Speaker 1: M the day after Mother Teresa died. Her body lay
Speaker 1: on a bed of ice in the mother house and Calcutta.
Speaker 1: Hundreds of people stood outside in the rain, somewhere crying. Inside,
Speaker 1: sisters knelt or stood around her body. They prayed the
Speaker 1: Rosary aloud and approached one at a time to kiss
Speaker 1: her feet. The chapel was too small for all the
Speaker 1: visitors who wanted to pay their respects, so her body
Speaker 1: was carried through the streets in an open coffin to
Speaker 1: a church, where she lay in state for a week.
Speaker 1: Her funeral was in a sports arena and Calcutta. Some
Speaker 1: fifteen thousand people attended, including dignitaries from around the world,
Speaker 1: the presidents of Albania, of Ghana, of Italy, the Queen
Speaker 1: of Spain, the Queen of Belgium, the Queen of Jordan's
Speaker 1: first Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Prime Minister of India,
Speaker 1: declared at a state funeral, something usually reserved for presidents
Speaker 1: and prime ministers, a leprosy patient carried in the eucharis twine.
Speaker 1: Mother Teresa's personal story seems to me like a vague silhouette,
Speaker 1: something so public and at the same time deeply private.
Speaker 1: As I chiseled my way through. It wasn't long before
Speaker 1: I hit something hard. Mother Teresa's cult of death and
Speaker 1: suffering depends for its effect on the most vulnerable and helpless.
Speaker 1: Abandoned babies, say all the terminally ill. Christopher Higins was
Speaker 1: a political critic and author known for his blistering commentaries.
Speaker 1: Some people called them hitch slaps, and in the nineteen
Speaker 1: nineties he made a television documentary about Mother Teresa, a
Speaker 1: scathing critique. It's called Hell's Angel. Mother Teresa regards herself
Speaker 1: as mandated by Heaven, which is hot, be modest. She
Speaker 1: learns spiritual solace to dictators and to wealthy exploiters, which
Speaker 1: is scarcely the essence of simplicity, and she preaches surrender
Speaker 1: and prostration to the poor, which a truly humble person
Speaker 1: would barely have the nerve to do. Throughout the program,
Speaker 1: Higgins is weirdly lit half his faces and shadow, A
Speaker 1: massive caricature of a devious looking Mother Teresa lurks in
Speaker 1: the background, and Hitchens is ruthless. She takes on the
Speaker 1: grim and tedious tones of the zealot and the finacial
Speaker 1: such a person is manifested in the shape of a demagogue,
Speaker 1: an obscure antist, and a servant of earthly powers, a
Speaker 1: presumable virgin who also campaigns against birth control. Hell's Angel
Speaker 1: came out at a time when Mother Teresa was considered
Speaker 1: too virtuous to be criticized. Calls for her sanehood were growing.
Speaker 1: If you haven't heard some of these criticisms before, you
Speaker 1: might be thinking, what is this guy saying? I thought
Speaker 1: everyone loved Mother Teresa. Well, it isn't just Christopher Higgins
Speaker 1: who just has Mother Teresa. Because it has to be done,
Speaker 1: somebody has to do it. Somebody had to do it.
Speaker 1: From a cocoa punch and I heart radio. This is
Speaker 1: the Turning America Lance, Part four, The Devil's Advocates. We
Speaker 1: reached out to the missionaries of Charity Sisters and sent
Speaker 1: them a list of questions we had. While a representative
Speaker 1: did respond, they declined to be interviewed. Critics have a
Speaker 1: lot of complaints against Mother Teresa, and once these criticisms
Speaker 1: entered the world, they became part of her story. They
Speaker 1: still are today. I can't go into all of them,
Speaker 1: but we're going to look at a handful. Let's start
Speaker 1: by going back to something beautiful for God. That's the
Speaker 1: documentary about Mother Teresa by Malcolm Muggridge, the film that
Speaker 1: made her famous. M Muggridge was convinced that a scene
Speaker 1: in his film captured a miracle. It happened in the
Speaker 1: home for the Dying. When the crew tried to film
Speaker 1: in there, the room was so dark that the director
Speaker 1: worried the images wouldn't come out, But it turns out
Speaker 1: they did. The scene was full of light. Immediately Muggaret's
Speaker 1: thought it was divine intervention. He declared it the first
Speaker 1: photographic miracle. But to Christopher Higgins, mother Teresa's critic, this
Speaker 1: miracle seemed too good to be true, and in Hell's
Speaker 1: Angel he included an interview with Muggridge's cameraman, a guy
Speaker 1: named Ken McMillan, who said, it's true they were worried
Speaker 1: about the low light, but they were using a new
Speaker 1: kind of film, some new film made by Kodak, which
Speaker 1: we hadn't had time to test before we left. So
Speaker 1: I said, well, let's have a go, so we shot him.
