Fan Ch’ih asked about wisdom. The master said: ‘To work for the things the common people have a right to, and to keep one’s distance from the gods and spirits while showing them reverence can be called wisdom.’
No Philosopher was on hand to tell him that there is no strong sentiment without some terror, as there is no real religion without a little fetishism.
Star light, star bright… we look up and we hope the stars look down, we pray that there may be stars for us to follow, stars moving across the heavens and leading up to our destiny, but it’s only our vanity. We look at the and fall in love, but the universe cares less about us than we do about it, and the stars stay in their courses however much we may wish upon them to do otherwise. It’s true that if you watch the sky-wheel turn for a while you’ll see a meteor fall, flame and die. That’s not a star worth following; it’s just an unlucky rock. Our fates are here on earth. There are no guiding stars.
Those prepared to listen to criticism of Mother Teresa’s questionable motives and patently confused sociological policy are still inclined to believe that her work is essentially humane. Surely, they reason, there is something morally impressive in a life consecrated to charity. If it were not for the testimony of those who have seen the shortcomings and contradictions of her work firsthand, it might be sufficient argument, on the grounds that Mother Teresa must have done some genuine good for the world’s suffering people.
However, even here the record is somewhat murky and uneven, and it is qualified by the same limitations as apply to the rest of Mother Teresa’s work: that such work is undertaken not for its own sake but to propagandize one highly subjective view of human nature and need, so that she may one day be counted as the beatific founder of a new order and discipline within the Church itself. Even in the quotidian details of ostensibly ‘charitable’ labour, this unresolved contradiction repeatedly discloses itself.
Take, as one unremarked example, the visit of Dr Robin Fox to the Mother Teresa operation in Calcutta in 1994. As editor of The Lancet, perhaps the world’s leading medical journal, Dr Fox was professionally interested in, and qualified to pronounce upon, the standards of care. The opening paragraphs of his report in the journal’s 17 September 1994 issue also make it clear that he paid his visit with every expectation of being favourably impressed. Indeed, his tone of slightly raised-eyebrow politeness never deserts him:
There are doctors who call in from time to time but usually the sisters and volunteers (some of whom have medical knowledge) make decisions as best they can. I saw a young man who had been admitted in poor shape with high fever, and the drugs prescribed had been tetracycline and paracetamol. Later a visiting doctor diagnosed probable malaria and substituted chloroquine. Could not someone have looked at a blood film? Investigations, I was told, are seldom permissible. How about simple algorithms that might help the sisters and volunteers distinguish the curable from the incurable? Again no. Such systematic approaches are alien to the ethos of the home. Mother Teresa prefers providence to planning; her rules are designed to prevent any drift towards materialism: the sisters must remain on equal terms with the poor…. Finally, how competent are the sisters at managing pain? On a short visit, I could not judge the power of their spiritual approach, but I was disturbed to learn that the formulary includes no strong analgesics. Along with the neglect of diagnosis, the lack of good analgesia marks Mother Teresa’s approach as clearly separate from the hospice movement. I know which I prefer. [Emphasis added.]
It should be underlined that the state of affairs described by Dr Fox was not that obtaining in some amateur, impoverished clinic in a disaster zone. Mother Teresa has been working in Calcutta for four and a half decades, and for nearly three of them she has been favoured with immense quantities of money and material. Her ‘Home for the Dying’, which was the part of her dominion visited by Dr Fox, is in no straitened condition. It is as he described it because that is how Mother Teresa wishes it to be. The neglect of what is commonly understood as proper medicine or care is not a superficial contradiction. It is the essence of the endeavour, the same essence that is evident in a cheerful sign which has been filmed on the wall of Mother Teresa’s morgue. It reads ‘I am going to heaven today’.
According to many other former volunteers, Dr Fox may have paid his visit on an unusually good day, or may have been unusually well looked after. Mary Loudon, a volunteer in Calcutta who has since written extensively about the lives of nuns and religious women, has this testimony to offer about the Home for the Dying:
My initial impression was of all the photographs and footage I’ve ever seen of Belsen and places like that, because all the patients had shaved heads. No chairs anywhere, there were just these stretcher beds. They’re like First World War stretcher beds. There’s no garden, no yard even. No nothing. And I thought what is this? This is two rooms with fifty to sixty men in one, fifty to sixty women in another. They’re dying. They’re not being given a great deal of medical care. They’re not being given painkillers really beyond aspirin and maybe if you’re lucky some Brufen or something, for the sort of pain that goes with terminal cancer and the things they were dying of…
They didn’t have enough drips. The needles they used and re-used over and over and over and you would see some of the nuns rinsing needles under the cold water tap. And I asked one of them why she was doing it and she said: ‘Well to clean it.’ And I said, ‘Yes, but why are you not sterilizing it; why are you not boiling water and sterilizing your needles?’ She said: ‘There’s no point. There’s no time.’
