S1: Ep 4 - The Devil's Advocates

The day after Mother Teresa died, her body lay on a bed of ice in the mother house in Kolcutta. Hundreds of people stood outside in the rain. Some were 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

Mother Theresa's cult of death and suffering depends for its effect on the most vulnerable and helpless, abandoned babies, say or the terminally ill.

Christopher Higgins 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 recognized it's called Hell's Angel.

Mother Teresa regards soself as mandated by Heaven, which is hot modest. She lends 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, Hitchins is weirdly lit, half his faces in shadow. A massive caricature of a devious looking Mother Teresa lurks in the background, and Hitchins is ruthless.

She takes on the grim and tedious tones of the zealot and the fanatic. Such a person is manifested in the shape of a demagogue, an obscurantist, and a servant of earthly powers, a presumable virtue who also campaigns against birth control.

Hall's Angel came out at a time when Mother Teresa was considered too virtuous to be criticized. Calls for her sainthood 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. Just Christopher Higgins, I critic has.

Mother Teresa because it has to be done. Somebody has to do it. Somebody had to do it.

From a cocoa punch and iHeartRadio. This is the Turning I 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 under the world, they became part of her story. They still are today. I can't go into all of them, but we're going

New film made by Kodak, which we hadn't had time to test before we left. So I said, well, let's have it go. So we shot him.

A month or two later, they're in the studio looking at the footage.

I did think. Up came the shots of the house of a dye and it was surprising.

You could see every detail.

And I said, that's amazing, that's extraordinary. And I was going to go on to say, you know, three cheers for Kodak. I didn't get a chance to say that, though, because Malcolm, sitting in the front rise spun round said, it's divine light.

It's Mother Theresa. You'll find that it's divine light.

Old boy, Malcolm Muggridge 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 Theresa look if, just for a moment we switch off Malcolm Muggridge's kindly lied.

Well, without him, there wouldn't be any Mother Tries, obviously, because he was the one who puts her on that pedestal.

This is a roop Chattergy a physician in London. He collaborated with Higgins 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.

Might 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. I would say that practically everything about Mother Teresa is a result of myth and hyperbole.

But what fired him up in the first place. A roop Chattergy grew up in Kolkatta in the nineteen seventies. He was a medical student, and back then he had a very different person on Mother Teresa.

When I used to go to medical school, on my mobed every day in Kakata, 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 Kakata. Even in her heyday, 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 coworker asked him where he was from.

He said Calcutta, and then he said, oh, Kakuta. Do you know something. There's one person in the whole world I respect more than anybody else. That's Mother Teresa. And I I was quite surprised. I said, why this is nineteen eighty five. Why did she mention Mother Tusa when I said I was from Gacasa. That incident stuck to my mind like yesterday. I just I didn't know that people synonymized Kakata with Mother Teresa.

After that, he started noticing how his home city was viewed by the western world.

I read little things about Kakata 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 Bishop and Los Angeles describes Kolcutta 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 Kolkutta Chatterje knew a thriving metropolis, a cultural hub. So when he was on a trip to Kolkutta. He visited the Home for the Dying, the place he'd heard described as an oasis for the poor.

And I was up polled that that place had given us so much publicity and it was even called a hospice. It had less than one hundred places, and it didn't have any beds. Even they had hammocks. There was no yards, no veranda, and no balcony, no nothing, know what 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 reuse needles and gloves. Even that practice has stopped now.

It was a hush place. I think it was a hush place.

Collete 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 MCS, she became a physician, but back in nineteen eighty she was assigned to the Home for the Dying. Collette fed intended to patience There. She cleaned maggots from wounds and washed 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 painkillers.

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 throwing over them.

Clotte says 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 sister's even got aggressive.

Acting harshly to someone or hitting them or.

That's when did you see sisters head.

People inklcutta, 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 plans to study medicine, but then she watched Something Beautiful for.

God and I saw that movie and I thought, Oh, I don't need to bother being a doctor anymore because they don't need complicated medicine. They just need food.

Clutt joined the EMCs, and it didn't take long for her to have misgivings about their medical care, including the care for sisters. In nineteen seventy seven, she was assigned to a house in Papua New Guinea. She was twenty two before she left. She says no one suggested she'd take medication to prevent malaria, usually taken two weeks before travel.

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.

Colette decided to take it, but it was too late. One night, she felt incredibly cold.

My teeth were chattering. I had a terrible back pain, 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 was extremely serious.

I didn't die. You'll be pleased to hear.

Another time, I 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 the sister, you know, well, how much did you give? And they didn't even know what dose they'd given.

Cross in fiction was a problem since patients were mixed together in close quarters collect things. A lot of these mistakes stem from this ams 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 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're 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 and Manila sticks out to her. The sisters had what they called at Tahanan, a 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 Tobit back then, spoke with the parents Anymay.

