M the day after Mother Teresa died. Her body lay on a bed of ice in the mother house and Calcutta. Hundreds of people stood outside in the rain, somewhere crying. Inside, sisters knelt or stood around her body. They prayed the Rosary aloud and approached one at a time to kiss her feet. The chapel was too small for all the visitors who wanted to pay their respects, so her body was carried through the streets in an open coffin to a church, where she lay in state for a week.
Her funeral was in a sports arena and Calcutta. Some fifteen thousand people attended, including dignitaries from around the world, the presidents of Albania, of Ghana, of Italy, the Queen of Spain, the Queen of Belgium, the Queen of Jordan's first Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Prime Minister of India, declared at a state funeral, something usually reserved for presidents and prime ministers, a leprosy patient carried in the eucharis twine.
Mother Teresa's personal story seems to me like a vague silhouette, something so public and at the same time deeply private. As I chiseled my way through. It wasn't long before I hit something hard. Mother Teresa's cult of death and suffering depends for its effect on the most vulnerable and helpless. Abandoned babies, say all the terminally ill. Christopher Higins was a political critic and author known for his blistering commentaries.
Some people called them hitch slaps, and in the nineteen nineties he made a television documentary about Mother Teresa, a scathing critique. It's called Hell's Angel. Mother Teresa regards herself as mandated by Heaven, which is hot, be modest. She learns spiritual solace to dictators and to wealthy exploiters, which is scarcely the essence of simplicity, and she preaches surrender and prostration to the poor, which a truly humble person
would barely have the nerve to do. Throughout the program, Higgins is weirdly lit half his faces and shadow, A massive caricature of a devious looking Mother Teresa lurks in the background, and Hitchens is ruthless. She takes on the grim and tedious tones of the zealot and the finacial such a person is manifested in the shape of a demagogue, an obscure antist, and a servant of earthly powers, a
presumable virgin who also campaigns against birth control. Hell's Angel came out at a time when Mother Teresa was considered too virtuous to be criticized. Calls for her sanehood were growing. If you haven't heard some of these criticisms before, you might be thinking, what is this guy saying? I thought everyone loved Mother Teresa. Well, it isn't just Christopher Higgins who just has Mother Teresa. Because it has to be done, somebody has to do it. Somebody had to do it.
From a cocoa punch and I heart radio. This is the Turning America Lance, Part four, The Devil's Advocates. We reached out to the missionaries of Charity Sisters and sent them a list of questions we had. While a representative did respond, they declined to be interviewed. Critics have a lot of complaints against Mother Teresa, and once these criticisms entered the world, they became part of her story. They still are today. I can't go into all of them,
but we're going to look at a handful. Let's start by going back to something beautiful for God. That's the documentary about Mother Teresa by Malcolm Muggridge, the film that made her famous. M Muggridge was convinced that a scene in his film captured a miracle. It happened in the home for the Dying. When the crew tried to film in there, the room was so dark that the director worried the images wouldn't come out, But it turns out they did. The scene was full of light. Immediately Muggaret's
thought it was divine intervention. He declared it the first photographic miracle. But to Christopher Higgins, mother Teresa's critic, this miracle seemed too good to be true, and in Hell's Angel he included an interview with Muggridge's cameraman, a guy named Ken McMillan, who said, it's true they were worried about the low light, but they were using a new kind of film, some new film made by Kodak, which