The first day I was there when I’d finished working in the women’s ward I went and waited on the edge of the men’s ward for my boyfriend, who was looking after a boy of fifteen who was dying, and an American doctor told me that she had been trying to treat this boy. And that he had a really relatively simple kidney complaint that had simply got worse and worse and worse because he hadn’t had antibiotics. And he actually needed an operation. I don’t recall what the problem was, but she did tell me. And she was so angry, but also very resigned which so many people become in that situation. And she said, ‘Well, they won’t take him to hospital.’ And I said: ‘Why? Al you have to do is get a cab. Take him to the nearest hospital, demand that he has treatment. Get him an operation.’ She said: ‘They don’t do it. They won’t do it. If they do it for one, they do it for everybody.’ And I thought — but this kid is fifteen.
Bear in mind that Mother Teresa’s global income is more than enough to outfit several first-class clinics in Bengal. The decision not to do so, and indeed to run instead a haphazard and cranky institution which would expose itself to litigation and protest were it run by any branch of the medical profession, is a deliberate one. The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection. Mother Teresa (who herself, it should be noted, has checked into some of the finest and costliest clinics and hospitals in the West during her bouts with heart trouble and old age) once gave this game away in a filmed interview. She described a person who was in the last agonies of cancer and suffering unbearable pain. With a smile, Mother Teresa told the camera what she told this terminal patient: ‘You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.’ Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer’s reply: ‘Then please tell him to stop kissing me.’ There are many people in the direst need and pain who have had cause to wish, in their own extremity, that Mother Teresa was less free with her own metaphysical caresses and a little more attentive to actual suffering.
After I had helped to make Hell’s Angel, a documentary about Mother Teresa’s shortcomings which was screened on Channel Four in England in the autumn of 1994, I received a number of communications from former volunteers and even from former members of the Missionaries of Charity. Some wished to remain anonymous and some seemed actuated by motives of revenge or other personal disorders. My practice in citing the ones I consider to be genuine is as follows: the person must have been willing to be quoted by name and to give bona fide answers to some background questions. Let me instance Ms Elgy Gillespie, author, journalist and sometime editor of The San Francisco Review of Books. Experienced in the care of AIDS patients, she spent some time at Mother Teresa’s San Francisco branch:
Sent to cook in her hostel, tactfully named ‘The Gift of Love’ (it is for homeless men with HIV), I found a dozen or so very sick men; but those who weren’t very sick were exceptionally depressed, because they were not allowed to watch TV or smoke or drink or have friends over. Even when they are dying, close friends are not allowed. They are never allowed to drink, even (or especially) at the funerals of their friends and roommates and some have been thrown out for coming home in drag! When I mentioned the Olympics to them, they looked even more depressed. We are not watching the Olympics,’ said a sister from Bombay, ‘because we are making our Lenten sacrifice.’ When they’re very sick and very religious (which is often the case…) this doesn’t matter, but with brighter men or older men it seems intolerable.
A Guatemalan writer that I befriended there was desperate to get out, so a friend of mine who also cooks there (an African American who is a practising Catholic) adopted him for as long as she could. He became much sicker and when she begged him to go back because she couldn’t mind him, he begged her to keep him because he knew they didn’t medicate enough, or properly, and was afraid he would have to die without morphine… I am now cooking occasionally for the homeless men at the Franciscans where one of the patients, Bruce, is an ex-Mother Teresa and neither he nor the priest have a good word to say for the Sisters at ‘The Gift of Love’.
Many volunteers at hostels and clinics from Calcutta to San Francisco have comparable tales to relate. Especially impressive is the testimony of Susan Shields, who for nine and a half years worked as a member of Mother Teresa’s order, living the daily discipline of a Missionary of Charity in the Bronx, in Rome and in San Francisco. I have her permission to quote from her unpublished manuscript, In Mother’s House, which is an honest, well-written account, offered by a woman who left the Missionaries of Charity for the same reason that she joined it — a love of her fellow humans.[3] If her memoir reads like the testimony of a former cult member, this is because in many ways it is. She relates that, within the order, total obedience to the dictates of a single woman is enforced at every level. Questioning of authority is not an option.
