Mother Teresa: A Biography (16 page)

Another journalist wrote that Mother Teresa went on to state: I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion. Because it is a direct war, a direct killing—direct murder by the mother herself. . . . Because if a mother can kill her own child—

what is left but for me to kill you and you to kill me—there is nothing in between.7

Mother Teresa also spoke of the great spiritual poverty of the West: Around the world, not only in the poor countries, I found the poverty of the West so much more difficult to remove. . . . a person that has been thrown out from society—that poverty is so hurtful and so much, that I find it very difficult. Our Sisters are working amongst that kind of people in the West.8

Even though the Norwegian paper
Aftenposten
commented how the press was spellbound by the tiny nun who won the award, there were numerous others who were critical of her remarks. In the aftermath of her speech, one thing was clear: Mother Teresa had not only stated her view of abortion, but also made it clear she would not change her views. And when given the opportunity, she would speak out on the subject to any who would listen.

As if the abortion issue were not controversial enough, Mother Teresa disappointed many Albanians with her comments on the religious persecution in Albania. When asked by a reporter for her thoughts on the subject, Mother Teresa demurred, stating that she could not say much B L E S S I N G S A N D B L A M E

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because she did not know what was going on. But, as more than one critic has pointed out, the fact that she was in contact with her mother and sister until they died, along with her repeated attempts to get them out of the country, or at least to gain permission to visit, demonstrate that Mother Teresa, in fact, knew well the conditions present in the country.

In addition, earlier that year, Mother Teresa had met with the widow of the Albanian king, Queen Geraldine, when the country’s predicament surely would have been discussed.

In the wake of the Nobel Prize ceremonies, many of Mother Teresa’s supporters stated that she did not comment on the Albanian question because she refused to become involved in any controversial political stances, as that was incompatible with her primary mission: helping the poor. But her detractors point out that, by making her comments on abortion, Mother Teresa was in fact involving herself in what was clearly one of the most heated political arguments of the day.

DAPHNE RAE AND
LOVE UNTIL IT HURTS

Following Mother Teresa’s winning of the Nobel Prize, activity at the Motherhouse at 54A Lower Circular Road picked up considerably. Offers and donations poured in from all over the world, as many companies and individuals offered to help the Missionaries of Charity. From Bata Shoe Company came leather for leprosy patients to make shoes. Help the Aged, a nonprofit organization based in England, donated money for meals. An international organization, the Rotary Club, also pledged money and help for Mother Teresa. Also aiding Mother Teresa in her work were many wealthy individuals who gave both time and money for the poor.

One of these volunteers was Daphne Rae, who came to Calcutta to work in the slums. Rae was the wife of the headmaster of Westminster, one of the best schools in England. Rae, originally from Sri Lanka, converted to Catholicism in 1977 and came to Calcutta in 1979, leaving her husband and six children to work with Mother Teresa. Altogether, she traveled to the city three times in order to work with the Missionaries of Charity. She brought with her large donations of medical supplies and medicines and spent much of her time at Nirmal Hriday and the children’s home. But, suddenly, Rae stopped working with Mother Teresa, and instead devoted her energy to working with lesser-known organizations also dedicated to helping India’s poor.

Although she never publicly stated why she no longer worked with the Missionaries of Charity, Rae’s 1981 book,
Love until It Hurts: Mother
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M O T H E R T E R E S A

Teresa and Her Missionaries of Charity,
offers some clues about her change of heart. Rae, who had previously worked with the terminally ill and dying, was no stranger to places such as Nirmal Hriday. However, she was distressed that while helping Mother Teresa, she saw disposable hypoder-mic needles used over and over again; in some cases as many as 40 or 50

times.

Rae, who was also a passionate opponent of abortion, was bothered by the approach the nuns took toward single, pregnant mothers at the Shishu Bhavan. For a young, unmarried Hindu girl to become pregnant was a scandal, and for many, abortion was often seen as the only solution.