Speaker 1: A month or two later, they're in the studio looking
Speaker 1: at the footage. Thanks really up came the shots of
Speaker 1: the house of a dying and it was surprising. You
Speaker 1: could see every detail. And I said, that's amazing, it's extraordinary.
Speaker 1: And I was going to go on to say, you know,
Speaker 1: three cheers for Koda. I didn't get a chance to
Speaker 1: say that because Malcolm, sitting in the front rows, spun
Speaker 1: around and said, it's divine light. It's Mother Theresa. You'll
Speaker 1: find that it's divine mit. Old boy Malcolm Muggert couldn't
Speaker 1: stop talking about this miracle. He called it a halo
Speaker 1: and a star was born. Here's Christopher Higgins and Hell's
Speaker 1: Angel again. This profane marriage between tawdry media hype and
Speaker 1: medieval superstition gave birth to an icon which few have
Speaker 1: since had the poor taste to question, how does the
Speaker 1: reputation of Holy Mother Teresa look if, just for a
Speaker 1: moment we switch off Malcolm muggerage is kindly light? Well,
Speaker 1: without him, there wouldn't be any Mother Trees obvious sleep,
Speaker 1: because he was the one who puts her on that pedestal.
Speaker 1: This is a roop Chatter Gee a physician in London.
Speaker 1: He collaborated with Hitchens on the film Hell's Angel. He
Speaker 1: also published a book, jam Packed with his research and
Speaker 1: condemnations of Mother Teresa for years he spent his spare
Speaker 1: time researching the lady, as he often calls her, whatever
Speaker 1: you call it, crusade against the lady. Well, maybe to start,
Speaker 1: I wonder, could you just if you had to summarize
Speaker 1: your overall case or perspective on Mother Teresa, what would
Speaker 1: you say? I considered the whole Mother Teresa bandwagon as
Speaker 1: a cult um. I would say that practically everything about
Speaker 1: Mother Teresa is a result of myth and hyperbolic But
Speaker 1: what fired him up in the first place? A roop
Speaker 1: chatter Gee grew up in Calkatta in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: He was a medical student, and back then he had
Speaker 1: a very different person backtive on Mother Teresa. When I
Speaker 1: used to go to medical school on my moped every
Speaker 1: day in Calcata, I used to pass by one of
Speaker 1: her places and I used to see about forty people
Speaker 1: being fed, and I would be quite thankful and happy
Speaker 1: that somebody was feeding at least forty people in Calcata.
Speaker 1: Even in her head day, not much was known about her.
Speaker 1: It was known that she had won the Nobel Prize
Speaker 1: and that she was a very good, charitable lady. So
Speaker 1: I had absolutely nothing against her. If anything, I was
Speaker 1: positive towards her. Then he moved to the UK. One
Speaker 1: day a co worker asked him where he was from.
Speaker 1: He said Calcutta, and then he said, oh, Calcata. Do
Speaker 1: you know something. There's one person in the whole world
Speaker 1: I respect more than anybody else. That's Mother Teresa. And
Speaker 1: I was I was quite surprised. I said, why this is?
Speaker 1: Why did she mention Mother Teresa When I said I
Speaker 1: was from Carcasa. That incident stuck to my mind, like yesterday,
Speaker 1: I just I didn't know that people synonymized Calcata with
Speaker 1: Mother Teresa. After that, he started noticing how his home
Speaker 1: city was viewed by the Western world. I read little
Speaker 1: things about Calcutta in a very gruesome way, and it's
Speaker 1: all about poverty and leprosy and squala, nothing at all
Speaker 1: about anything else. I recently came across a video where
Speaker 1: a bishop in Los Angeles describes Calcutta like this, Imagine
Speaker 1: the worst garbage jump you've seen, and now think of
Speaker 1: the whole city that way. Reports like this didn't match
Speaker 1: the Calcutta chatter. Je new a thriving metropolist, a cultural hub.