we hadn't had time to test before we left. So I said, well, let's have a go, so we shot him. A month or two later, they're in the studio looking at the footage. Thanks really up came the shots of the house of a dying and it was surprising. You could see every detail. And I said, that's amazing, it's extraordinary. And I was going to go on to say, you know, three cheers for Koda. I didn't get a chance to say that because Malcolm, sitting in the front rows, spun
around and said, it's divine light. It's Mother Theresa. You'll find that it's divine mit. Old boy Malcolm Muggert couldn't stop talking about this miracle. He called it a halo and a star was born. Here's Christopher Higgins and Hell's Angel again. This profane marriage between tawdry media hype and medieval superstition gave birth to an icon which few have since had the poor taste to question, how does the reputation of Holy Mother Teresa look if, just for a
moment we switch off Malcolm muggerage is kindly light? Well, without him, there wouldn't be any Mother Trees obvious sleep, because he was the one who puts her on that pedestal. This is a roop Chatter Gee a physician in London. He collaborated with Hitchens on the film Hell's Angel. He also published a book, jam Packed with his research and condemnations of Mother Teresa for years he spent his spare time researching the lady, as he often calls her, whatever
you call it, crusade against the lady. Well, maybe to start, I wonder, could you just if you had to summarize your overall case or perspective on Mother Teresa, what would you say? I considered the whole Mother Teresa bandwagon as a cult um. I would say that practically everything about Mother Teresa is a result of myth and hyperbolic But what fired him up in the first place? A roop chatter Gee grew up in Calkatta in the nineteen seventies. He was a medical student, and back then he had
a very different person backtive on Mother Teresa. When I used to go to medical school on my moped every day in Calcata, I used to pass by one of her places and I used to see about forty people being fed, and I would be quite thankful and happy that somebody was feeding at least forty people in Calcata. Even in her head day, not much was known about her. It was known that she had won the Nobel Prize and that she was a very good, charitable lady. So
I had absolutely nothing against her. If anything, I was positive towards her. Then he moved to the UK. One day a co worker asked him where he was from. He said Calcutta, and then he said, oh, Calcata. Do you know something. There's one person in the whole world I respect more than anybody else. That's Mother Teresa. And I was I was quite surprised. I said, why this is? Why did she mention Mother Teresa When I said I
was from Carcasa. That incident stuck to my mind, like yesterday, I just I didn't know that people synonymized Calcata with Mother Teresa. After that, he started noticing how his home city was viewed by the Western world. I read little things about Calcutta in a very gruesome way, and it's all about poverty and leprosy and squala, nothing at all
about anything else. I recently came across a video where a bishop in Los Angeles describes Calcutta like this, Imagine the worst garbage jump you've seen, and now think of the whole city that way. Reports like this didn't match the Calcutta chatter. Je new a thriving metropolist, a cultural hub. So when he was on a trip to Calcutta. He visited the Home for the Dying, the place he'd heard described as an oasis for the poor, and I was appolled that that place had given us so much publicity
and it was even called a hospice. It had less than one places, and they didn't have any beds, even they had hammocks. There was no yards, no veranda, no balcony, no nothing nowhere to stretch your limbs. You were brutally treated in there. Chatterjee says he was even more shocked by the medical practices he saw. They routinely used to re use needles and gloves. Even that practice has stopped now. It was a harsh place. I think it's a harsh place.
Collet Livermore was with the Missionaries of Charity for eleven years. She's the Australian sister who wasn't allowed to go home when her brother was very ill. After she left the m CS, she became a physician, but back in night she was assigned to the Home for the Dying. Collett fed intended to patients. There, she cleaned maggots from wounds and watched the bodies of people who died. One patient died in her arms. The standard medicine wouldn't have been high.