I was able to keep my complaining conscience quiet because we had been taught that the Holy Spirit was guiding Mother. To doubt her was a sign that we were lacking in trust and, even worse, guilty of the sin of pride. I shelved my objections and hoped that one day I would understand the many things that seemed to be contradictions.
…
One summer the sisters in the Rome novitiate were given a great quantity of tomatoes. They couldn’t give the tomatoes away because all their neighbors had grown their own. The superior decided that the sisters would can the tomatoes and eat them in the winter. When Mother came to visit and saw the canned tomatoes, she was very displeased. Missionaries of Charity do not store things but must rely only on God’s providence.
…
In San Francisco the sisters were given use of a three-storey convent with many large rooms, long hallways, two staircases and an immense basement…. The sisters lost no time in disposing of the unwanted furnishing. They removed the benches from the chapel and pulled up all the carpeting in the rooms and hallways. They pushed thick mattresses out the windows and removed all the sofas, chairs and curtains from the premises. People from the neighborhood stood on the sidewalk and watched in amazement.
The beautifully constructed house was made to conform to a way of life intended to help the sisters become holy. Large sitting rooms were turned into dormitories where beds were crowded together…. The heat remained off all winter in this exceedingly damp house. Several sisters got TB during the time I lived there.
…
In the Bronx, plans were being made to establish a new home for the poor. Many of the homeless were sick and needed more permanent accommodation than that offered by our night shelter. We had bought a large abandoned building from the city for one dollar. A co-worker offered to be the contractor and arranged for an architect to draw up plans for the renovations. Government regulations required that an elevator be installed for the use of the disabled. Mother would not allow an elevator. The city offered to pay for the elevator. Its offer was refused. After all the negotiations and plans, the project for the poor was abandoned because an elevator for the handicapped was unacceptable.
This last anecdote may be familiar to some readers, because the New York press (which is fanatically loyal to Mother Teresa, as are most branches of the journalistic profession) wrote up the incident as a case of ‘politically correct’ bureaucracy insisting on the rights of the disabled and negating the efforts of the missionaries. The truth is the exact reverse.
It might be argued that extreme simplicity, even primitivism, is to be preferred to a luxurious or corrupting style of the sort that has overtaken religious orders in the past. Ms Shields told herself things like this for years. However, she realized that, rather than a life of ascetism, theirs was a regime of austerity, rigidity, harshness and confusion. As might be expected, when the requirements of dogma clash with the needs of the poor, it is the latter which give way.
She was disturbed that the poor were the ones who suffered from the sisters’ self-righteous adherence to ‘poverty’. She knew of immense quantities of money, donated in all sincerity by people ‘from all walks of life’, which lingered unproductively in bank accounts, the size of which even many of the sisters knew nothing about. The sisters were rarely allowed to spend money on the poor they were trying to help. Instead they were forced to plead poverty, thus manipulating generous, credulous people and enterprises into giving more goods, services and cash. Ms Shields became uncomfortable with the deceit, pretence and hypocrisy — the ancient problem of the Pharisees and the too-ostentatious public worshippers:
The flood of donations was considered to be a sign of God’s approval of Mother Teresa’s congregation. We were told that we received more gifts than other religious congregations because God was pleased with Mother, and because the Missionaries of Charity were the sisters who were faithful to the true spirit of religious life. Our bank account was already the size of a great fortune and increased with every postal service delivery. Around $50 million had collected in one checking account in the Bronx…. Those of us who worked in the office regularly understood that we were not to speak about our work. The donations rolled in and were deposited in the bank, but they had no effect on our ascetic lives or on the lives of the poor we were trying to help.
Without an audit, it is impossible to say with certainty what becomes of Mother Teresa’s hoards of money, but it am possible to say what the true purpose and nature of the order is, and to what end the donations are accepted in the first place. Susan Shields again:
For Mother, it was the spiritual well-being of the poor that mattered most. Material aid was a means of reaching their souls, of showing the poor that God loved them. In the homes for the dying, Mother taught the sisters how to secretly baptize those who were dying. Sisters were to ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a ‘ticket to heaven’. An affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. The sister was then to pretend she was just cooling the person’s forehead with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptizing him, saying quietly the necessary words. Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa’s sisters were baptizing Hindus and Moslems.
Thus the smaller hypocrisy conceals a much greater one. ‘Our Constitution forbade us to beg for more than we needed, but the money in the bank was treated as if it did not exist.’ And thus the affectation of modesty and humility masks both greed and ambition, not to say arrogance.