Speaker 1: So when he was on a trip to Calcutta. He
Speaker 1: visited the Home for the Dying, the place he'd heard
Speaker 1: described as an oasis for the poor, and I was
Speaker 1: appolled that that place had given us so much publicity
Speaker 1: and it was even called a hospice. It had less
Speaker 1: than one places, and they didn't have any beds, even
Speaker 1: they had hammocks. There was no yards, no veranda, no balcony,
Speaker 1: no nothing nowhere to stretch your limbs. You were brutally
Speaker 1: treated in there. Chatterjee says he was even more shocked
Speaker 1: by the medical practices he saw. They routinely used to
Speaker 1: re use needles and gloves. Even that practice has stopped now.
Speaker 1: It was a harsh place. I think it's a harsh place.
Speaker 1: Collet Livermore was with the Missionaries of Charity for eleven years.
Speaker 1: She's the Australian sister who wasn't allowed to go home
Speaker 1: when her brother was very ill. After she left the
Speaker 1: m CS, she became a physician, but back in night
Speaker 1: she was assigned to the Home for the Dying. Collett
Speaker 1: fed intended to patients. There, she cleaned maggots from wounds
Speaker 1: and watched the bodies of people who died. One patient
Speaker 1: died in her arms. The standard medicine wouldn't have been high.
Speaker 1: And the thing I found difficult was there was no
Speaker 1: pain killers. She says. The sisters were often rough and cold.
Speaker 1: When people who had been on the street arrived at
Speaker 1: the home, the sisters would strip off their clothes right
Speaker 1: there in the room. They were all washed in a
Speaker 1: cement washing place with no privacy and just cold water
Speaker 1: thrown over them. Clutz as they often cried out when
Speaker 1: the cold water hit their skin while some visitor with
Speaker 1: a camera might be snapping photos. Their hair was shaved,
Speaker 1: and I mean, I know they had lice and all
Speaker 1: that sort of stuff, but I don't know. I found
Speaker 1: it very harsh. She says. Sometimes sisters even got aggressive,
Speaker 1: acting harshly to someone or hitting them or when did
Speaker 1: you see sisters head people in Calcutta? You know? And
Speaker 1: I understand that it's very frustrating because you know, if
Speaker 1: you've got desperate people trying to get things food and such,
Speaker 1: they'll be pushing. Clatt couldn't get over the feeling that
Speaker 1: things could be so much better, and it wasn't the
Speaker 1: first time she felt that way. As a teenager, Collet
Speaker 1: Livermore Plants to study medicine but then she watched Something
Speaker 1: Beautiful for God, and I saw that movie and I thought,
Speaker 1: I don't need to bother being a doctor anymore because
Speaker 1: they don't need complicated medicine, they just need food. Clud
Speaker 1: joined the m CS, and it didn't take long for
Speaker 1: her to have misgivings about their medical care, including the
Speaker 1: care for sisters. In seven, she was assigned to a
Speaker 1: house in Papua New Guinea. She was twenty two. Before
Speaker 1: she left, She says no one suggested she take medication
Speaker 1: to prevent malaria, usually taken too weeks before travel. When
Speaker 1: she arrived, she says she saw griefstones of nuns who
Speaker 1: had died from malaria, so as soon as she had
Speaker 1: a chance, she talked to mother Teresa about it. I
Speaker 1: asked her, could we take something to prevent malaria? And
Speaker 1: she said I I don't take anything. She trusts in God,
Speaker 1: but I could take it if I wanted to. Collett
Speaker 1: decided to take it, but it was too late. One night,
Speaker 1: she felt incredibly cold, MY teeth were chattering. I had
Speaker 1: a terrible back paint, terrible headache. She didn't go to
Speaker 1: work that day and she wasn't getting any better. I
Speaker 1: was arching my back was arching, My tongue was coming
Speaker 1: out involuntarily, and I could have died. The sisters sent
Speaker 1: for a doctor. He said it was cerebral malaria, which
Speaker 1: is extremely serious. I didn't die. You'll be pleased to hear.