And the thing I found difficult was there was no pain killers. She says. The sisters were often rough and cold. When people who had been on the street arrived at the home, the sisters would strip off their clothes right there in the room. They were all washed in a cement washing place with no privacy and just cold water thrown over them. Clutz as they often cried out when the cold water hit their skin while some visitor with
a camera might be snapping photos. Their hair was shaved, and I mean, I know they had lice and all that sort of stuff, but I don't know. I found it very harsh. She says. Sometimes sisters even got aggressive, acting harshly to someone or hitting them or when did you see sisters head people in Calcutta? You know? And I understand that it's very frustrating because you know, if you've got desperate people trying to get things food and such,
they'll be pushing. Clatt couldn't get over the feeling that things could be so much better, and it wasn't the first time she felt that way. As a teenager, Collet Livermore Plants to study medicine but then she watched Something Beautiful for God, and I saw that movie and I thought, I don't need to bother being a doctor anymore because
they don't need complicated medicine, they just need food. Clud joined the m CS, and it didn't take long for her to have misgivings about their medical care, including the care for sisters. In seven, she was assigned to a house in Papua New Guinea. She was twenty two. Before she left, She says no one suggested she take medication to prevent malaria, usually taken too weeks before travel. When she arrived, she says she saw griefstones of nuns who had died from malaria, so as soon as she had
a chance, she talked to mother Teresa about it. I asked her, could we take something to prevent malaria? And she said I I don't take anything. She trusts in God, but I could take it if I wanted to. Collett decided to take it, but it was too late. One night, she felt incredibly cold, MY teeth were chattering. I had a terrible back paint, terrible headache. She didn't go to work that day and she wasn't getting any better. I was arching my back was arching, My tongue was coming
out involuntarily, and I could have died. The sisters sent for a doctor. He said it was cerebral malaria, which is extremely serious. I didn't die. You'll be pleased to hear. Another time, Collett was working with tuberculosis patients in the Philippines. What she saw startled her. There was a particular mistake where a wrong injection was given, and I was horrified when I asked a sister, you know how much did you give? And they didn't even know what dose it
had given. Kas in fiction was a problem since patients were mixed together in close quarters collect things. A lot of these mistakes stem from this empty belief that the sisters shouldn't have too much expertise. Expertise is an opportunity for pride, and Mother Teresa believed ignorance was actually an advantage because you're a vessel for God's will. It was a sort of form of magical thinking. If you obey God's will be done through you in some sort of
magical way. Mother used to say, it was I'm just a pencil in his hands, like an inanimate object. That's what they told Half the time. We didn't know where we were going, and we were sent away suddenly, so there was absolutely no preparation, no language or cultural training. The other thing that troubled her was how the vow of obedience affected their work. You were supposed to obey cheerfully, promptly, and without question, but what if you saw injustice or
medical mistakes? Do you speak up? Then one day in Manila sticks out to her. The sisters had what they called a Tohanan home for people who had tuberculosis and other illnesses, and so a little boy came with his parents, and his name was Alex, and he was very sick, dehydrated and malnourished, with a fever and sepsis. His skin
was floppy and his eyes were sunken. They weren't supposed to accept people on Thursdays, but Collette, who was Sister Tobitt back then, spoke with the parents any way, and the professor sister came out in a boiling rage, saying Tobert, what are you doing here? I said, well, this little boy is very ill and he's been rejected by the hospital and we need to help him. And she said, so,
only you know what's right. And I said, look, I don't really know what's right, but I just know that this little child is going to die if we don't do something. And she said, go back to the dahana and I said, no, I hope I won't. And she said, I will help him this time, but you do what you're told and go back to the so collect dead and the child was admitted. They put him on a drop with antibiotics and fluids. That night, she snuck over
to see how he was. I remember carrying him outside into the night and just sort of saying, why, why you know too the blackness. Next day he was much much better. Yeah, he survived. He became a fat little thing. In fact, Collett's intervention wouldn't go unnoticed. About a month later, she says, she walked into the dormitory and her bedrole was gone. Someone had removed it, no warning, no explanation. She had been demoted from her post as a novice mistress.
She says the conflict she felt inside her pierced through her life like a thorn. Mother Teresa wrote a letter in seven As usual, there was one thing on her mind. She said, during the year, very often, I have been longing to be all for Jesus and to make other souls, especially Indian come and love him fervently. Bringing souls to Jesus sounds a lot like conversion to me, and Mother Teresa used the word conversion in some of her letters.
