Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu famously known as Mother Teresa was born in Skopje which is now the capital of North Macedonia of the Ottoman Empire on 26 August 1910. She considered 27 August as her birthday as it was the day she was baptized. She was an Albanian-India Roman Catholic nun and missionary and spent a lot of her time promoting her faith, beliefs, and services.
It is not possible not to talk of Mother Teresa while talking about people who expended a gigantic portion of their lives in the service of other fellow human beings. She left her home to go to Ireland to join the Sisters of Loreto at the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1928 and sailed only six weeks later to India as a teacher.
Joan Graff Clucas in one of Mother Teresa’s biographies wrote how she was fascinated by the stories of missionaries and those devoting their lives to the well-being of others at a small age. She from a young age was adamant to devote herself to religious life. She came to India in 1929 and started her novitiate in Darjeeling. She learned to speak Bengali during her stay there and started to teach in a convent school.
She took her first religious vow in 1931 and chose “Teresa” as her calling name. She served as a teacher at the Loreto convent school in Entally, which is in eastern Calcutta, and was appointed as headmistress for almost twenty years. She enjoyed being a teacher there and she was very disturbed and concerned by the condition of Calcutta back then. There was poverty everywhere and the Bengal famine made the condition worse.
Teresa experienced her “Call within the call” while travelling to Darjeeling in 1946 and considered that the call of her inner conscience. This is when she decided to devote herself to caring for the sick and poor. She started to work with people and their sufferings.
Mother Teresa adopted Indian citizenship in the year 1948 and then went to Patna to attain basic medical knowledge. She opened various hospices and congregations that would become the Missionaries of Charity. In her words, it would care for “the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone” and started to help the “poorest of the poor’’ in every way possible. Her efforts attained global attention and she was awarded the Padma Shri, one of its highest civilian honours, for her services to the people of India.
In 1979 she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her humanitarian work, and the following year the Indian government conferred on her the Bharat Ratna, the country’s highest civilian honour.
Criticism and allegation against Mother Teresa:
Every coin has two sides and this fits quite well in the case of Mother and her practices. Mother Teresa has faced some very strong allegations in her life and even posthumously by different governments, organizations, and eminent personalities.
Aroup Chatterjee, an Indian author, and physician worked very closely in one of Mother Teresa’s homes and investigated all the practices being followed in her order. Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ali, two British Journalists produced a very critical documentary based on Chatterjee’s work named Hell’s Angel. Hitchen made many strong accusations against her practices and called her “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.”
She was often accused of ignoring the testimony of the patient’s doctor, who attributed the recovery of his patient to modern medicine and leaving the health of a patient to a miracle. Robin Fox, then editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, described the medical care the patient received as “Haphazard” during his visit at the Home for Dying Destitutes in Calcutta.
He also alleged how most of the volunteers and nurses working with patients had no medical knowledge. He alleged them of using their Spiritual Approach to manage pain.
Mary Loudon, one of the volunteers at the same facility observed that syringes were washed with cold water and were used again, aspirin was given to those fighting cancer and whatnot. Many reports have accused the facilities of not using appropriate medical methods for the treatment of any disease.
According to Hitchens Mother Teresa used to secretly baptize the dying patient without any of their religion. A member of missionaries of charity, Susan writes ‘’Sisters were to ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a ‘ticket to heaven ‘ and would baptize the dying person secretly so that no one would know that they were even baptizing patients following a different religion.
Chatterjee and Hitchen stated that the image of Mother Teresa is the well-wisher of poor and needy as misleading and accused her of converting locals to Catholicism and equated her organizations with a cult of misleading and using all the charity for her purpose. She was called an ‘’religious imperialist” who preyed on the flesh of those most vulnerable in the name of Jesus.
Mother Teresa died in 1997 and a collection of her writings was released after her death and it revealed how she struggled with feelings of disconnectedness with God and that made her look like a hypocrite to a lot of people.
Also Read: Kanhaiya Kumar from Bihar to INC.