I also have permission to quote from a letter I received from Emily Lewis, a seventy-five-year-old nurse who has worked in many of the most desperate quarters of the earth. At the time she wrote to me, she had just returned from a very arduous stint in Rwanda (a country about which Mother Teresa has been silent, perhaps because the Roman Catholic leadership in that country was complicit in the attempted genocide of the Tutsi people in the summer of 1994). Ms Lewis’s testimony follows:
My own experience of Mother Teresa occurred when she was being honored at the 1989 luncheon meeting of the International Health Organization in Washington, D.C. During her acceptance speech, she spoke at length of her opposition to contraception and her activities to save the unwanted products of heterosexual activity. (She also touched on AIDS, saying she did not want to label it a scourge of God but that it did seem like a just retribution for improper sexual conduct.) Although she said that God could find it in his heart to forgive all sinners, she herself would never allow a woman or a couple who had had an abortion to adopt one of ‘her’ babies. In her speech Mother Teresa frequently referred to what God wants us to think or do. As my table-mate (an MD from Aid to International Development) remarked to me: ‘Do you think it takes a certain amount of arrogance to assume that you have a direct line to God’s mind?’
Is it going too far to liken Mother Teresa to some of our infamous televangelists, turning their audiences on to what is in God’s heart and mind while encouraging and accepting all donations?
The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate. The great white hope meets the great black hole; the mission to the heathen blends with the comforting myth of Florence Nightingale. As ever, the true address of the missionary is to the self-satisfaction of the sponsor and the donor, and not to the needs of the downtrodden. Helpless infants, abandoned derelicts, lepers and the terminally ill are the raw material for demonstrations of compassion. They are in no position to complain, and their passivity and abjection is considered a sterling trait. It is time to recognize that the world’s leading exponent of this false consolation is herself a demagogue, an obscurantist and a servant of earthly powers.
The Catholic Church is a limitless source of fascination, to believers as well as to doubters and unbelievers, because of its attitude toward sex and procreation. Its official dogmas, derived in the main from St Paul but elaborated down the centuries, forbid clergy from being married and prohibit women from being clergy. Homosexual acts are condemned, as in a way are homosexual persons. Heterosexual acts taking place outside the bond of lawful matrimony are condemned, whether premarital or extramarital. The sexual act within marriage is frowned upon unless it has reproduction as its object Solitary sex is taboo. The preaching of such a range of prohibitions, and its enforcement by male and female celibates, has been the fertile soil for innumerable reflections, autobiographies and polemics from the Confessions of St Augustine to Mary McCarthy’s Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood.
Reverence for life, especially in its vulnerable condition in utero, is a sine qua non of Catholic teaching, and one which possesses a great moral strength even in its extreme forms. A woman experiencing danger in childbirth, for example, is supposed to sacrifice her own life for that of the child. (Judaism, which has codes no less ethical, tends to mandate the opposite decision, for the greater good of the family.) When mass rapes occurred in the course of aggressive war in Bangladesh and later in Bosnia, Mother Teresa in the first case and the Pope in the second made strenuous appeals to the victims not to abort the seed of the invader and the violator. Give the child up for adoption, or raise it in a spirit unlike the one in which it was conceived — this was the injunction. While it can be seen as grotesque to lecture women who are in such desperate dilemmas, there is none the less something impressive and noble in the high priority the Church gives to potential life. Humans, it says, blaspheme when they throw away a foetus, because they cannot assume the right to dispose of another’s life and they cannot presume to know the future. Children born with appalling deformities in sordid and overcrowded homes have been known time and again, after all, to defy all material odds and become exemplary, or merely human.
But the nobility of this essential teaching is compromised by the fact that it depends on an unnecessary theological assumption about ‘ensoulment’ — the point at which Thomas Aquinas maintained that a life became human and immortal. Two objections can be made here, the first being that human life can and should be respected whether or not it is constituted by a creator with an immortal soul; to make the one position dependent upon the other is to make the respect in some way contingent Second, if a fertilized egg is fully human, then all terminations of pregnancy at any stage and for any reason are to be regarded as murder. This offends against the natural or instinctive feeling in favour of the pregnant woman and the occupant of her womb, because it blurs the distinction between an embryonic group of cells and a human with a central nervous system. The distinction between abortions in the first and third trimesters, a distinction which speaks both to our ability to avoid casuistry and to our inborn wish to have a say in our own fates, is therefore null and void in Catholic teaching. Some of the coarsening in arguments on the other side of the case — arguments which bluntly and unscientifically define the foetus as a mere appendix to the woman’s body — no doubt result from confrontation with this absolutist edict Then there is the fact that Catholic prohibition on abortion comes indissolubly linked to a prohibition on birth control and contraception. Again, more is involved than the technical and dogmatic finding that certain forms of contraception, such as some versions of the intrauterine device which expels fertilized ova, actually are abortifacient in the fundamentalist definition of the term: the ban extends to all means and methods of avoiding conception, and indeed to the very intention of doing so. It is as ‘natural’ in humans to seek control over their biological fecundity as it is for them to wish to have children in the first place. The Roman Catholic Church stands alone in condemning the desire to remove oneself from the caprices ofnature and evolution, and the Roman Catholic Church has great political power over millions of poor and fertile people.