According to Father Brian Colodetuch, who edited her letters for publication, she said, yes, I convert. I convert you to be a better Hindu, or a better Muslim, or a better Protestant, or a better Catholic, or a better Parsi, or a better seek or a better Buddhist. And after you have found God, it is for you to do what God wants you to do. When I first joined the energy and the spirit of the society, it was extremely powerful. It was never about converting people. But that didn't last.
Sue Weber says, she's a former m C who was a sure year in the early The longer I stayed in the order, it started to be about converting people. It became more about how many people did you convert. I heard from many, many people that this was happening on a large scale, that they were converting surreptitiously at
the point of death. In his book, A Root Strategy tells the story of one former sister who says sisters were trained to ask a dying person if they wanted a ticket to heaven, and if they agreed to press the wet cloths to their forehead and quietly baptize them. But Run has died. The ticket wasn't bitterly called because Ticus and Peter will not let them go in they called baptism tickets. Was This is Mother Teresa speaking at
a clinic in California. We asked a person, do you Runs, Do you want a blessing by which your scenes will be forgiven and you will receive God? And they have never really used. So twenty nine have died in that one house from the time we began to buck in two and they were collecting the numbers because you get brownie points if you convert, because it is so beautiful
to see the people die. It's so much choi And it's actually pretty lowly thing to do to take advantage of somebody's alternate mental state and to exploit them like that. Maybe the most repeated critique of Mother Teresa is that you romanticized poverty. Christopher Hedges put it this way, that Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. S Antony Chaco Party, a professor of history at the University of Calcutta, says westerners
ate her story up. I think the Western fascination with her was because she was using the Indian sardi as a projection of her glorification of poverty. The Saudi clad women on the streets of Calcutta, working among among destitute people living on the streets. I think that fascinated a lot of Western people, trying to project India as a somewhat, you know, a place like Mars. Almost the Roop Charity
put it a little more strongly. The West felt so smug and so glad that this white woman who's a Catholic, very very rigid Catholic, who was looking after this disgusting, desperate people in a remote corner of the world. The Western interest in Mother Teresa's work led to a lot of donations. Some report tens of millions of dollars a year, but the exact amount is unclear. The m c s don't reveal their financial information, including to us we asked.
When one Forbes India reporter asked how much they received in donations, he was told God knows he is our banker. We have a lot of money, a lot. This is Sue Webber again. When she became a superior at the AIDS Hospice in San Francisco, she got a checkbook for the first time, but she says she couldn't really use it. I had to go through so many channels to get like a refrigerator, a small refrigerator to put the men's
medicine in. Mm hmm. I had. I had access to an account that had over million dollars in it, and I couldn't buy a refrigerator. As the superior of the house. Collet Livermore, the former sister from Australia, put it this way. We had plenty of money, but in the name of poverty, we didn't want to use it. Instead, they begged. That's what the sisters called it, begging. They begged or donated supplies,
whether food or medicine or clothes. Mother trees. I believed it was a chance for the donor to come closer to Christ. So I was told with another sister to go look at vehicles. So he remembers when she was in the Bronx and they needed a new car. So we get there and we look at different vehicles and there's a small jeep. So I called the house and I said to the regional superior, so we found the vehicle and this is how much it costs. Can we
go ahead and purchase it? And she goes, no, you should beg for it, and I was like what, and I said, I'm not begging for it. I said, we have the money. And I would have never had a problem at all to beg for anything if we didn't have it. By begging for it, it's basically, um, it's a lie because you're basically presenting that you need something and you don't have the wherewithal to get it, right, that's a lie. So you refused to beg for it, but you usually had to obey her regional superior. So