Speaker 1: Another time, Collett was working with tuberculosis patients in the Philippines.
Speaker 1: What she saw startled her. There was a particular mistake
Speaker 1: where a wrong injection was given, and I was horrified
Speaker 1: when I asked a sister, you know how much did
Speaker 1: you give? And they didn't even know what dose it
Speaker 1: had given. Kas in fiction was a problem since patients
Speaker 1: were mixed together in close quarters collect things. A lot
Speaker 1: of these mistakes stem from this empty belief that the
Speaker 1: sisters shouldn't have too much expertise. Expertise is an opportunity
Speaker 1: for pride, and Mother Teresa believed ignorance was actually an
Speaker 1: advantage because you're a vessel for God's will. It was
Speaker 1: a sort of form of magical thinking. If you obey
Speaker 1: God's will be done through you in some sort of
Speaker 1: magical way. Mother used to say, it was I'm just
Speaker 1: a pencil in his hands, like an inanimate object. That's
Speaker 1: what they told Half the time. We didn't know where
Speaker 1: we were going, and we were sent away suddenly, so
Speaker 1: there was absolutely no preparation, no language or cultural training.
Speaker 1: The other thing that troubled her was how the vow
Speaker 1: of obedience affected their work. You were supposed to obey cheerfully, promptly,
Speaker 1: and without question, but what if you saw injustice or
Speaker 1: medical mistakes? Do you speak up? Then one day in
Speaker 1: Manila sticks out to her. The sisters had what they
Speaker 1: called a Tohanan home for people who had tuberculosis and
Speaker 1: other illnesses, and so a little boy came with his parents,
Speaker 1: and his name was Alex, and he was very sick,
Speaker 1: dehydrated and malnourished, with a fever and sepsis. His skin
Speaker 1: was floppy and his eyes were sunken. They weren't supposed
Speaker 1: to accept people on Thursdays, but Collette, who was Sister
Speaker 1: Tobitt back then, spoke with the parents any way, and
Speaker 1: the professor sister came out in a boiling rage, saying Tobert,
Speaker 1: what are you doing here? I said, well, this little
Speaker 1: boy is very ill and he's been rejected by the
Speaker 1: hospital and we need to help him. And she said, so,
Speaker 1: only you know what's right. And I said, look, I
Speaker 1: don't really know what's right, but I just know that
Speaker 1: this little child is going to die if we don't
Speaker 1: do something. And she said, go back to the dahana
Speaker 1: and I said, no, I hope I won't. And she said,
Speaker 1: I will help him this time, but you do what
Speaker 1: you're told and go back to the so collect dead
Speaker 1: and the child was admitted. They put him on a
Speaker 1: drop with antibiotics and fluids. That night, she snuck over
Speaker 1: to see how he was. I remember carrying him outside
Speaker 1: into the night and just sort of saying, why, why
Speaker 1: you know too the blackness. Next day he was much
Speaker 1: much better. Yeah, he survived. He became a fat little thing.
Speaker 1: In fact, Collett's intervention wouldn't go unnoticed. About a month later,
Speaker 1: she says, she walked into the dormitory and her bedrole
Speaker 1: was gone. Someone had removed it, no warning, no explanation.
Speaker 1: She had been demoted from her post as a novice mistress.
Speaker 1: She says the conflict she felt inside her pierced through
Speaker 1: her life like a thorn. Mother Teresa wrote a letter
Speaker 1: in seven As usual, there was one thing on her mind.
Speaker 1: She said, during the year, very often, I have been
Speaker 1: longing to be all for Jesus and to make other souls,
Speaker 1: especially Indian come and love him fervently. Bringing souls to
Speaker 1: Jesus sounds a lot like conversion to me, and Mother
Speaker 1: Teresa used the word conversion in some of her letters.
