The Pope has announced that Mother Teresa will be canonised later this year, but criticism of her beliefs, politics and use of donations are as strong as ever. Philip Leone-Ganado asks both her critics and those inspired by her work whether she was truly sainthood material.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta was possibly the most recognisable religious icon of modern times: a Nobel Peace Prize winner known as the Angel of Mercy for her care of the sick and the poorest of the poor in India and across the world.

Pope Francis announced earlier this week that the Albanian-born nun, who died in 1997, would be officially made a saint in a ceremony at the Vatican on September 4.

She had been beatified in 2003, just six years after her death, following a decision by Pope John Paul II to ‘fast-track’ her case for sainthood. The process was initiated two years after her death, instead of the usual five.

The news of her canonisation has been met with delight by followers of her charitable work – and the thousands of volunteers who have worked with the hospices and homes, orphanages and schools, run by Mother Teresa’s international organisation – the Missionaries of Charity – in some 130 different countries.

But the announcement has also brought back into focus claims and controversies that followed the saint-to-be throughout her career and continued after the death of the person who British journalist and religious critic Christopher Hitchens called “a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud”.

Hitchens’s 1995 book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice alleged, through documents and interviews with those who knew her, that she had glorified suffering, made questionable use of the considerable funds she received in donations, nurtured relationships with dictators and secretly baptised the dying, regardless of their religious beliefs.

There have also been claims that Mother Teresa glorified suffering in her homes for the dying, once writing: “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion.”

Canadian researchers who studied her documents found instances of doctors who observed a significant lack of hygiene and unfit conditions, as well as a shortage of actual care and adequate medication.

A lot of people have a very unrealistic view of who she was and what she did

“A lot of people have a very unrealistic view of who she was and what she did,” said Ramon Casha, president of the Malta Humanist Association. She raised a lot of money, but very little of it went to the poor.

“People were under the impression they were donating to the poor, but in reality a lot of the money was going to new churches and monasteries.”

A report in German magazine Stern, for example, once revealed that in 1991, only seven per cent of donations received by the Missionaries of Charity was actually used for charity.

“All charities have overheads, but when it’s such a large amount – and there’s so little accountability – that’s when you start doubting how genuine the work is.”

Mr Casha, an outspoken critic of the Church, believes regardless of its own criteria for sainthood, questions should be asked about the decision to elevate a person whom many see as undeserving of praise, particularly when a number of issues continue today in Mother Teresa’s international movement.

“Many well-respected figures had flaws in their character, but often – with Martin Luther King or Mahatma Ghandi – the flaws are incidental to their work. With Mother Teresa it’s not a side issue, it’s the very thing she’s most known for,” he said.

The local chapter of the Missionary Sisters of Charity, which has operated in Malta since 1989, did not wish to comment on any of the claims, as the Mother Superior is currently out of the country.

The Order has previously rejected most of the claims, saying, for example, that most of those helped in the Kalighat Home for Dying Destitutes in Calcutta were non-Christians with just a few days left to live and noting that conversion is a lengthy process. The leadership has rarely spoken about the uses their donations have gone to.

Nevertheless, volunteers and those who have worked closely with the Missionary Sisters offer a very different view of their current work from that of Mother Teresa’s critics.

“They really try to search for the poorest of the poor, wherever they are. They seek out the dark holes of society, not just in India but in Europe and all over the world, looking for places where their services are most needed,” said Fr Michael Bugeja, the university chaplain, who has worked with the order in Ethiopia, Jamaica, Poland and a number of other countries across the world.

“All their communities maintain the life-style Mother Teresa insisted on: remaining humble and getting rid of anything superfluous. It ensures they don’t lose focus on what’s important. They don’t want to get rich to serve the poor; they want to be poor with the poor to really understand what the poor need.”

Fr Bugeja admitted that this rigid adherence to poverty could strike observers as strange, particularly when it meant foregoing modern commodities that could make their charity work more effective.

Nevertheless, he said, the order had never in his experience refused to spend money if it meant compromising the care of those who came to them for help.

“They’re not the sort of order that would buy a new bed simply because they could, but in a sense that’s a commitment to making the best use of the funds they have. I’ve always seen a very generous order that would never use their money to improve themselves.”

Nigel Camilleri, a doctor who has volunteered with the order in India, Nepal, Ethiopia and Palermo, told The Sunday Times of Malta he was unconvinced by claims that the order had regularly provided substandard care or that suffering was in any way glorified, as critics have claimed.

“In my experience, they’ve never overtly promoted unsanitary conditions or poor medication,” Dr Camilleri said. “The issue of accepting suffering is present in Buddhist philosophy as well: they’re not telling people to give up and die, but to come to terms with their situation.”