And the professed 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

So callite dead and the child was admitted. They put him on a drip with antibiotics and fluids. That night, she snuck over to see how he was.

I remember carrying him outside into the knot and just sort of thing, why why you know, to the blackness. Next day was much much better. Yeah, he survives. He became a fat little thing.

In fact, Collette's intervention wouldn't go unnoticed. About a month later, she says, she walked into the dormitory and her bedroll was gone. Someone had removed it, no warning, no explanation. She'd been demoted from her post as novice mistress. She says the conflict she felt inside her pierced through her life like a thorn. Mother Teresa wrote a letter in nineteen forty. As usual, there was one thing on her mind.

When I first joined, the energy and the spirit of the society was extremely powerful. It was never about converting people, but.

That didn't last. Sue Weber says, she's a former MC who is a SUPERI in the early nineteen nineties.

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 surpriitiously at the point of death.

In his book, Rube Chattergy 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 a wet cloth to their forehead and quietly baptize them, not.

One has died. Result Jesse session ticket was St. Peter. We call it because tickets and Peter will not let them go in we call baptism tickets was mister, this.

Is Mother Teresa. In nineteen ninety two, speaking at a clinic in California.

We asked the person, do you runs you wanted blessing by which your sins will be forgiven and you will receive God. And they have never refuse. So twenty nine thousand have died in that one house from the time we began the work in nineteen fifty two.

And they were collecting the numbers because you get brownie points if you convert.

Because it's so beautiful to see the people.

Die, so much joy, and it's actually a pretty lowly thing to do to take advantage of somebody's altered mental state and to exploit them like that.

Maybe the most repeated critique of Mother Teresa is that you romanticized poverty. Christopher Hutchins put it this way, that Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor, She was a friend of poverty. Chantony Chacerbarty, a professor of history at the University of Kolcutta, says westerners ate her story up.

I think the Western fascination with her was because she was using the Indian sari as a projection of her glorification of poverty. The sadi clad women on the streets of Calcutta, working among destitute people living on the streets. I think that fascinated a lot of Western people, trying to project India as somewhat, you know, a place like Mars, almost through chartategy.

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, was looking after these 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 tons of millions of dollars, but the exact amount is unclear. The mcs don't reveal their financial information, including to us we asked. When one Forbes India reporter asked how much they receive 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 Aid's 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 I had. I had access to an account that had over fifty five million dollars in it, and I couldn't buy a refrigerator as the superior of the house.

Collette 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 donated supplies, whether food or medicine or clothes. Mother Teresa 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 you 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 call the house and I said to the regional superiors, 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.

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 she knew she had to obey her regional superior.

So I said, this is exactly what 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 you would just give it to us. And he started laughing and

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 in nineteen eighty nine, where she tells the story of a woman who had 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 was in some 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.

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 underway, 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 to 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, And I do think that's a way of using someone.

A lot of people wanted to use that symbol. After Malcolm Muggridge's filmed 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 with you or the greatest destroyer of peace today is the crive of the innocent unborn child. If a mother and murder her own child in her own roomb, 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 Hells 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 give women control over their ratory reduction 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 Treesa spent her entire life say that that solution was imcommissible. She waged her entire life making

It just strikes me again and again how polarized 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.

They 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 they 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, and attributed motives to her that were not at all her motives.

I just think if we're going to talk shit, we should talk the right shit, right.

Kelly Dunham was a sister with the MC's in the nineteen nineties. She's heard the criticisms I just laid out and has plenty of her own. She calls the MC's 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 know, to offer it up, and also said that suffering Jesus kissing that 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 and accept it, you're obviously contributing to a system of oppression and we should fight like hell

They could not alleviate all the poverty of Kolkatta, and the focus is on the poorest.

Of the poor, not the poor.

Father Brian Khaladechich, the head of the MC Fathers, says that the quality of medical care and empty 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 set home for the dying, the ones who are dying, so that last moments 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 force of the poor and attend to their needs. After Mother Teresa died in nineteen ninety seven, her supporters jump started the complicated process of advocating for her sainthood, a process that typically starts five years after somebody dies.

The Archbishop of Calcutta went to the department the Congregation for a Saints and asked if he could start already, And they said, hey, wait a minute, she only died a month ago. Hold your horses.

But Father Brian Koladachik says, soon, Pope John Paul the Second waved the waiting period. Father Brian was the official postulator, basically the advocate for her canonization and her fiercest critics a Rupe Chatterjee and Christopher Higgins. 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 advocatis diaboli or devil's advocate. That's actually where the

A sudden, Naobia's snacks to me, and she's whispering in my ear, Sister Donat, 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 asoahe is. Our digital fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Special links to Dennis Wills of DG Will's Books, Treig a Llie, Amy Gaines, Sarah Olander, Catherine Joyce, Betha Macaluso, Travis Dunlap, and consulting producer Mary Johnson. Her memoir and Unquenchable Thirst provided inspiration for this series.