Speaker 1: According to Father Brian Colodetuch, who edited her letters for publication,
Speaker 1: she said, yes, I convert. I convert you to be
Speaker 1: a better Hindu, or a better Muslim, or a better Protestant,
Speaker 1: or a better Catholic, or a better Parsi, or a
Speaker 1: better seek or a better Buddhist. And after you have
Speaker 1: found God, it is for you to do what God
Speaker 1: wants you to do. When I first joined the energy
Speaker 1: and the spirit of the society, it was extremely powerful.
Speaker 1: It was never about converting people. But that didn't last.
Speaker 1: Sue Weber says, she's a former m C who was
Speaker 1: a sure year in the early The longer I stayed
Speaker 1: in the order, it started to be about converting people.
Speaker 1: It became more about how many people did you convert.
Speaker 1: I heard from many, many people that this was happening
Speaker 1: on a large scale, that they were converting surreptitiously at
Speaker 1: the point of death. In his book, A Root Strategy
Speaker 1: tells the story of one former sister who says sisters
Speaker 1: were trained to ask a dying person if they wanted
Speaker 1: a ticket to heaven, and if they agreed to press
Speaker 1: the wet cloths to their forehead and quietly baptize them.
Speaker 1: But Run has died. The ticket wasn't bitterly called because
Speaker 1: Ticus and Peter will not let them go in they
Speaker 1: called baptism tickets. Was This is Mother Teresa speaking at
Speaker 1: a clinic in California. We asked a person, do you Runs,
Speaker 1: Do you want a blessing by which your scenes will
Speaker 1: be forgiven and you will receive God? And they have
Speaker 1: never really used. So twenty nine have died in that
Speaker 1: one house from the time we began to buck in
Speaker 1: two and they were collecting the numbers because you get
Speaker 1: brownie points if you convert, because it is so beautiful
Speaker 1: to see the people die. It's so much choi And
Speaker 1: it's actually pretty lowly thing to do to take advantage
Speaker 1: of somebody's alternate mental state and to exploit them like that.
Speaker 1: Maybe the most repeated critique of Mother Teresa is that
Speaker 1: you romanticized poverty. Christopher Hedges put it this way, that
Speaker 1: Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She
Speaker 1: was a friend of poverty. S Antony Chaco Party, a
Speaker 1: professor of history at the University of Calcutta, says westerners
Speaker 1: ate her story up. I think the Western fascination with
Speaker 1: her was because she was using the Indian sardi as
Speaker 1: a projection of her glorification of poverty. The Saudi clad
Speaker 1: women on the streets of Calcutta, working among among destitute
Speaker 1: people living on the streets. I think that fascinated a
Speaker 1: lot of Western people, trying to project India as a somewhat,
Speaker 1: you know, a place like Mars. Almost the Roop Charity
Speaker 1: put it a little more strongly. The West felt so
Speaker 1: smug and so glad that this white woman who's a Catholic,
Speaker 1: very very rigid Catholic, who was looking after this disgusting,
Speaker 1: desperate people in a remote corner of the world. The
Speaker 1: Western interest in Mother Teresa's work led to a lot
Speaker 1: of donations. Some report tens of millions of dollars a year,
Speaker 1: but the exact amount is unclear. The m c s
Speaker 1: don't reveal their financial information, including to us we asked.
Speaker 1: When one Forbes India reporter asked how much they received
Speaker 1: in donations, he was told God knows he is our banker.
Speaker 1: We have a lot of money, a lot. This is
Speaker 1: Sue Webber again. When she became a superior at the
Speaker 1: AIDS Hospice in San Francisco, she got a checkbook for
Speaker 1: the first time, but she says she couldn't really use it.
Speaker 1: I had to go through so many channels to get
Speaker 1: like a refrigerator, a small refrigerator to put the men's
Speaker 1: medicine in. Mm hmm. I had. I had access to
Speaker 1: an account that had over million dollars in it, and
Speaker 1: I couldn't buy a refrigerator. As the superior of the house.
Speaker 1: Collet Livermore, the former sister from Australia, put it this way.
