Saint of the Gutters

Greg Daly considers some common criticisms of the soon-to-be canonised Blessed Teresa of Kolkata

The December 18 announcement that a second miracle had been formally attributed to the intercession of Blessed Teresa of Kolkata has sparked some predictable reactions.

With the way to Blessed Teresa’s canonisation being opened and with the Vatican having set September 4 aside for the big day, journalist after journalist resuscitated the late Christopher Hitchens’s criticisms of the Albanian nun, some slightly more diligent ones underlining the celebrity atheist’s polemics by citing a literature study conducted by three Canadian education specialists.

Blessed Teresa was a regular target for the US-based Englishman, who with Tariq Ali condemned her in his 1994 TV piece Hell’s Angel, the following year repeating and elaborating on many of his criticisms in The Missionary Position, giving them another airing in a 2003 article in which he called her “a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud”, and recycling them yet again in his error-strewn 2007 screed, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

The charges could, on the face of it, hardly be more serious, and they were revived around the world in 2013 when the Canadian academics appeared to confirm them in their 27-page article Les côtés ténébreux de Mère Teresa (The dark side of Mother Teresa), which the University of Montreal promoted through a press release titled ‘Mother Teresa: anything but a saint’.

Contacts

After reading 287 pieces written about Blessed Teresa, they criticised, among other things, what they called “her rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception and divorce”.

Curiously, few media outlets that recycled this story stopped to question the oddity of such research having been conducted by lecturers in education or indeed psychoeducation – the education offered to empower those with mental health difficulties and their families – rather than sociologists or historians of religion, or others with more obviously relevant qualifications for such an investigation.

Few too troubled to note that the study was in fact little more than a literature review with the most frequently cited author being Christopher Hitchens; devoid of original research, it was penned without consulting any patients or associates of Blessed Teresa or anyone in Rome who had dealt with her beatification and canonisation cause.

Deeply flawed though the Canadian literature review may have been, and profoundly biased though Hitchens’ accusations surely were, the charges do seem to have stuck for many, and in truth, they deserve to be engaged with.

Hitchens’ 2003 column offers the most succinct charge sheet, beginning with his accusation that there’s something cheap and desperate about how speedily the beatification process began.

“It used to be that a person could not even be nominated for ‘beatification,’ the first step to ‘sainthood,’ until five years after his or her death,” he wrote, explaining that “this was to guard against local or popular enthusiasm in the promotion of dubious characters”, and pointing out that the beatification process for Blessed Teresa began just a year after her death in 1997.

It is of course the case that the Church normally employs such a holding period before beginning beatification processes, but this has not always been the way; in the Church’s early centuries men and women were typically hailed as saints by popular acclamation, canonised without rigorous and systematic research into their heroic virtues or demands for proof of miracles linked with them.

Even as late as the 13th Century, for instance, the Dominican St Peter of Verona and the Franciscan St Anthony of Padua were both canonised within a year of their deaths.

The Church’s canonisation procedures exist not to constrain but to aid the Pope in making decisions, and he can suspend them when he considers them unnecessary, as in recent years Popes Benedict XVI and Francis have done in different ways in the cases of, for example, St Hildegard of Bingen and St John XXIII.

For those inclined to dismiss the judgement of ordinary Catholics, the urge to canonise Blessed Teresa so swiftly is easily construed as a cynical power grab. “What could be better than beatification followed by canonisation of this model to revitalise the Church and inspire the faithful especially at a time when churches are empty and the Roman authority is in decline?” Montreal’s Serge Larivée and his Canadian colleagues asked.

The most obvious problem here, of course, is that even leaving aside the assumption of cynicism, the Canadian scholars have embraced lazy clichés about Church attendance being in freefall. The reality, of course, is that while Church attendance and participation is in decline in its traditional strongholds in the developed world, and strikingly so in Quebec, in most of the world it’s steadily and even dramatically on the rise.

