Saviour
of the needy driven by self-interest
by
Sunanda K. Datta-Ray - (An
editorial consultant to The Straits Times)
From
"The Australian", 11th September, 1997.
http://www.users.bigpond.com/Atheist_Australia/teresa3.htm
Did
Mother Teresa cynically use Calcutta's poor for her own ends or did she deserve
her saintly reputation?
SISTER
Nirmala, the new ethnic Indian head of the Missionaries of Charity, the
Calcutta-based order that Mother Teresa set up, may find it difficult to operate
in the shadow of a legend whose white skin and skilful public relations --
"Without the media she would still be a little nun working with a few other
nuns," said Father Edward le Joly, the order's former spiritual director --
enabled her to overcome Indian wariness about missionaries.
Without either advantage, the new superior must ask
herself whether her predecessor's unyielding opposition to contraception helped
a country that groans under the burden of an additional 17 million mouths --
Australia's entire population -- to feed every year. Also, how much impact the
missionaries actually made on Calcutta's pain and poverty.
CALCUTTA'S
party circuit used to bubble with stories about the stooped woman in the
blue-bordered sari, the strong features and intense stare. A European diplomat
talked ruefully of stamping visas for a dozen nuns, then being told that God
would pay the fees. She offered (threatened?) to become an Air-India hostess
whereupon the airline gave her a complimentary pass. There was the titled
Englishwoman who did not disclose her rank, but whom Mother Teresa tracked down
when her order needed a house in London. There were whispers of secret deathbed
conversions to Christianity. She kept curious company, being photographed with
Haiti's Michele Duvalier and Washington's mayor Marion Barry. The missionaries
accepted $1.7 million from Charles Keating, the California businessman who was
jailed for embezzling $346 million in savings funds, and Mother Teresa wrote to
Los Angeles Judge Lance Ito to intercede for Keating while he was being tried in
Ito's court.
But only Westerners spoke of such matters. The
star-struck city tamely offered up its poor and dying to be stepping stones in
her relentless ascent to sainthood. For, though she expanded into Europe and
America, Africa and Australia, it was the misery of Calcutta that built up and
sustained her reputation, inducing the rich and the powerful to give her money
and patronage. She owed Calcutta everything. Calcutta gave her a halo. It
received little in return. Sister Nirmala can repay that debt by repatriating to
India the vast undisclosed fortune that Mother Teresa apparently invested in
missions worldwide, and use it to set up schools and centres to educate adults,
train women to earn, look after orphans and feed the under-nourished.
Calcutta needs comfortable homes for the aged, and,
above all, a fully equipped free hospital where the poor are guaranteed
world-class doctors, nurses and treatment. Only this can atone for the ultimate
paradox of Mother Teresa going to elite clinics whenever she fell ill while
idealising pain for the poor.
'I THINK
it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the
passion of Christ," she said."I think the world is being much helped
by the suffering of the poor people." In 1991, Dr Robin Fox, the then
editor of The Lancet, scathingly dismissed the order's rudimentary
medical facilities. Souls, not bodies, were grist to the mills of her faith.
I learned this in 1971 when Indian television,
Doordarshan, wanted me to interview her in celebration of a papal award. During
a preliminary chat, I asked what distinguished her from other social workers.
Mother Teresa was horrified. She was not doing social service. She
was"helping the poor" because "our Lord" had told her to do
so for her salvation.
"So, the good work that you do is for your own
sake?" I asked. "The beneficial effect is only incidental, the real
purpose is your personal salvation?" Mother Teresa did not disagree.
As I spent the afternoon in her homes -- she wanted me
to see her work before the interview -- I dwelt on what she had said.
It would be central to our discourse before the
cameras, for I realised that it revealed her and her mission, as well as her
relationship with Calcutta, in a new light. So did Mother Teresa. Doordarshan
telephoned early next morning to say that the interview was off. She would talk
only to Desmond Doig, a British journalist in Calcutta who had written a book
about her.
Abroad,
she did not conceal her contempt for secular labour to relieve poverty.
Yet, what Mother Teresa had confided to me was then a
secret only in India. Abroad, she did not conceal her contempt for secular
labour to relieve poverty.
"There is always the danger that we may become
only social workers or just do the work for the sake of the work" she told
another British biographer, Malcolm Muggeridge, whose 1969 BBC documentary, Something
Beautiful for God, launched her internationally.
Many years later, Navin Chawla, Indian author of her
"authorised biography", asked if there were fewer destitutes as a
result of her efforts. Mother Teresa laughingly said she did not know. "But
those who die with us, die in peace ... for that's for eternity."
Millions
of Indians, for whom her mission's only raison d'etre is its secular
achievement, do not want to die in peace but to live in dignity. The here and
now matters more than the hereafter. Struggling to escape hunger, disease and
homelessness, they will expect the less saintly Sister Nirmala, to redress the
past by providing tangible evidence of concern and commitment, to replace
charisma with credibility. Her missionaries will now have to succour the living,
not just "save" the dying.
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