Speaker 1: We had plenty of money, but in the name of poverty,
Speaker 1: we didn't want to use it. Instead, they begged. That's
Speaker 1: what the sisters called it, begging. They begged or donated supplies,
Speaker 1: whether food or medicine or clothes. Mother trees. I believed
Speaker 1: it was a chance for the donor to come closer
Speaker 1: to Christ. So I was told with another sister to
Speaker 1: go look at vehicles. So he remembers when she was
Speaker 1: in the Bronx and they needed a new car. So
Speaker 1: we get there and we look at different vehicles and
Speaker 1: there's a small jeep. So I called the house and
Speaker 1: I said to the regional superior, so we found the
Speaker 1: vehicle and this is how much it costs. Can we
Speaker 1: go ahead and purchase it? And she goes, no, you
Speaker 1: should beg for it, and I was like what, and
Speaker 1: I said, I'm not begging for it. I said, we
Speaker 1: have the money. And I would have never had a
Speaker 1: problem at all to beg for anything if we didn't
Speaker 1: have it. By begging for it, it's basically, um, it's
Speaker 1: a lie because you're basically presenting that you need something
Speaker 1: and you don't have the wherewithal to get it, right,
Speaker 1: that's a lie. So you refused to beg for it,
Speaker 1: but you usually had to obey her regional superior. So
Speaker 1: I said, that is exactly why. I said to the guy,
Speaker 1: so I said, hey, I'm just curious, like, would you
Speaker 1: give us that cheap? Would you just give it to us?
Speaker 1: And he was like for free and I was like yeah,
Speaker 1: And he was like, well, don't you have any money,
Speaker 1: and I go, oh, no, we have plenty of money.
Speaker 1: I'm just curious if he would just give it to us,
Speaker 1: and he started laughing and he goes no, and I
Speaker 1: was like, okay. So I called back the regional and
Speaker 1: I was like, they won't give it to us for free,
Speaker 1: and then we ended up buying it. Mother Teresa often
Speaker 1: spoke of suffering, but critics asked how much did you
Speaker 1: do to alleviate it. There's a particular moment in an
Speaker 1: interview on William F. Buckley's Firing Line on PBS, where
Speaker 1: she tells the story of a woman who would cancer.
Speaker 1: The woman wasn't terrible pain, but Mother Teresa told her
Speaker 1: that the pain was a sign that she had come
Speaker 1: so close to Jesus on the cross that he could
Speaker 1: kiss her. And the lady, though she wasn't a great pain,
Speaker 1: she joined their hands together and said, Mother Teresa, please
Speaker 1: tell Jesus to stop kissing me. As Mother Teresa tells
Speaker 1: this story, you can see that she's starting to smile.
Speaker 1: What's weird about this moment to me is hearing people
Speaker 1: laughing in the background after this woman says to Mother Teresa,
Speaker 1: please tell Jesus to stop kissing me. I guess it's
Speaker 1: supposed to be funny, but doesn't it also mean this
Speaker 1: person just wants the pain to stop. The interviewer then says,
Speaker 1: to Mother Teresa, Christ entered his own passion willingly. Most
Speaker 1: humans enter unwillingly into pain. Mother Teresa replies that he'd
Speaker 1: be surprised how content that poor people in India are,
Speaker 1: that on their suffering faces you see a beautiful smile.
Speaker 1: That her work is to help them accept suffering as
Speaker 1: a gift. Mother Teresa knew the power of a good story,
Speaker 1: repeated anecdotes until they were parables, and she had a
Speaker 1: way journalists. One expert said it was like she cast
Speaker 1: a spell on them. She may not have enjoyed publicity,
Speaker 1: but she saw the value in it. She was strategic
Speaker 1: about granting interviews. Sometimes she made agreements that she be
Speaker 1: allowed to review an edit material before it was published.
Speaker 1: Books about her are often full of inaccuracies, more legend
Speaker 1: than fact, and some of the people I talked to
Speaker 1: told me the church was more than happy to benefit
Speaker 1: from that legend. It wasn't only Mother Teresa who knew
Speaker 1: how to use the media. Mary Johnson says the church
Speaker 1: saw its value too, and I do feel that the
Speaker 1: Church used her. I remember I traveled with her once
Speaker 1: to Louisiana, the first place where the abuses of priests
Speaker 1: who were pedophiles had become known. In nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: a Louisiana priest admitted to abusing more than thirty children.
Speaker 1: He was eventually sentenced to twenty years in prison. While
Speaker 1: the trial was under way, the Missionaries of Charity opened
Speaker 1: a new house just an hour away in Baton Rouge.