The Church’s teaching seems to deny any connection at all between the rapid exponential growth in human population and the spread and persistence of disease, famine, squalor, ignorance and environmental calamity. One need not be a follower of the grim Reverend Malthus to deduce that there is indeed such a connection and that, moreover, it works in the other direction as well. In every developing county that has been studied, a clear correlation can be found between the limitation of family size and the life chances of the family members. Where such measures cannot be freely taken, by means of education and example, they have been enforced in desperation by authoritarian regimes. We have before us the forbidding example of the People’s Republic of China, which limits families to one child apiece and is thus, in the name of Communism, preparing a future in which the words ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ will have no literal meaning. And we have the instance of Mother Teresa’s friend and admirer Indira Gandhi, who launched a demagogic and brutal attempt to bring about male sterilization by a combination of bullying and bribery. (Salman Rushdie’s short story ‘The Free Radio’ in East, West brilliantly shows the pathos and emptiness of this effort.) Certainly these are not kind solutions, but they evidence the severity of a problem which the Church has chosen entirely to ignore.
Over the past decades, and particularly since the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church has been faced with nearly every sort of cultural, doctrinal and political dissent. In Latin America, where it faces an unprecedented challenge from evangelical Protestantism and from the populist challenge of so-called ‘liberation theology’, the need to renew the priesthood has led to questioning of the celibacy requirement. In the United States and Western Europe, the congregation appears to conduct its affairs without reference to canonical teaching on birth control. Homosexual groups have petitioned for the right to be considered true Catholics, since if God did not create their condition there seems to be an interesting question as to who did. Even prominent. Catholic writers of the conservative wing, such as William Buckley and Clare Booth Luce, have made the obvious point that an unyielding opposition to contraception, and the ranking of it as a sin more or less equivalent to abortion, is, among other things, a cheapening of the moral position on abortion itself.
In all of these debates, the most consistently reactionary figure has been Mother Teresa. The fundamentalist faction within the Vatican has found her useful in two ways — first as an advertisement for the good works of the Church to non-Catholics; and second as a potent instrument of moral suasion within the ranks of the existing faithful. She has missed no opportunity to restate elementary dogmas (much as she once told an interviewer that, if faced with a choice between Galileo and the authority of the Inquisition, she would have sided with the Church authorities). She has inveighed against abortion, against contraception and against the idea that there should be any limit whatsoever to the growth of world population.[4]
When Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, few people had the poor taste to ask what she had ever done, or even claimed to do, for the cause of peace. Her address to the ceremony of investiture did little to resolve any doubt on this score and much to increase it. She began the speech with a literal-minded account of the myth of Christ’s conception, perhaps in honour of that day’s festal character: the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Then she began her diatribe:
I was amazed when I learned that in the West so many young people are on drugs. I tried to understand the reason for this. Why? The answer is, ‘because in the family there is nobody who cares about them’. Fathers and mothers are so busy they have no time. Young parents work, and the child lives in the street and goes his own way. We speak of peace. These are the things that threaten peace. I think that today peace is threatened by abortion, too, which is a true war, the direct killing of a child by its own mother. In the Bible we read that God clearly said: ‘Even though a mother did forget her infant, I will not forget him.’
Today, abortion is the worst evil, and the greatest enemy of peace. We who are here today were wanted by our parents. We would not be here if our parents had not wanted us.
We want children, and we love them. But what about the other millions? Many are concerned about the children, like those in Africa, who die in great numbers either from hunger or for other reasons. But millions of children die intentionally, by the will of their mothers. Because if a mother can kill her own child, what will prevent us from killing ourselves, or one another? Nothing.
There is not much necessity for identifying the fallacies and distortions which are piled upon one another here. Few women who have had abortions, even those who still feel remorse or regret, will recognize themselves as having committed actual infanticide. If there are ‘millions’ of children being slain in this way, so that they compare to the millions of children dying of malnutrition and pestilence, then there is clearly no hope for Mother Teresa’s adoption solution. (She claims to have rescued only three or four dozen orphans from the entire Bangladesh calamity, for example.) Moreover, these impressive figures should be enough at least to impel reconsideration in those who proclaim that all pregnancies are ‘wanted’ by definition and that there can be no excess population.
