Mother Teresa: The saint and the controversies

While comments made by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat on Mother Teresa continue to attract widespread criticism, we take a look at other controversies in the past on the saint. 

From the issues of abortion to her beatification and sainthood, Mother Teresa's work and life has been subjected to intense scrutiny, judgement and criticism.

While she was lauded for founding the Missionaries of Charity that ran hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, many of the criticisms against her sprouted due to the conflicts of between her religious beliefs and her role as a social worker.

Anti-abortion stance:

Critics have decried Mother Teresa for her anti-abortion stance. After receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, she had espoused the anti-abortion cause, "...I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing - direct murder by the mother herself." Read more

Some even went so far as to say that she used her influence to further the Vatican stance on abortion. Other critics have been of the view that her charity work is a part of a larger scheme to fight 'abortion and contraception'. In a 1995 book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, one of Mother Teresa's harshest critics Christopher Hitchens says, 

"..But it is difficult to spend any time at all in Calcutta and conclude that what it most needs is a campaign against population control. Nor, of course, does Mother Teresa make this judgment based on local conditions. She was opposed on principle to abortion and birth control long before she got there. For her, Calcutta is simply a front in a much larger war." 

Hypocrisy and controversial associations:

Mother Teresa has been accused of hypocrisy on some occasions. Known to embrace and idolise a life of suffering and poverty, she had once said, "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people," as mentioned in Hitchens' work. However her association with and open support to corrupt businessmen Charles Keating and Robert Maxwell as well as dictatorial family Robert Duvalier received harsh criticism and disapproval.

Hitchens and others have also pointed at the duplicity that while her patients suffered from the lack of pain-relieving and illness-combating medical support in her charitable organisations, Mother Teresa herself would check into expensive and sophisticated clinics and hospitals in the West.

Sainthood:

Mother Teresa was beatified to sainthood in 2003 by Pope John Paul II. Many eyebrows were raised over this event.

The charges against the Vatican was that they did not follow the necessary steps usually taken to confer the sainthood. Mother Teresa was nominated by the Pope for sainthood in 1998, a year after her death, instead of five years which is the usual practice.

There were also glaring holes into claims that she had performed miracles. A woman had claimed that she saw a light emanating from Mother Teresa's picture which cured her of cancer. Her physician, however, countered the claims and said that the woman did not suffer from cancer, but from a tubercular cyst which went away after the regular intake of medication.

So RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat does not happen to be the first one to attempt puncturing the halo that surrounds Mother Teresa and it does not look like he might be the last. Bhagwat has alleged that Mother Teresa had an ulterior motive to convert people under her organisation's care to Christianity. But Hitchens in his 1995 book mentions a far more serious charge -- that Mother Teresa and her nuns would secretly baptise dying men and women without their consent, a charge denied by the Missionaries of Charity.

Also Read - Mother Teresa never participated in conversion: Missionaries