As noted, the three Canadian scholars – Serge Larivée, Genevieve Chenard, and Carole Sénéchal – singled out for criticism Blessed Teresa’s “overly dogmatic” views on abortion, contraception and divorce, and Hitchens criticised her opposition at the time of the Second Vatican Council to all suggestions of reform, maintaining that what was needed “was more work and more faith, not doctrinal revision”.

It’s not clear whether or not Hitchens realised that the council wasn’t about doctrinal revision, but was about enabling the Church to speak to the modern world while restoring neglected aspects of the Church’s heritage and teaching.

The claim that Blessed Teresa’s adherence to Church teaching should have undermined her case for sainthood, is rather bizarre, Fr Peter Gumpel of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints told First Things magazine’s William Doino Jr, saying that all criticisms of Blessed Teresa have been thoroughly examined and that her orthodoxy was “one of the many assets in her favour”.

It is probably fair for Hitchens to have said that Catholics, while obliged to “abhor and eschew abortion… are not required to affirm that abortion is ‘the greatest destroyer of peace’” as Blessed Teresa did when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize”, but neither is this anywhere outside the realms of acceptable belief for Catholics.

Blessed Teresa’s intervention in Irish politics in 1996 to encourage people to vote against divorce in that year’s referendum was not merely an instance of dogmatic excess, Hitchens argued, but of sheer hypocrisy. “Later in that same year, she told Ladies’ Home Journal that she was pleased by the divorce of her friend Princess Diana, because the marriage had so obviously been an unhappy one,” he wrote, in 2007 observing that he was unsurprised “to find the Church applying sterner laws to the poor or offering indulgences to the rich”.

This analysis seems to say rather more about Christopher Hitchens than about either Blessed Teresa or the Church.

“I think it is such a sad story,” Blessed Teresa had said, continuing, “Diana is such a sad soul… You know what? It is good that it is over. Nobody was happy. I know I should preach for family love and unity, but in their case… ”

Relief

Even leaving aside how had Charles and Diana been Catholics there might have been a case for their marriage being annulled, it should be clear to anyone reading the Ladies’ Home Journal interview that Blessed Teresa had been expressing relief that a sad situation had ended, and was not saying anything whatsoever to signal support for Princess Diana remarrying.

“MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor,” Hitchens continued, “She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”

Narrowly, Hitchens was challenging Blessed Teresa’s opposition to the use of artificial contraception – she spoke highly of natural family planning – but his take on Church teaching on this, aside from being a ludicrous and false caricature, misses the mark entirely. The empowerment of women is indeed essential to solve the problem of poverty, but that’s best achieved through education, something Blessed Teresa never opposed and the Church has long promoted throughout the world.

As for claims that Mother Teresa saw something “beautiful” in poverty and poor people suffering, as Hitchens said elsewhere, this is utterly to misconstrue her – rather, and this is fully in line with Catholic teaching, she saw something beautiful in the acceptance of suffering when that acceptance entailed a recognition that it was shared by Christ, and was willingly shared with Christ. The beauty she saw was the beauty of unity with God.

“And she was a friend to the worst of the rich,” Hitchens went on, “taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan.”

There is meat to these charges, and it won’t quite do to present Blessed Teresa as an innocent who had no idea what she was dealing with when accepting such donations. Nobody who knew Blessed Teresa has ever described her as an unworldly naïf.

In 1981 she visited Jean-Claude Duvalier, who had been ruling Haiti as a police state for the previous decade, following the death of his dictator father Francois, in order to be inducted into Haiti’s Légion d’honneur.

There she described Duvalier’s wife Michele, who he had married the previous year, as “someone who feels, who knows, who wishes to demonstrate her love not only with words but also with concrete and tangible actions” and said that she had had a “beautiful lesson” in Haiti as she had “never seen the poor people being so familiar with their head of state as they were with her”.

It’s undeniably galling to look at a photo of Blessed Teresa with Michele Duvalier, just five years before the latter would be driven out of Haiti by the country’s starving people, and wonder what she truly saw there, but we do not know what she said behind closed doors, or how she might have hoped to influence the couple.