For those unwilling to terminate their pregnancy, there was the possibility of sanctuary at the Shishu Bhavan. Often these girls were taken in by the nuns with the understanding that they would receive a place to sleep, medical care, and help in placing the infant up for adoption in return for helping with domestic chores. According to Rae, these arrangements in fact often resulted in the girls being treated as the lowliest form of servant with only the barest of necessities provided for them. She also found a kind of moral superiority on the part of the nuns, certainly not in keeping with the charitable expressions toward unmarried women espoused in public by the order.

A WOMAN IN DEMAND

Beginning in the 1980s, Mother Teresa stepped up her visits, traveling all over the world to meet with world leaders or to open another foundation somewhere for the Missionaries of Charity. Her travels kept her away from Motherhouse even more; it was usual for her to be gone for 10

months out of every year. At the behest of Pope John Paul II, with whom she developed a very close relationship, Mother Teresa used her travels and the media attention to air her views, giving her a platform second to none among religious leaders.

The new decade opened with Mother Teresa traveling again to her hometown of Skopje as a guest of the city. Months earlier, she also had the opportunity to open a house for the elderly in Zagreb, Croatia, marking the first time the Missionaries of Charity had opened one of their homes in a communist country. She attended a conference on family life in Guatemala; then went to visit the desperately poor island of Haiti, where she met the then-president Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and his wife. From Haiti, she traveled to Egypt where, much to the Egyptian government’s dismay, she urged Egyptian housewives to have many children. The government, which had just finished producing a series of B L E S S I N G S A N D B L A M E

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short films that urged families to limit the number of children, could do nothing.

In addition to Mother Teresa’s traveling, the Missionaries of Charity opened a number of new facilities throughout the world. In 1980, 14 new homes were opened; in 1981, 18. Twelve Missionaries of Charity foundations opened in 1982; in 1983, the number rose to 14. At the beginning of the decade, the Missionaries of Charity established 140 slum schools, a daily meal program that fed nearly 50,000 persons at 304 centers. There were 70 Shishu Bhavans, which took care of approximately 4,000 children, out of which 1,000 adoptions were arranged. There were 81 homes for the dying and 670 mobile clinics that had treated some 6 million patients. Although the Missionaries of Charity were going global with their work, the bulk of their endeavors were still based in India.

Mother Teresa also continued to show little regard for her own personal safety as she ventured into many of the world’s hotspots. In 1982, she went to West Beirut where the area’s hospitals had been shelled by Israeli ar-tillery. While there, she took 37 children who had been stranded in a mental hospital on a Red Cross convoy into East Beirut and safety. In 1984, she traveled to Bhopal, India, where a poisonous gas leak at a Union Carbide plant killed thousands of people and left many others in terrible health.

During this period, Mother Teresa also plunged into the growing AIDS

crisis. She opened a hospice in Greenwich Village in New York City to care for patients who were suffering from what she termed as the new leprosy of the West. Among her first patients were three convicts suffering from the disease in the notorious Sing-Sing Prison near New York City.

But despite her willingness to tackle the deadly disease and provide hospice care, Mother Teresa was criticized for her handling of AIDs patients.

According to one account, a doctor who was also working at the hospice was appalled by how little the nuns knew about the disease. The doctor told Mother Teresa that simply wearing a crucifix around her neck offered her no protection from the disease. To this, Mother Teresa replied that God would take care of her. But for critics this argument was flawed at best, and dangerous at worst, as the account illustrates: “God never provides knowledge or skill. God in fact is never enough. . . . [T]he teresan community sees it [AIDS] as a sickness that can be assuaged with loving words and a little hot soup.”9

THE SAINT AND THE SINNER

In 1985 came one of the oddest pairings the world had seen: that of a young, anti-Catholic Irish rock musician and the tiny nun who worked 1 2 0

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with the world’s poor. On the face of it, the idea of rock star Bob Geldof, lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, meeting with Mother Teresa not only seemed odd; it was completely incongruous. But the two actually had something in common: working to help the poor.