Speaker 1: The sisters had been invited there in order to repair
Speaker 1: the image of the church. If the people of the
Speaker 1: diocese saw Mother Teresa and the sisters, that would be
Speaker 1: the example that could kind of make up for these
Speaker 1: horrible things that the priests had done. It sounds like
Speaker 1: the missionaries of Charity and Mother Teresa sort of became
Speaker 1: a pr tool for the church exactly, a pr tool,
Speaker 1: a symbol um and I do think that's a way
Speaker 1: of using someone. A lot of people wanted to use
Speaker 1: that symbol. After Malcolm Muggridge's films Something Beautiful for God,
Speaker 1: he promoted her like crazy. He saw her potential for
Speaker 1: advancing conservative causes, especially with her stance on abortion. He
Speaker 1: and a number of American politicians advocated for her to
Speaker 1: be given the Nobel Peace Prize, and when she was
Speaker 1: abortion was at the center of her acceptance speech, and
Speaker 1: I feel one thing I want to share the two
Speaker 1: on the greatest destroyer of peace today is the pride
Speaker 1: of the innocent unborn child. If a mother and murder
Speaker 1: her own child in her own room, what is left
Speaker 1: for you and for me to kill each other to meet?
Speaker 1: The nations who have legalized abortion, they are the poorest nation.
Speaker 1: Christopher Higgins, the man behind the documentary Hell's Angel, he
Speaker 1: sees this speech and much of Mother Teresa's work as
Speaker 1: part of a larger, unstated political agenda to advance the
Speaker 1: goals of the church. If you can give women control
Speaker 1: over the rat reproduction and come back to that village
Speaker 1: in ten years time, everything will be better right away.
Speaker 1: It's the only thing that works well. Mother Reasons spent
Speaker 1: her entire life saying that that solution was impermissible. She
Speaker 1: waged her entire life making sure that didn't happen. So
Speaker 1: I wish there was a hell to which she could go,
Speaker 1: because she has a lot of death on the conscience,
Speaker 1: and a lot of misery and stupidity and ignorance and
Speaker 1: dirt and filth and disease as well. It just strikes
Speaker 1: me again and again, how polarize these camps are. It's
Speaker 1: like you either love her or you hate her. The
Speaker 1: image of Mother Teresa that I had encountered out in
Speaker 1: the world wasn't anything like the woman I had known.
Speaker 1: Here's Mary Johnson. Either. There were people who made her
Speaker 1: out to be this complete holy saint and said all
Speaker 1: kinds of silly things like every morning she had only
Speaker 1: a banana for breakfast and she you know, just these
Speaker 1: apocryphal stories that were absurd, or there were people who
Speaker 1: were very, very critical, and not that there weren't things
Speaker 1: to be critical about, but who didn't really understand where
Speaker 1: Mother Troops was coming from at all, unattributed motives to
Speaker 1: her that were not at all her motives. I just
Speaker 1: think if we're going to talk ship, we should talk
Speaker 1: the right ship, right. Kelly Dunham was a sister with
Speaker 1: the m CS in the nine nineties. She's heard the
Speaker 1: criticisms I just laid out and has plenty of her own.
Speaker 1: She calls the MCS problematic, But on the day Mother
Speaker 1: Teresa was made a saint, Kelly posted a YouTube video
Speaker 1: critiquing the critiques. People complain about Mother Teresa is that
Speaker 1: she urged people to accept her suffering, to say you
Speaker 1: to offer it up, and also said that suffering is
Speaker 1: Jesus kissing. Now, Okay, So on the macro, if somebody
Speaker 1: is suffering and it's caused by somebody else's actions, especially
Speaker 1: a powerful person, and you tell them to accept it,
Speaker 1: you're obviously contributing to a system of oppression and we
Speaker 1: should fight like hell against that. But on the micro
Speaker 1: and this is always what people are talking about, helping
Speaker 1: somebody who's dying to find meaning in their suffering or
Speaker 1: their death. Who are you to say, like that's not like,
Speaker 1: that's not cool, but that's not good to offer them
Speaker 1: like you the non dying person. They could not alleviate
Speaker 1: all the poverty of Calcutta, and the focus is on
Speaker 1: the poorest of the poor, not the poor. Father Brian Colladach,
Speaker 1: the head of the EMC Fathers, says that the quality
Speaker 1: of medical care and EMCY houses has improved over time,
Speaker 1: but also that's not the point you have to understand.