At a vast open-air mass in Knock, Ireland, in 1992, Mother Teresa made, it plain yet again that there is no connection at all in her mind between the conditions of poverty and misery that she ‘combats’ and the inability of the very poor to reach the plateau on which limitation of family size becomes a rational choice. Addressing a crowd of the devout, she said, ‘Let us promise Our Lady who loves Ireland so much that we will never allow in this country a single abortion. And no contraceptives.’
In this instance, she fell into the last great fallacy and offence to which Church teaching on this subject is prone. Ireland is now, to a great extent, a secular society. It is also a society which has to seek an accommodation with its huge Protestant-majority province. The Church claims the right to make law, in states where it is strong enough, for believers and unbelievers alike. Mother Teresa’s ‘pacific’ humanitarianism and charity therefore translate directly into an injunction to the faithful to breed without hindrance, an admonishment to the rest to live under laws not made by them, and an attack on the idea of a nonsectarian state. What this does for the cause of peace does not, in Ireland, take long to estimate. What it does for suffering humanity is to criminalize, or at least to ration and restrict, one of the few means ever devised for its self-emancipation. It is often said, inside the Church and out of it, that there is something grotesque about lectures on the sexual life when delivered by those who have shunned it. Given the way that the Church forbids women to preach, this point is usually made about men. But given how much this Church allows the fanatical Mother Teresa to preach, it might be added that the call to go forth and multiply, and to take no thought for the morrow, sounds grotesque when uttered by an elderly virgin whose chief claim to reverence is that she ministers to the inevitable losers in this very lottery.
In her reputation-making interview with Malcolm Muggeridge during Something Beautiful for God, Mother Teresa made the following large claim:
We have to do God’s will in everything. We also take a special vow which other congregations don’t take; that of giving wholehearted free service to the poor. This vow means that we cannot work for the rich; neither can we accept any money for the work we do. Ours has to be a free service, and to the poor.
For the many ethical humanists, as well as for the many vaguely religious people who support or endorse what they imagine to be Mother Teresa’s mission, the above statement is quite an important one. It seems to spare the Missionaries of Charity from the worldliness and financial cunning which have so disfigured Christianity in the past. And it insists that no service is furnished to the rich — a claim which might lead the unwary to conclude that no contributions are solicited from them.
In point of fact, the Missionaries of Charity have for decades been the recipients of the extraordinary largesse of governments, large foundations, corporations and private citizens. The affectation of poverty, which is so attractive to some observers, has obscured this relative plenty. And so has another affectation — one very well known to missionary fund-raisers down through the years. In this story, which has become solemnized by repetition at a thousand tent meetings, the necessary donation arrives justatthe moment when the need for it is greatest. Was a consignment of blankets the pressing need, with a hard winter coming on? Sure enough, an anonymous benefactor chose that very night to leave a truckload of blankets on the doorstep of the mission. Dr Lush Gjergji gives an especially touching example of the genre in his book, an example no less touching for its being written as if the notion had never been tried out in print before:
One day Sister Frances, from the city of Agra, phoned Mother Teresa asking for urgent help.
‘Mother, I need 50,000 rupees. Over here there is a crying and urgent need to start a house for the children.’
Mother Teresa replied: ‘That is too much, my daughter, I will call you back; for the moment we have nothing… ’ A short time later the phone rang again. It was a press agency. ‘Mother Teresa? This is the editor of the agency. The Philippine government has just awarded you the Magsaysay Prize. Heartfelt compliments! It involves a considerable sum.’
Mother Teresa: ‘Thanks for letting me know.’
The editor: What do you plan on doing with the 50,000 rupees from the prize?’
Mother Teresa: ‘What did you say? 50,000 rupees? I think the Lord wants us to build a home for children at Agra.’
