Mother Teresa Was No Saint

On September 4 of this year, Mother Teresa will become Saint Teresa. This is unsurprising; she was beatified in 2003, which is sort of a one-way road to canonization. But it's the last thing we need. She was no saint.

To canonize Mother Teresa would be to seal the lid on her problematic legacy, which includes forced conversion, questionable relations with dictators, gross mismanagement, and actually, pretty bad medical care. Worst of all, she was the quintessential white person expending her charity on the third world -- the entire reason for her public image, and the source of immeasurable scarring to the postcolonial psyche of India and its diaspora.

A 2013 study from the University of Ottawa dispelled the "myth of altruism and generosity" surrounding Mother Teresa, concluding that her hallowed image did not stand up to the facts, and was basically the result of a forceful media campaign from an ailing Catholic Church.

Although she had 517 missions in 100 countries at the time of her death, the study found that hardly anyone who came seeking medical care found it there. Doctors observed unhygienic, "even unfit," conditions, inadequate food, and no painkillers -- not for lack of funding, in which Mother Theresa's world-famous order was swimming, but what the study authors call her "particular conception of suffering and death."

"There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's Passion. The world gains much from their suffering," Mother Teresa once told the unamused Christopher Hitchens.
Even within the bounds of Christian notions of blessed meekness, what kind of perverse thought underlies such thinking?

The answer, unsurprisingly, given the locale of her work, is racist colonialism. Despite the 100 countries, Mother Teresa is of India and India begat Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. And there, she became what the historian Vijay Prakash dubbed "the quintessential image of the white woman in the colonies, working to save the dark bodies from their own temptations and failures. "

Her image is entirely circumscribed by colonial logic: that of the white savior shining a light on the world's poorest brown people.

Mother Teresa was a martyr -- not for India's and the global South's poor -- but for white, bourgeois guilt. (As Prakash says, it functioned as this instead of, not on top of, a "genuine challenge to those forces that produce and maintain poverty.")

And how did she even help said brown people? Dubiously if at all. She had a persistent "ulterior motive" to convert some of India's most vulnerable and sick to Christianity, as an Indian government official said last year. There are even a number of accounts that she and her nuns tried to baptize the dying.

This resolute tawdriness towards the nun and her order would seem petty were it not for the Church's breathless campaign to make her into something more.

This campaign started during her own life, when the anti-abortion British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge made Mother Teresa's public image his singular cross to bear, first through a hagiographic 1969 documentary and then with a 1971 book. He set into motion a public resolve to situate her in the "realm of myth" rather than of history.

Her posthumous beatification was undertaken with the ardency of someone who doesn't want to get caught. Pope John Paul II waived the normal five-year waiting period after her death for her beatification process to begin and launched it just a year after she died.

You would think that a woman who called for such extraordinary measures was singularly reproachless. Yet Mother Teresa hobnobbed, during her lifetime, with notorious despots like Haiti's Jean-Claude Duvalier (from whom she accepted the Legion d'Honneur in 1981) and Albania's Enver Hoxha.

Look, none of this is particularly new. Much of this surfaced in 2003, when she was beatified, and in Christopher Hitchens's polemic, and in Tariq Ali's documentary, "Hell's Angel." This is not to speak ill of the dead.

But Mother Teresa's imminent sainthood is freshly infuriating. We make god in our image and we see holiness in those who resemble us. In this, Mother Teresa's image is a relic of white, Western supremacy. Her glorification comes at the expense of the Indian psyche -- of my Indian psyche. For a billion Indians and diaspora who were force-fed the notion that it's different, and better, when white people help us. Who learned that forced conversion can get a free pass. Who noted the egregious fact that one of the five "Indian" Nobel laureates was a woman who let sick people die. Poverty is not beautiful, it's terrible. Mother Teresa will be the patron saint of white people on gap years, not of any brown person.

Mother Teresa to be made a saint

Mother Teresa, the Roman Catholic nun who worked with the poor in the Indian city of Kolkata (Calcutta), is to be declared a saint on 4 September, Pope Francis has announced.

She founded a sisterhood that runs 19 homes, and won the Nobel Peace Prize.

She died in 1997 - aged 87 - and was beatified in 2003, the first step to sainthood.

The Pope cleared the way for sainthood last year when he recognised a second miracle attributed to Mother Teresa.

Born in 1910 to Albanian parents, Agnese Gonxha Bojaxhiu grew up in what is now the Macedonian capital, Skopje, but was then part of the Ottoman Empire.

Aged 19, she joined the Irish order of Loreto and in 1929 was sent to India, where she taught at a school in Darjeeling under the name of Therese.

In 1946 she moved to Kolkata to help the destitute and, after a decade, set up a hospice and a home for abandoned children.

She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950. The sisterhood now has 4,500 nuns worldwide.

She achieved worldwide acclaim for her work in Kolkata's slums, but her critics accused her of pushing a hardline Catholicism, mixing with dictators and accepting funds from them for her charity.
Five years after her death, Pope John Paul II accepted a first miracle attributed to Mother Teresa as authentic, clearing the way for her beatification in 2003.

He judged that the curing of Bengali tribal woman Monica Besra from an abdominal tumour was the result of her supernatural intervention.

A Vatican commission found that her recovery had been a miracle after the Missionaries of Charity said that the woman had been cured by a photo of the nun being placed on her stomach. The finding was criticised as bogus by rationalist groups in Bengal.

In December 2015, Pope Francis recognised a second miracle, which involved the healing of a Brazilian man with several brain tumours in 2008. The man's identity was not disclosed but the man was said to have been cured unexpectedly after his priest prayed for Mother Teresa's intervention with God.

It often takes decades for people to reach sainthood after their death, but beatification was rushed through by Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis was known to be keen to complete the process during the Church's Holy Year of Mercy which runs to November 2016.

In an unrelated move, the Pope last week introduced new financial rules governing the process of becoming a saint, in response to allegations that some candidates supported by wealthy donors were likely to have their cases resolved faster than others.

Under the regulations, an administrator must be named for each prospective saint and should "scrupulously respect" the intention of each donation as well as manage the funds donated.

The cost to the Vatican can be high during the "Roman phase" of the process, when the Congregation for the Causes of Saints investigates the candidate, and there have been claims that officials failed to oversee how some donations were spent.