I said, that is exactly why. I said to the guy, so I said, hey, I'm just curious, like, would you give us that cheap? Would you just give it to us? And he was like for free and I was like yeah, And he was like, well, don't you have any money, and I go, oh, no, we have plenty of money. I'm just curious if he would just give it to us, and he started laughing and he goes no, and I was like, okay. So I called back the regional and I was like, they won't give it to us for free,
and then we ended up buying it. Mother Teresa often spoke of suffering, but critics asked how much did you do to alleviate it. There's a particular moment in an interview on William F. Buckley's Firing Line on PBS, where she tells the story of a woman who would cancer. The woman wasn't terrible pain, but Mother Teresa told her that the pain was a sign that she had come so close to Jesus on the cross that he could
kiss her. And the lady, though she wasn't a great pain, she joined their hands together and said, Mother Teresa, please tell Jesus to stop kissing me. As Mother Teresa tells this story, you can see that she's starting to smile. What's weird about this moment to me is hearing people laughing in the background after this woman says to Mother Teresa, please tell Jesus to stop kissing me. I guess it's supposed to be funny, but doesn't it also mean this
person just wants the pain to stop. The interviewer then says, to Mother Teresa, Christ entered his own passion willingly. Most humans enter unwillingly into pain. Mother Teresa replies that he'd be surprised how content that poor people in India are, that on their suffering faces you see a beautiful smile. That her work is to help them accept suffering as a gift. Mother Teresa knew the power of a good story, repeated anecdotes until they were parables, and she had a
way journalists. One expert said it was like she cast a spell on them. She may not have enjoyed publicity, but she saw the value in it. She was strategic about granting interviews. Sometimes she made agreements that she be allowed to review an edit material before it was published. Books about her are often full of inaccuracies, more legend than fact, and some of the people I talked to told me the church was more than happy to benefit from that legend. It wasn't only Mother Teresa who knew
how to use the media. Mary Johnson says the church saw its value too, and I do feel that the Church used her. I remember I traveled with her once to Louisiana, the first place where the abuses of priests who were pedophiles had become known. In nineteen eighty five, a Louisiana priest admitted to abusing more than thirty children. He was eventually sentenced to twenty years in prison. While the trial was under way, the Missionaries of Charity opened a new house just an hour away in Baton Rouge.
The sisters had been invited there in order to repair the image of the church. If the people of the diocese saw Mother Teresa and the sisters, that would be the example that could kind of make up for these horrible things that the priests had done. It sounds like the missionaries of Charity and Mother Teresa sort of became a pr tool for the church exactly, a pr tool, a symbol um and I do think that's a way of using someone. A lot of people wanted to use
that symbol. After Malcolm Muggridge's films Something Beautiful for God, he promoted her like crazy. He saw her potential for advancing conservative causes, especially with her stance on abortion. He and a number of American politicians advocated for her to be given the Nobel Peace Prize, and when she was abortion was at the center of her acceptance speech, and I feel one thing I want to share the two on the greatest destroyer of peace today is the pride
of the innocent unborn child. If a mother and murder her own child in her own room, what is left for you and for me to kill each other to meet? The nations who have legalized abortion, they are the poorest nation. Christopher Higgins, the man behind the documentary Hell's Angel, he sees this speech and much of Mother Teresa's work as part of a larger, unstated political agenda to advance the
goals of the church. If you can give women control over the rat reproduction and come back to that village in ten years time, everything will be better right away. It's the only thing that works well. Mother Reasons spent her entire life saying that that solution was impermissible. She waged her entire life making sure that didn't happen. So I wish there was a hell to which she could go, because she has a lot of death on the conscience, and a lot of misery and stupidity and ignorance and
dirt and filth and disease as well. It just strikes me again and again, how polarize these camps are. It's like you either love her or you hate her. The image of Mother Teresa that I had encountered out in the world wasn't anything like the woman I had known.
