Demystifying Mother Teresa: Saint or human?

It’s been 10 years since Mother Teresa has "gone to God" as the sisters at the Missionary of Charity put it.

Her name remains synonymous with the poor - giving destitutes dignity in death, looking after abandoned children and lepers.

But while her admirers who run into thousands call her a saint, critics disagree.

They accuse her of being more interested in the dead than the living, of being anti-abortion and family planning.

On the special show 30 Minutes this week, we will try and demystify the woman and hear both sides of the story so that you can decide whether Mother Teresa is a saint or an extraordinary human being with some flaws.

It was behind the gates of St Mary’s High School in Calcutta that Mother Teresa spent the first 17 years of her life in India - in relative comfort and complete anonymity first as a teacher and later as principal of this Catholic school.

However, on September 10, 1946, her life changed forever. On a train to Darjeeling for a retreat Mother Teresa heard what she called a call to give up everything and serve the poorest of the poor. She believed the voice was Jesus Christ himself.

“It was a call and I could not ignore it,” she said.

“She would look back at the convent and wanted to return. She would cry from loneliness and humiliation but she never went back,” says Mother Teresa's biographer, Navin Chawla.

In the narrow by-lanes of Kalighat in South Calcutta near a Kali temple, the Goddess of Death for the Hindus, among little shops selling flowers, sindoor and other items of worship where people come to pray for their dead and for new journeys, stands Nirmal Hriday: Mother Teresa's first project, a home for the dying destitute.

“I found a woman on the streets half-eaten by rats and ants. No hospital was willing to admit her so I asked them for a place to keep these people,” Mother Teresa had said.

The first thing I encounter as I enter Nirmal Hriday is a dead body being carried out for its final rites. From then on I decide it could only get better. Slow creaking fans hand from a tall ceiling above a hall cramped with low stretcher beds.

There are two dormitories - one for the men and one for the women, with a total of 105 beds.

Since it began in 1952, nearly 85,000 people have found shelter and comfort here. And 35,000 of them left this place dead.

Micheal Muggredge was the first person to shoot Nirmal Hirday in 1969 for a BBC documentary.

He told Mother the place was too dark to be captured on film. She told him to go ahead and leave it to God.

When he processed the film, he found that it was, in fact, full of light. While he called it a miracle, his cameraman said it was because of a new Kodak film he was using.

Among the gaunt sick faces, some of them crying out in pain as the sisters clean their wounds, a young, comparatively healthy hand beckons me to sit on his bed.

This is Johnny - the longest resident of Nirmal Hriday. He has been here nearly a year while the average stay is just two weeks.

Johnny, a name given to him by the sisters, is deaf and dumb. He was admitted here after an accident where his right leg was cut into many pieces.

He is all right now but has nowhere to go and the sisters can't bear to throw him back out on the street. So he stays and guards the place at night.

Critics say Mother Teresa made no distinction between those who could be cured and those who were dying which is probably why the only medical help at hand are untrained though well meaning sisters and volunteers.

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A doctor does come around three times a week but it is mostly the helpers at Nirmal Hirday who are left to administer to the sick. But then they say they have God.

“It is God who heals them. And Mother Teresa said, ‘When I go to God, I will help you more’,” says the incharge at Nirmal Hirday, Sister Gladas.

The problem, some say, was how Mother Teresa viewed the inmates. For her, everyone at Nirmal Hriday was the sick, dying or abandoned Christ. Every sore that is cleaned and every hand that is held is in fact, his.

Her critics say she saw suffering as necessary to the salvation of the soul. The goal was not to put an end to the suffering but to help the suffer find joy in it.

“If people are sick on the streets, what they need is a hospital, they don’t need a group of nuns praying for them or keeping them on a bad diet,” says journalist and co-producer, Hell's Angel, Tariq Ali.

But whatever Mother Teresa's reasons, for people like Shibani Roy they are not really important. A human skeleton, she has been at Nirmal Hirday for the past two years.

Totally paralysed, her daughter was unable to take care of here and left her here never to return. Shibani will only leave here on a stretcher for the cremation ground.

Sonny Sweatt from Mississippi is another person who does not question Mother's motives. He has come along with five friends to work here for four weeks when he could be enjoying the freedom of having finished high school.

“People who criticise her have obviously never come here and seen the good that she has done. I was not here when she was here but she has obviously done much more to stop suffering than to have kept it going,” says Sweatt.

Of the 50 or so volunteers at Nirmal Hriday, only three are Indian.

One of them Chandramani Agarwalla began working with Mother Teresa in 1982. She keeps the records: those who die, those who have been shifted to a hospital and so on.

And she strongly defends mother against those who say she wanted to convert.

“She never wanted to convert. Her prayer was service,” says Chandramani.

When she is not at Nirmal Hriday, she, along with several of the rich and famous of Kolkata, make pill packets for mobile hospitals run by Missionaries of Charity.

Another family of Calcutta that has been associated with Mother Teresa from the very beginning - Sunita Kumar and her husband Naresh.

Every Thursday, this group gathers in her house, surrounded by Hussain originals and does their bit for society.