As her television reputation spread, Mother Teresa found herself accepting more and more awards and benefactions. The Indian government invested her with the Prize of the Miraculous Lotus. In 1971 the Vatican gave her the John XXIII Prize for Peace (Dr Gjergji hastens to inform us that on this occasion ‘the prize winner herself had come to the Vatican on the city bus, and was wearing her Indian sari, worth about one dollar’. If true, this was ostentatious of her.) In Boston in the same year she accepted the ‘Good Samaritan’ award, again with many words of self-deprecation. Then straight to Washington, to receive the John F. Kennedy award on 16 October. The next year, with the auction in full swing, the government of India improved on its relatively lowly Miraculous Lotus prize and gave her a larger one, in a ceremony at which Indira Gandhi publicly wept. In 1973 it was Prince Philip’s turn to make an emotional demonstration, which he did while presenting the Templeton Prize ‘for the promotion of faith in the world’. In the presence of his wife, who holds the title of ‘Defender of the Faith’ against all the works of Rome and who heads a family which is barred from making a marriage to a Roman Catholic, the royal consort handed over £34,000. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization went one better two years later by striking a special medal with the goddess Ceres brandishing a stalk of wheat at Mother Teresa and, on the obverse, the inscription ‘Food For All: Holy Year 1975’. Revenue from the sale of the medals went to the Missionaries of Charity. It was only a step up from this to the Albert Schweitzer Prize, and then to yet another recognition from the Indian government — this time an honorary degree presented by Indira Gandhi herself. (The future patroness of compulsory sterilization had become, in the mean time, head of the government.) In March 1979, the International Baizan Prize, worth a quarter of a million lire, was presented by the president of Italy. The Pope, by then John Paul II, took the opportunity of her visit to receive her in private audience. All things thereby pressed toward the ultimate event of the prize-giving machine, which was to make Mother Teresa the Nobel Laureate for Peace and to invest her with the prize and the cheque in December 1979.
Nobody has troubled to total the amount of prize money received from governments and quasi-government organizations by the Missionaries of Charity, and nobody has ever asked what became of the funds. It is safe to say, however, that if all the money had been used on one project it would have been possible, say, to give Calcutta the finest teaching hospital in the entire Third World. That such is neither Mother Teresa’s intention nor her desire may be inferred from the Muggeridge incident. It may also be inferred from her preference for spreading the money thin and for devoting it to religious and missionary work rather than the sustained relief of deprivation. In any event, if she is claiming that the order does not solicit money from the rich and powerful, or accept it from them, this is easily shown to be false.
The apologists generally claim that Mother Teresa is too innocent to count money or to take the measure of those who offer it, or to reckon that they obtain some benefit from their supposed generosity in the form of virtue-by-association. Forgetting for a moment her boast that she does not accept eye-of-the-needle subventions in the first place, we might agree that this argument had merit in the case of the late Robert Maxwell. Mr Maxwell inveigled a not-unwilling Mother Teresa into a fund-raising scheme run by his newspaper group, and then, it seems (having got her to join him in some remarkable publicity photographs), he made off with the money. But Maxwell did succeed in fooling some very experienced and unsentimental people in his day, and although it might be asked how Mother Teresa had time to spare for such a wicked and greedy man, it can still be argued with some degree of plausibility that she was a blameless party to his cynical manipulations.
However, it is difficult, if not impossible, to assert this in the case of Mr Charles Keating. Keating is now serving a ten-year sentence for his part in the Savings and Loan scandal — undoubtedly one of the greatest frauds in American history. In the early 1980s, during the booming, deregulated years of Reagan’s first term, Keating, among other operators, mounted a sustained and criminal assault on the deposits of America’s small investors. His methods were those of the false prospectus and the political bribe. (Washington vernacular still contains the expression ‘the Keating Five’, in honour of the five United States senators who did him favours while receiving vast campaign donations in the form of other people’s money.) Keating had political ambitions as well as financial ones, and as a conservative Catholic fundamentalist had served Richard Nixon as a member of a much-mocked commission to investigate the ill effects of pornography.
At the height of his success as a thief, Keating made donations (not out of his own pocket, of course) to Mother Teresa in the sum of one and a quarter million dollars. He also granted her the use of his private jet. In return, Mother Teresa allowed Keating to make use of her prestige on several important occasions and gave him a personalized crucifix which he took everywhere with him.
In 1992, after a series of political and financial crises and the most expensive bailout operation in the history of the American tax-payer, Keating was finally brought to trial. He appeared before the Superior Court in Los Angeles (his ‘Lincoln Savings and Loan’ had been a largely Californian operation) where he was heard by the later-notorious Judge Lance Ito. The trial could have only one outcome: the sentence allowable under California law.
During the course of the trial, Mother Teresa wrote to the court seeking clemency for Mr Keating. She gave no explanation of her original involvement with the defendant and offered no direct testimony mitigating his looting of the thrift industry. The letter, in its original form, appears opposite.