Instructive

It may be instructive too to recall that Jesus was not exactly known for shunning those administrators and officials who had fleeced local populations; on the contrary, if anything he seems to have made a point of spending time with greedy tax-collectors, pointing out that he had “not come to call the virtuous, but sinners, to repentance”.

A similar explanation may explain the otherwise perplexing visit of Blessed Teresa to the tomb of Albania’s communist dictator Enver Hoxha in 1990; why would she have laid a wreath at the tomb of someone who had so persecuted the Church? A fair question, perhaps, but as Christians we are called to forgive our enemies, and to pray for them, and Blessed Teresa was surely doing that, convinced too that there is good in everyone.

As for money received – a million dollars – from Charles Keating, head of Lincoln Savings and Loan who was sentenced to 10 years in prison after defrauding $225 million from thousands of investors, there’s no doubt that this is troubling, but it goes too far to paint it as a simple case of “receipt of stolen goods”, not least as it may have come from money Keating legitimately earned, or as depriving others of their property, since all depositors in the Lincoln Saving and Loan Association were reimbursed up to $40,000 by the US government.

Blessed Teresa was never charged with any crime in this regard, of course, but there are many for whom this episode will still sit badly. Others will wonder where the money went. Hitchens certainly did so, asking “Where did that money, and all the other donations, go?

“The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been,” he said, “—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit.”

The snipe about preferring California clinics is perhaps unfair, because as Fr James Martin SJ pointed out in 1996, “anyone familiar with religious orders will be aware that a sick superior is, more often than not, urged by the members of her community to treat herself better than she would if left on her own”, with people professing horror when “poverty-minded superiors are allowed to let their own medical problems go untreated”. Fr Martin cites the example of how the papal household in 1978 were excessively deferential to Pope John Paul I’s instructions not to call for quality medical care even when he was clearly ill.

Far from being a sin against poverty or even hypocrisy, Fr Martin suggested, the urging of Blessed Teresa’s subordinates to take better care of herself reflected “a demonstration of the deep affection of the Missionaries of Charity for their founder”.

The charge that the hospices did not provide decent medical care is a very serious one, but as Fr Martin pointed out then, “primary health care is not what Mother Teresa’s order was founded to do”. Arguing that “there are hundreds of Catholic medical orders which generously fill that need” he wrote that the charism of the Missionaries “is, quite specifically, to provide solace to the very many poor patients who would otherwise die alone”.

Fr Gumpel, of the Congregation for Saints, made similar points when being interviewed for First Things, pointing out firstly that although mistakes were made in the network of homes established by Blessed Teresa, constructive changes and improvements were regular made. Recalling how many forget or fail to understand the desperate conditions Blessed Teresa faced, he stressed that it was “absolutely false” to claim that she rejected or neglected available medical care for those still treatable, or good palliative care for the terminally ill, waring against “anecdotal stories circulating from disgruntled people or those with an anti-Catholic agenda”.

Question

The question of where the money went still remains, of course, and many will legitimately wonder why the Missionaries of Charity’s homes are so bare and ill-equipped when hundreds of millions have been donated to them. Insisting that Blessed Teresa helped raise, and spent “enormous sums of money” on the poor, Fr Gumpel explains that she also donated funds to the Holy See, which in turn distributed them to Catholic hospitals and other good works.

It seems a fair explanation, but will for many also appear deeply inadequate. The problem lies in how the finances of Church orders are all too rarely transparent, often for good – if perhaps outdated – reasons, such that even accounts that are kept impeccably and money movements that are entirely legitimate can look arcane, even Byzantine, and inherently suspicious. In this respect, it is to be hoped that Pope Francis’ financial reforms, spearheaded by Cardinal Pell, will serve as an example for the Church as a whole.

Centuries of persecution may have woven discretion and secrecy into the fabric of the Church, but saying “trust us” just won’t cut it anymore. Only transparency can ensure doubts and claims about Blessed Teresa can be thoroughly dispelled.