In a simple but beautiful old Hindu temple in downtown Kolkata, there is a home for the destitute and the dying. Remarkably, this place for the unseen and the unloved would make the woman who founded it one of the most famous and revered figures of the 20th Century.
Mother Teresa opened Nirmal Hriday (Home of the Pure Heart) more than 60 years ago to allow the destitute to die with dignity, away from the gutters where they had lived.
Those who had lived like animals, she said, could die like angels, loved and wanted.
Three people died at Nirmal Hriday in the dark hours before SBS arrived, but Saregoma, a malnourished man from rural West Bengal, continued to cling to life. He was found a few months ago destitute and dying on a railway station. He is one of many hundreds of thousands of people who have been touched by Teresa.
“He came to Kolkata to earn some money as a porter; once he fell ill he had nowhere to go and no one to care for him,” Sister Nicole told SBS as she fed him a banana.
Once Saregoma’s health had stabilised, the nuns organised an operation for him at a local hospital. His right arm was burnt many years ago; they’re hoping he will be able to regain some use of it now that he’s had the operation.
Sister Nicole, from the Indian state of Kerala, joined the Missionaries of Charity more than 30 years ago. She worked closely with Mother Teresa and says the late nun was a light for people who were in darkness.
“This official recognition (of sainthood) gives us much joy. I feel happy also for the sake of the poor.”
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was still a teenager in 1929 when she first stepped out into the chaos of Calcutta, as it was known then. The Albanian nun spent 20 years with the Loreto order working as a teacher before she decided to leave and dedicate her life to the poorest of the poor.
The Missionaries of Charity was born.
What began as one woman’s calling now has thousands of nuns operating hostels for people with HIV, leprosy and tuberculosis in more than 100 countries. It runs soup kitchens, schools and orphanages for the poor. The uniform of its nuns, a simple sari with a blue border, has a brand recognition that most football teams and corporates can only envy. And it all grew from a very simple message.
Pope Francis is driven through the crowd in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican Source: L'Osservatore Romano
“People who have nothing, who are wanted by no one, who have become a burden to society, who have forgotten what is love, what is human touch - for us, they are the children of God,” Mother Teresa told a television crew in 1979, the year she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Her biographer, Navin Chawla, a self-described “near-atheist Hindu” and a former election commissioner of India, knew Mother Teresa for 23 years.
“Once when I asked Jyoti Basu, that towering Chief Minister of West Bengal for 19 years, what he and Mother Teresa could possibly have in common because he was a communist and an atheist and for her God was everything, he smiled and said, ‘We share a love for the poor’.”
“When his cadres would go to him and say, ‘Why are you supporting a Christian missionary he would say ‘you see how she works with the lepers? The day you can clean the wounds of a leprosy patient, on that day I will ask her to leave.’ And that day never came.”
But Mother Teresa also has her critics. Last year, Mohan Bhagwat, leader of the right-wing Hindu organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), said her primary motivation was to convert people to Christianity.
Mother Teresa waves to a crowd of onlookers after receiving a visit from Princess Diana Wednesday, June 18, 1997, in New York. Source: AAP
RSS spokesman Jishnu Bose would not be drawn into the conversion debate when he spoke to SBS. He did, however, accuse the Missionaries of Charity of claiming all the credit for the good work that is done in Kolkata. And, he said, Mother Teresa’s missionaries have run an exploitative marketing campaign.
“The Missionaries of Charity, whenever they’re marketing our poverty, this is a direct insult to the people of Kolkata,” he said.
Another persistent criticism is that Mother Teresa provided inadequate medical care in her hospices.
In 1991, Robin Fox, the editor of the British medical journal The Lancet visited Nirmal Hriday and found that the sisters’ approach to managing pain was “disturbingly lacking”. He also found that patients with curable diseases were sometimes dying.
Mother Teresa was also criticised for accepting money from dictators and for being the principal mouthpiece of the Vatican’s views against abortion. One of her most vociferous critics was the writer, Christopher Hitchens, who said she was not a friend of the poor.
“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.”
But Navin Chawla said Mr Hitchens only “briefly descended on Kolkata” before making his judgements.
Mr Chawla said much of the criticism that came from the west went largely unnoticed in India “where there has always been great reverence for holiness, and where people admired and respected her irrespective of her faith or their own.”
He asked Mother Teresa more than once whether she tried to convert people. “She said, ‘Yes, I do convert. I convert you to be a better Hindu, a better Christian, a better Catholic, a better Jew, a better Sikh, a better Muslim. When you’ve found God, it’s up to you to do with him what you want.’”
Mr Chawla said he was not sure how Mother Teresa would view being made a saint.
“At one level I think she’d be very pleased because she always wanted her Missionaries of Charity to give saints to the church, but on the other hand she considered herself, strange as this may sound, to be just a pencil in the hand of the Lord, somebody who didn’t matter, somebody who was completely inconsequential.”
