A BBC documentary in 1969 catapulted Mother Teresa to world fame. And in 1994, another from Channel 4 cast shadows on her, which she would never get rid of despite her canonization in 2016, 19 years after her death. The first, Something Beautiful for God, was an openly hagiographic project by Malcolm Muggeridge in which the author interviewed the nun and publicized her work with the poor in Calcutta, where she is opening a home for the dying, an orphanage and a colony for them had lepers. The second, Hell’s Angel, was a frontal attack in the form of a pamphlet, edited by three of his harshest critics, Aroup Chatterjee, a doctor who had worked with the Calcutta poor and who, since the 1980s, had questioned the nun’s methods, journalists and essayists Tariq Ali and Christopher Hitchens. Now the docu-series Mother Teresa: For the love of God?, which is showing in Spain on SkyShowtime a year after its premiere on the British channel Sky – one of the partners of the new platform – offers an extremely complex overview of the Albanian nun who eventually becoming an icon of Christian charity, a worldwide reference, and also the most effective and influential propaganda and collecting machine the Catholic Church had during the papacy of John Paul II. The production pays tribute to his achievements but also brings out his dark side. And it compounds one of the charges against her by suggesting that not only did she protect a pedophile when the church began suspecting him, as was made public in 2019, but that she was aware, or at least suspected, of the abuses’ existence .
Mother Teresa: For the love of God? begin at the end. For the death of Agnés Gonxha Bojaxhiu on September 5, 1997. And restores some testimonies from individuals collected by television at the time to reflect the shock the death brought to millions of people. “If Diana was the queen of hearts, Mother Teresa was the queen of the poor and of humanity,” says one man. The comparison is not in vain, and not just because Diana of Wales had died five days earlier: the story of Teresa of Calcutta, like that of Lady Di, was sold as “a fairy tale come true,” as Chatterjee put it. The strategy of those responsible for the documentary, directed by Ziyaad Desai and Benedict Sanderson, is to remember clearly that fairy tales are just that, stories. Yes, they offer a varied chorus of voices for and against.
Mother Teresa, 1982 in Lebanon. Arnaud de Wildenberg (Sygma/Getty Images)
Muggeridge and Hitchens, who are now deceased, only appear in archival material. But along with Chatterjee and Tariq Ali, the director of the BBC show that started the cult surrounding the Missionaries of Charity’s founder, Peter Chafer, is also summoned to explain how visiting the Calcutta centers affected him care for the poor, orphans and sick. “It was unbearable for me to live that for a single day, and we had this nun tending to what most would avoid, which was taking up every hour and minute of their lives,” she explains. The documentary acknowledges the Calcutta saint’s devotion, but contrasts Chafer’s testimony with that of a doctor who went to the Bengali capital in the 1970s to work side-by-side with the community, and who eventually withdrew and because of refusal The missionaries founded their own clinic to provide the sick with the appropriate medical care.
Mother Teresa’s friends, supporters and apologists roam the miniseries, including one who affirms that when he finally met the nun in person, his schizophrenia was cured, something those in charge of the documentary don’t question. But their statements, in line with the official and majority version that emphasizes their goodness, are opposed by those of their critics. Notably, in a decade as materialistic as the 1980s, it was “countercultural,” as US Catholic League President Bill Donohue put it, because it represented the antithesis of greed and consumerism. And Chatterjee counters that she also shares an old colonial vision: “The idea of a white savior saving people of color was very appealing to the West.” It is recalled, for example, that in 1985, after winning the Sing- Sing Prison and met several AIDS patients, opened a center in New York to care for them. But also in his furious campaign against abortion, which he called the “greatest destroyer of peace” in the acceptance speech at the Nobel Peace Prize, and against contraceptive methods.
Teresa of Calcutta caresses a sick man suffering from polio in Manila on November 27, 1982. Bettman (Getty Images)
Most of the accusations against his protagonist since the 1990s are listed in three hours: his religious fundamentalism, according to which closeness to those who suffer and sharing their suffering brings us closer to Christ on the cross; his fondness for prayer over painkillers to ease the pain of the sick; its refusal to provide medicines and medical supplies to its hundreds of centers around the world and to start anti-poverty programs in Calcutta, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars it receives annually in donations, most of them at the Vatican Bank land; the opacity of your accounts; his allegiance to and double standards with those in power, including satraps like the Duvaliers; or his letter of intercession asking the judge to be kind in sentencing the fraudster Charles Keating, responsible for what was then the largest known financial fraud , an episode to which the documentary adds the testimony of the prosecutor in the case, who says he in turn wrote a letter to the nun urging her to return the hundreds of thousands of dollars Keating had donated to his community, because it was stolen money the poor, and never received an answer.
Other particularly juicy testimonies enrich the documentation. An adult who grew up in the Kolkata hospice stresses that he will always be grateful to Mother Teresa, but clarifies that the conditions and treatment at the center were not good and that she “could be brutal” towards other nuns. And Mary Johnson, who was a close associate of the Saints and left the congregation shortly before her death, relates that the nuns could not have friends, that they were only allowed to visit the family for two weeks every 10 years, and that corporal self-punishment, with Cilices and knotted ropes called “discipline” that the sisters used to whip each other. “Many of the things Missionaries of Charity require of their members are very similar to what cults require,” he notes.
The series also includes a much more recent allegation: the protection and even possible cover-up of a pedophile, Jesuit priest Don McGuire, who was a confidante of Mother Teresa for years and traveled the world working for the community and raising funds, always accompanying her of minors whom he systematically abused. McGuire was convicted in 2009, but 15 years earlier, with suspicions already growing against him within the church, the Jesuits ordered him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, which revealed he had a sexual disorder and a paranoid and narcissistic personality, the Center for the treatment. But a letter signed by Mother Teresa in defense of the accused changed things and McGuire was able to continue practicing and abusing minors for almost a decade.
This is the only criticism the Missionaries of Charity respond to in the miniseries. The first two chapters conclude with a declaration that they will not be distracted from their work to refute the “posthumous insults” slandering their founder. The latter, on the other hand, includes a message in which they claim, as they did when the press aired the McGuire affair in 2019, that Mother Teresa was not the author of the letter in her defense, which they gave her signs that she had consented to because a senior Jesuit official guaranteed her innocence and she had no proof of the abuse. However, according to the lawyer for 12 of the victims, one of them assures that Teresa of Calcutta herself came once to ask him if McGuire had done bad things to her. According to this version, the boy replied that he did not want to talk about it, and that same night the priest again scolded him.
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