Dr Camilleri explained that the order’s homes were not registered as hospitals but functioned as nursing homes, emphasising the human aspect of care. In poorer countries, he said, the standard of care could easily equal that of most State-run hospitals.

Running on providence, Dr Camilleri believes they have raised their standards accordingly when the right personnel and medication is available.

“It’s true that they are more conservative than the private sector,” Dr Camilleri said. “It may be slow, but I’ve seen change: going from a reliance on volunteers to having more long-term doctors, for example. There’s been a much greater acceptance of medicine over the years.”

Moreover, having seen up close her order’s work in several countries, Dr Camilleri believes Mother Teresa’s greatest legacy goes far beyond medical care.

They really try to search for the poorest of the poor... They seek out the dark holes of society… looking for places where their services are most needed

“They have brought hope,” he said. “The hope that comes from knowing you have a person to care for you gives you a reason to live. The children from their institutions in Palermo still refer to those times as the happiest of their lives, whatever happened next. That can’t be translated into money.”

The personal criticism of Mother Teresa and the inspiring work that so many volunteers report seeing up close and personal need not be completely irreconcilable.

Researchers at the University of Montreal, who analysed 502 documents on the life and work of Mother Teresa and came down heavily on the side of scathing criticism, nevertheless concluded that her positive impact should not be entirely discounted on the back of the claims.

“If the extraordinary image of Mother Teresa conveyed in the collective imagination has encouraged humanitarian initiatives that are genuinely engaged with those crushed by poverty, we can only rejoice,” the researchers wrote in a March 2013 paper.

“It is likely that she has inspired many humanitarian workers whose actions have truly relieved the suffering of the destitute and addressed the causes of poverty and isolation without being extolled by the media.”

The Angel of Mercy: a short biography

Born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Macedonia, in August 1910, Mother Teresa left home at the age of 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto at Loreto Abbey in Ireland to learn English with a view to becoming a missionary.

A year later, she travelled to India for her novitiate period and was sent to Calcutta, where she was assigned to teach at Saint Mary’s High School for Girls, a school run by the Loreto Sisters and dedicated to teaching girls from the city’s poorest Bengali families.

Mother Teresa continued to teach at the school for years, eventually becoming principal. In 1946, however, she famously experienced what she called “the call within a call” while riding a train from Calcutta to the Himalayan foothills for a retreat, deciding to abandon teaching and devote herself to working with the poorest and sickest.

Adopting the blue-and-white sari that she would wear in public for the rest of her life and that would become a symbol of her order, she took basic medical training and set herself up in the slums of Calcutta, establishing a school and a home for the dying destitute.

Over the two decades that followed, she set up a leper colony, an orphanage, a nursing home, a family clinic and a string of mobile health clinics as the order she founded swelled as donations poured in from around the world.

By the time of her death in 1997, the Missionaries of Charity numbered more than 4,000, as well as thousands of volunteers, with foundations in some 130 countries.

Mother Teresa herself was honoured with a number of high-profile awards, most notably the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her work “in bringing help to suffering humanity.”

After several years of deteriorating health, in which she suffered from heart, lung and kidney problems, she died on September 5, 1997, at the age of 87.

The curious case of the miracle

Under Catholic Church procedure, for a saint to be canonised, at least two miracles must typically have been performed through their intercession after their death. For Mother Teresa, the first of these came in 1998, when a 30-year-old woman in Calcutta said she was cured of a stomach tumour after praying to Mother Teresa.

A Vatican committee said it could find no scientific explanation for her healing and declared it a miracle. It was not so, however, for the doctors who treated the woman, one of whom called the supposed miracle “nothing but a farce”.

The doctor, Ranjan Mustaphi, said the woman never had a cancerous tumour in the first place, but a tubercular cyst, which was cured by a course of prescription medicine.

The woman herself later claimed that, having escorted her to Rome as proof of the claim and promised her financial help for her livelihood and her children’s education, the Missionary Sisters later abandoned her to a life of poverty.

The case against Mother Teresa

• Dubious management of funds

“The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been – she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself – and her order always refused to publish any audit,” British journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote in his 1995 book on Mother Teresa.

• Political connections

“She was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go?”

• Secret conversions

“Sisters were to ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a ‘ticket to heaven’,” Hitchens quoted a former member of the order as saying. “An affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa’s sisters were baptising Hindus and Muslims.”

• Choice of causes

“During numerous floods in India or following the explosion of a pesticide plant in Bhopal, she offered numerous prayers and medallions of the Virgin Mary but no direct or monetary aid,” wrote researchers at the University of Montreal.

• Inadequacy of medical care

“The problem is not a lack of money – the Foundation created by Mother Teresa has raised hundreds of millions of dollars – but rather a particular conception of suffering and death.”