Speaker 1: For example, the Home for the Dying in its context,
Speaker 1: it was set up not to be a clinic to
Speaker 1: give medical care. It was set up to exactly what
Speaker 1: it's at home for the dying, the ones who are dying,
Speaker 1: so that last moments to to have some relief, some care,
Speaker 1: some human love. At Mother Teresa's funeral, a cardinal put
Speaker 1: it this way, He said, Mother Teresa was aware of
Speaker 1: this criticism. She would shrug as if saying, while you
Speaker 1: go on discussing causes and explanations, I will kneel beside
Speaker 1: the forest of the poor and attend to their needs.
Speaker 1: After Mother Teresa died, her supporters jump started the complicated
Speaker 1: process of advocating for her sainthood, the process that typically
Speaker 1: starts five years after somebody dies. The Archbishop of Calcutta
Speaker 1: went to the Department of Congregation for Saints and asked
Speaker 1: if you could start already, And he said, hey, wait
Speaker 1: a minute, she only died a month ago. Hold your horses.
Speaker 1: But Father Brian Colladatrix says soon, Pope John Paul the
Speaker 1: second wait to the waiting period. Father Brian was the
Speaker 1: official postulator, basically the advocate for her canonization, and her
Speaker 1: fiercest critics a Roop chatter Ge and Christopher Higgens. They
Speaker 1: both testified they gave the official critical perspective for the
Speaker 1: canonization process, a type of role previously known in the
Speaker 1: Catholic Church as the advocati diaboli or devil's advocate. That's
Speaker 1: actually where the term comes from. As part of the
Speaker 1: canonization process, the Church needed to attribute two miracles to
Speaker 1: Mother Teresa that happened after her death. This is proof
Speaker 1: that she's interceding from heaven, reports poured in the church
Speaker 1: research The claims had eventually approved two miracles. They declared
Speaker 1: she cured a Bengali woman's stomach tumor and saved a
Speaker 1: Brazilian man in a coma. Almost twenty years after Mother
Speaker 1: Teresa's death, a crowd packed St. Peter Square in Vatican
Speaker 1: City for her canonization. A massive portrait of Mother Teresa
Speaker 1: overlooked the proceedings from in front of St. Peter's Basilica,
Speaker 1: and a million tiny copies of the painting were passed
Speaker 1: out at the event. During the ceremony, two m C
Speaker 1: sisters carried in a relic a vial of Mother Teresa's blood,
Speaker 1: and Tolpe Francis, the head of the Catholic Church, said
Speaker 1: the words to proclaim her new status, we declare and
Speaker 1: define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta to be a saint. On
Speaker 1: her tomb in the Mother House, they engraved the words
Speaker 1: love one another, as I have loved you. Next time
Speaker 1: on The Turning, all of a sudden, Niobe's next to me,
Speaker 1: and she's whispering in my ear, Sister, do not I
Speaker 1: love you? The Turning is written by Allen Lance Lesser
Speaker 1: and Me. Our producers are Allen Lance Lesser and Emily Foreman.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Rob Rosenthal Andrea Swahe is our digital
Speaker 1: p Sir. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Special links
Speaker 1: to Dennis Wills of d G Will's Books, Terrik Ali,
Speaker 1: Amy Gains, Sarah oh Lander, Catherine Joyce, Bethan Macaluso, Travis Dunlap,
Speaker 1: and consulting producer Mary Johnson. Her memoir and Unquenchable Thirst
Speaker 1: provided inspiration for this series. Our executive producers are Jessica
Speaker 1: Alpert and John Parotti from Rococo Punch and Katrina Norville
Speaker 1: from My Heart Radio. Our theme music is by Matt Reid.
Speaker 1: For photos and more details on the series, follow us
Speaker 1: on Instagram at Rococo Punch. You can reach out via
Speaker 1: email to The Turning at Rocco Punch dot com I
Speaker 1: America Lance Thanks for listening.