Making the announcement to a square packed with thousands of pilgrims and worshippers, Pope Francis praised the Albanian heritage nun’s lifelong activism, which earned her a Nobel Prize for Peace in 1979, and deemed her a “model of holiness”.
But while much of the world remembers her as a humanitarian, some are less pleased about putting her on a pedestal.
As it turns out, Mother Teresa was far from the Khaleesi-like figure she’s often made out to be. Along with operating a string of hospices in developing regions that often failed to meet basic standards of hygiene set by the medical community — complete with second-hand needles, expired antibiotics and negligent staff — she was known to support stripping women of their legal reproductive rights, refusing to endorse abortion or contraception even when medically advisable.
As a vehement pro-lifer, she used her acceptance speech at the Nobel prize Award Ceremony to denounce abortion as the “greatest destroyer of peace,” labelling it an act of “violence” and calling mothers who choose to abort their pregnancies “murderers”, no matter their circumstances.
What’s more, she took to the podium in 1994 at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington of which Hillary Clinton — and her husband, then-President Bill Clinton — were in attendance and used her platform to skewer the pair over their support of universal healthcare for women in the United States.
Away from Capitol Hill, her politics were no less controversial. Her aggressive style of evangelisation involved pushing her organisation’s members to take vows of chastity and sometimes baptising Muslim and Hindu patients against their will in their final moments. Because she viewed suffering as a virtue — according to Christopher Hitchens, author of The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice — some have speculated that her doctrinaire beliefs were the reason behind the absence of adequate painkillers in her charity’s facilities.
Indian physician Aroup Chatterjee, who investigated the Missionaries of Charity as part of an explosive expose about the organisation’s medical misconduct, noted in his book, Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict, that patients arrived at clinics to undergo a simple procedure only to leave worse off than when they started after being exposed to various combatable illnesses.
That can be traced to at-risk patients who weren’t quarantined and needles that weren’t sterilised before reuse, all of which, he wrote, led one former volunteer to go as far as to compare the conditions at the hospices to those of a “World War Two concentration camp”. In his book, Chatterjee included testimonies from people who worked with Mother Teresa.
Accounts of her achievements left out these incriminating details. Once word of her exploits spread to the west, it wasn’t long before she became something of a hero to flocks of white, relatively wealthy churchgoers. Images of this wizened nun in her virginal white sari, surrounded by a sea of sickly brown children, assuaged their white guilt whether they were aware of it or not, and fulfilled something of a white saviour complex.
For all of that, it should be noted that Mother Teresa’s groupies have undeniably improved countless lives. Their work across more than 100 countries has earned praise and gratitude from some of the most underprivileged members of society, many of whom were housed, fed and clothed by the Missionaries of Charity in their orphanages, shelters and hospices.
Even so, we can’t turn a blind eye to her transgressions, because by neglecting to recognise the problematic aspects of her character, the public — and the media, we share the responsibility here too — leave unchallenged some of her more toxic views, and reinforce the silencing of disadvantaged women, disabled women and Women of Colour in favour of further glorifying a white, western, Messianic figure.
At the end of the day, despite the widely accepted narrative that Mother Teresa was the human embodiment of compassion, or some sort of heavenly emissary, she was no different from the rest of us lowly mortals in that she was just another bundle of flaws and prejudices.
Her actions directly hindered the tireless work of pro-choice advocates — by opposing them publicly and turning her followers against them — many of whom were already fighting an uphill battle in a society indifferent to the unique challenges and systemic inequalities faced by women in the west and the rest of the world. In the words of Hitchens: “She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”
And that’s something we can’t ignore.