One is struck immediately by two things. First, though the claim about ‘free service to the poorest of the poor’ is made in almost the same words as it was made to Muggeridge, the related claim that the rich receive no quid pro quo seems to have disappeared. Then there is the astonishing artlessness of the letter, both as composed and as presented. One might think it a missive from an innocent old woman who knows nothing of cupidity and scandal, and who naively wishes to intercede for reasons of rather woolly compassion. The transcript of Mother Teresa’s highly ideological Nobel Prize speech, for example, does not read like this. It is professionally written and presented. And many of her other public interventions demonstrate a much sharper sense of the real world, even when Mother Teresa is choosing to speak on matters, such as sexuality and reproduction, where she must necessarily admit to being disqualified by inexperience.
The suspicion that there might be something faux naïf about the appeal occurred also to Mr Paul Turley who, in his capacity as Deputy District Attorney for Los Angeles, was Mr Keating’s co-prosecutor. On his own initiative, and as a private citizen, he wrote and despatched a careful reply. I reproduce it below for the first time:
Dear Mother Teresa:
I am a Deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles County and one of the persons who worked on the prosecution of your benefactor, Charles H. Keating, Jr. I read your letter to Judge Ito, written on behalf of Mr. Keating, which includes your admission that you know nothing about Mr. Keating’s business or the criminal charges presented to Judge Ito. I am writing to you to provide a brief explanation of the crimes of which Mr. Keating has been convicted, to give you an understanding of the source of the money that Mr. Keating gave to you, and to suggest that you perform the moral and ethical act of returning the money to its rightful owners.
Mr. Keating was convicted of defrauding 17 individuals of more than $900,000. These 17 persons were representative of 17,000 individuals from whom Mr. Keating stole $252,000,000. Mr. Keating’s specific acts of fraud were that he was the source of a series of fraudulent representations made to persons who bought bonds from his company and he also was the repository of crucial information which he chose to withhold from bond purchasers, thereby luring his victims into believing they were making a safe, low-risk investment. In truth and in fact, their money was being used to fund Mr. Keating’s exorbitant and extravagant lifestyle.
The victims of Mr. Keating’s fraud come from a wide spectrum of society. Some were wealthy and well-educated. Most were people of modest means and unfamiliar with high finance. One was, indeed, a poor carpenter who did not speak English and had his life savings stolen by Mr. Keating’s fraud.
The biblical slogan of your organization is ‘As long as you did it to one of these My least brethren. You did it to Me’. The ‘least’ of the brethren are among those whom Mr. Keating fleeced without flinching. As you well know, divine forgiveness is available to all, but forgiveness must be preceded by admission of sin. Not only has Mr. Keating failed to admit his sins and his crimes, he persists in self-righteously blaming others for his own misdeeds. Your experience is, admirably, with the poor. My experience has been with the ‘con’ man and the perpetrator of the fraud. It is not uncommon for ‘con’ men to be generous with family, friends and charities. Perhaps they believe that their generosity will purchase love, respect or forgiveness. However, the time when the purchase of ‘indulgences’ was an acceptable method of seeking forgiveness died with the Reformation. No church, no charity, no organization should allow itself to be used as salve for the conscience of the criminal. We all are grateful that forgiveness is available but we all, also, must perform our duty. That includes the Judge and the Jury. I remind myself of the biblical admonition of the Prophet Micah: ‘O man, what is good and what does the Lord require of you. To do justice, love mercy and walk humbly.’
We are urged to love mercy but we must do justice.
You urge Judge Ito to look into his heart — as he sentences Charles Keating — and do what Jesus would do. I submit the same challenge to you. Ask yourself what Jesus would do if he were given the fruits of a crime; what Jesus would do if he were in possession of money that had been stolen; what Jesus would do if he were being exploited by a thief to ease his conscience?
I submit that Jesus would promptly and unhesitatingly return the stolen property to its rightful owners. You should do the same. You have been given money by Mr. Keating that he has been convicted of stealing by fraud. Do not permit him the ‘indulgence’ he desires. Do not keep the money. Return it to those who worked for it and earned it!
If you contact me I will put you in direct contact with the rightful owners of the property now in your possession.
Three years later, Mr Turley has received no reply to his letter. Nor can anybody account for the missing money: saints, it seems, are immune to audit.
This is by no means the only example of Mother Teresa’s surreptitious attitude to money, nor of her hypocritical protestations about the beauty of poverty, whether self-imposed or otherwise. But it is the clearest and best-documented instance, and it is proof against the customary apologetics about innocence and unworldliness. In her dealings with pelf, as in her transactions with power, Mother Teresa reigns in a kingdom that is very much of this world.