Geldof, an Irish Catholic who had little use for the Church of his youth, had come to the forefront during 1984 for his concert Band Aid to raise money for the poor in Africa. In 1985, he was traveling to Ethiopia to help distribute the funds raised. He met Mother Teresa at the Addis Ababa airport in January 1985. Geldof remembered, upon greeting her, how tiny she was. He towered more than two feet above her. He described her as a battered, wizened woman whose most striking character-istic was her feet. Mother Teresa’s sandals were beaten up pieces of leather; her feet were gnarled and misshapen. When Geldof tried to kiss her, Mother Teresa bowed her head quickly so that he could only kiss the top of her wimple. This bothered Geldof a great deal. He later found out that she only let lepers kiss her.

As photographers snapped their picture, Mother Teresa and Geldof began talking, she about the Missionaries of Charity, he about his band, the Boomtown Rats. He even offered to arrange a benefit concert for her work. But she gently refused him, stating that God would provide for her.

As Geldof later recounted, he had an opportunity to see Providence in action. Upon arriving in the city, Mother Teresa had seen some vacant buildings and asked if she could have the buildings to use as orphanages.

Flummoxed government officials, not wanting to turn her down, clearly did not know what to do. But it was clear that Mother Teresa knew about the buildings beforehand. When the official told her he would find her a building for her orphanages, she reminded him that she needed two buildings for two orphanages, not one.

When asked later for his impression of Mother Teresa, Geldof replied that she was the embodiment of moral good, but also added that there was nothing otherworldly about her. She showed herself fully capable of handling the media and could manipulate them easily. He also found her de-void of any false modesty or pretense; she was totally selfless in her work and seemed genuinely to care about the people she was helping.

In 1986, Mother Teresa made further headlines when she traveled to the Soviet Union to meet with government officials. Two years later, she returned with four nuns to begin working in a Moscow hospital helping victims of an earthquake. Her visit was unprecedented and marked the first time that a religious mission was allowed to open a house since the Russian Revolution in 1917.

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AN UNHAPPY VISIT

In 1988, Mother Teresa traveled to London to visit with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She also visited Cardboard City, the site of the city’s homeless. She asked Thatcher for help in setting up a hostel for them, but Thatcher pointed out that there were voluntary organizations in the city that specifically worked with the homeless, and there was no need for Mother Teresa’s help.

There were other problems as well. Mother Teresa’s trip coincided with a hearing in Parliament for a bill that would reduce the time limit for allowing abortions from the current 28 weeks to 18 weeks. Mother Teresa again went to Thatcher asking her to support the bill. Again she was refused. At a conference in Oxford, Mother Teresa told the audience that couples who used contraception other than the rhythm method, as allowed by the Catholic Church, would not be accepted as potential adoptive parents for any children coming from the Missionaries of Charity homes.

Shortly afterward, Mother Teresa met with Robert Maxwell, the Australian owner of the London newspaper the
Daily Mirror.
Maxwell, already known for his dubious business dealings, offered to help raise money for a new Missionaries of Charity home in London. Maxwell loved the publicity, and Mother Teresa, either in the dark about Maxwell’s personal business dealings or refusing to acknowledge them, accepted his offer. It also allowed her a chance to do something without going through government channels. In all, £169,000 (appx. $302,000) was raised and deposited in an account held by Maxwell and the paper. In addition, another £90,000 (appx. $160,000) was raised by the readers of a Scottish paper to be used for Mother Teresa’s efforts. With the funds, she hoped to set up two facilities for the homeless in London.

But Mother Teresa never saw the money. Some speculated that Maxwell had appropriated the funds. A spokesman for the
Daily Mirror
later charged that Mother Teresa never seemed to find an appropriate home or piece of land to suit her purposes. He further denied that any of the money was missing. There was also the stigma attached of having accepted the money in the first place from a man who was a known swindler and unsavory businessman. If Mother Teresa had any regrets about any of her actions, her association with Maxwell was one. Finally, though, in 1993, a 35-room hostel was opened in London for the Missionaries of Charity. Mother Teresa came for the opening ceremony and once again thanked readers of the
Daily Mirror
for their generosity. Mother Teresa 1 2 2