Here's Mary Johnson. Either. There were people who made her out to be this complete holy saint and said all kinds of silly things like every morning she had only a banana for breakfast and she you know, just these apocryphal stories that were absurd, or there were people who were very, very critical, and not that there weren't things to be critical about, but who didn't really understand where Mother Troops was coming from at all, unattributed motives to
her that were not at all her motives. I just think if we're going to talk ship, we should talk the right ship, right. Kelly Dunham was a sister with the m CS in the nine nineties. She's heard the criticisms I just laid out and has plenty of her own. She calls the MCS problematic, But on the day Mother Teresa was made a saint, Kelly posted a YouTube video
critiquing the critiques. People complain about Mother Teresa is that she urged people to accept her suffering, to say you to offer it up, and also said that suffering is Jesus kissing. Now, Okay, So on the macro, if somebody is suffering and it's caused by somebody else's actions, especially a powerful person, and you tell them to accept it, you're obviously contributing to a system of oppression and we
should fight like hell against that. But on the micro and this is always what people are talking about, helping somebody who's dying to find meaning in their suffering or their death. Who are you to say, like that's not like, that's not cool, but that's not good to offer them like you the non dying person. They could not alleviate all the poverty of Calcutta, and the focus is on
the poorest of the poor, not the poor. Father Brian Colladach, the head of the EMC Fathers, says that the quality of medical care and EMCY houses has improved over time, but also that's not the point you have to understand. For example, the Home for the Dying in its context, it was set up not to be a clinic to give medical care. It was set up to exactly what it's at home for the dying, the ones who are dying, so that last moments to to have some relief, some care,
some human love. At Mother Teresa's funeral, a cardinal put it this way, He said, Mother Teresa was aware of this criticism. She would shrug as if saying, while you go on discussing causes and explanations, I will kneel beside the forest of the poor and attend to their needs. After Mother Teresa died, her supporters jump started the complicated process of advocating for her sainthood, the process that typically
starts five years after somebody dies. The Archbishop of Calcutta went to the Department of Congregation for Saints and asked if you could start already, And he said, hey, wait a minute, she only died a month ago. Hold your horses. But Father Brian Colladatrix says soon, Pope John Paul the second wait to the waiting period. Father Brian was the official postulator, basically the advocate for her canonization, and her
fiercest critics a Roop chatter Ge and Christopher Higgens. They both testified they gave the official critical perspective for the canonization process, a type of role previously known in the Catholic Church as the advocati diaboli or devil's advocate. That's actually where the term comes from. As part of the canonization process, the Church needed to attribute two miracles to
Mother Teresa that happened after her death. This is proof that she's interceding from heaven, reports poured in the church research The claims had eventually approved two miracles. They declared she cured a Bengali woman's stomach tumor and saved a Brazilian man in a coma. Almost twenty years after Mother Teresa's death, a crowd packed St. Peter Square in Vatican
City for her canonization. A massive portrait of Mother Teresa overlooked the proceedings from in front of St. Peter's Basilica, and a million tiny copies of the painting were passed out at the event. During the ceremony, two m C sisters carried in a relic a vial of Mother Teresa's blood, and Tolpe Francis, the head of the Catholic Church, said the words to proclaim her new status, we declare and
define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta to be a saint. On her tomb in the Mother House, they engraved the words love one another, as I have loved you. Next time on The Turning, all of a sudden, Niobe's next to me, and she's whispering in my ear, Sister, do not I love you? The Turning is written by Allen Lance Lesser and Me. Our producers are Allen Lance Lesser and Emily Foreman. Our editor is Rob Rosenthal Andrea Swahe is our digital
p Sir. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Special links to Dennis Wills of d G Will's Books, Terrik Ali, Amy Gains, Sarah oh Lander, Catherine Joyce, Bethan Macaluso, Travis Dunlap, and consulting producer Mary Johnson. Her memoir and Unquenchable Thirst provided inspiration for this series. Our executive producers are Jessica Alpert and John Parotti from Rococo Punch and Katrina Norville from My Heart Radio. Our theme music is by Matt Reid.
For photos and more details on the series, follow us on Instagram at Rococo Punch. You can reach out via email to The Turning at Rocco Punch dot com I America Lance Thanks for listening.