“Mother taught us not to feel guilty. ‘Enjoy all your comforts and then come to me’, she said,” says spokesperson of Missionaries of Charity, Sunita Kumar.

It is comfort of a different sort back in Kalighat. Amidst all the death and suffering there is still song and dance. Even though most of these people have been abandoned and left to die these women sing for the good health of their brothers.

Perhaps they are living by Mother Teresa's belief that if you die smiling the gates of heaven open for you.

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Shishu Bhawan, a haven for abandoned babies

There is a joke in Calcutta Mother Teresa used to say: ‘Even though I talk about family planning every day, I have more and more children.’

Three hundred to be precise: That is the capacity of Shishu Bhawan, the home for abandoned children run by the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata.

The wing housing physically and mentally-challenged children is run by a cheerful sister Beatina.

Despite her enthusiasm, the place seems depressing. What kind of life has Sundari had? Thirty-nine-years old, she can't stand, sit or speak. She came to Shishu Bhawan at the age of nine and will probably die here.

“Why did God make her this way? But she keeps smiling and she is a great teacher for all of us,” says the incharge at Shishu Bhawan Sister Beatina.

Six-month-old Shyama is the newest child of the ward. Abandoned outside a hospital because of her mental and physical handicap, she was brought here by a ward boy.

She's lucky to find a home here - hundreds of others like her are rejected for lack of space.

But even if handicaps like hers were detected in the womb, Mother Teresa would never have recommended abortion as an option. She called it the greatest destroyer of peace.

“Abortion is a crime. Do destroy the life of a child is to destroy the presence of God in the world,” Mother Teresa once said.

For someone so practical it is surprising that she never questioned the Catholic dogma.

“She was a very staunch Catholic. For her, abortion was death, murder in the womb. That was her belief. She believed in natural planning,” says Mother Teresa's biographer Navin Chawla.

“She was Catholic and a supporter of Opus Dei which was the most reactionary Catholic faction so naturally she did not support aboration, contraception, family planning in that sense. But that doesn’t surprise me because a lot of reactionary religious people are like that,” says Tariq Ali.

There is laughter, bright toys and balloons in the wing housing normal children.

Most of the 211 children, between the ages of a month and eight years have been abandoned by unwed mothers.

All of them have already been adopted and are only waiting for the paper work to be complete.

But in the meantime they do what children do - go to school, fight, cry and always look for attention. When they leave, there are 300 others waiting to take their place.

On both sides of the railway tracks stands Mother Teresa's leprosy home, named after Mahatma Gandhi who like her championed the cause of people suffering from this dreaded disease.

January 30, the day he was assassinated, is observed as Anti-Leprosy Day in India.

Perhaps the least controversial of all her projects, Mother Teresa established The Gandhi Prem Nivas in 1959 at Titagarh.

Five hundred patients are treated at the OPD every month, 450 others work in the rehab facility.

Abdul Rashid came here when he was just nine. He makes special shoes for leprosy patients.

Most others like Shiela Guha are involved in weaving. She used to work on the loom till three years ago when she lost her leg. Now she spins the charkha (wheel) instead.

Madhusudan Nandi designs all the 5000 white and blue saris woven for Missionaries of Charity around the world.

He was chased out of his village in Jamshedpur 30 years ago when he contracted leprosy and came to Prem Nivas.

“Earlier I would not get the raw material from the shop but now-a-days I do. But even now there is untouchability. A handicapped person is sometimes not served at hotels,” says Madhusudan Nandi.

Urmila has infectious leprosy, unusual for a woman. They are only half as likely to get leprosy as men.

Her brother's son threw her out of the house when she contracted the disease.

Left untreated for so long, she lost a leg. The scars on her body will never heal but perhaps more important are the mental scars of rejection.

Given the kind of prejudices and stigma attached to leprosy and the plight of leprocy patients, mother decided to take a holistic approach,” says director of Gandhi Prem Nivas Brother Prem Anand.

Mother Teresa's critics have often questioned the source of her funding. Among them - the right-wing dictator of Haiti, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Charles Keating, who stole $252 million in the 80s Saving and Loan scandal, and British publisher Robert Maxwell, who embezzled £450 million from his employees' pension funds.

“They accumulated a lot of wealth. No one really knows where it went Tariq Ali, probably to the church if anywhere,” says Tariq Ali.

Her defenders claim she received the donations before the thefts were uncovered and that she had to lobby for her cause, dealing with dictators in poor countries and with thieves in rich ones.

“She said she will not judge - let God do that. ‘I must give them peace if they have come’, she said,” says Navin Chawla.

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Mother Teresa's years of darkness

‘Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see. Listen and do not hear, the tongue moves in prayer but does not speak,’ said Mother Teresa to Rev Michael Van Der Peet in September 1979.

A letter written by Mother Teresa in September 1979 shows a very different side to the person the world thought it knew.

After asking her to leave Loreto Convent and work among the poor, Christ never spoke with her again leaving Mother Teresa in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain.

In over 40 letters written over 50 years, Teresa writes about the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing and compares the experience to hell.

“It was a test of her faith. Inspite of not feeling his presence she continued to love him and proved her love. God purified her so he could deify her and form her into his likeness,” says Sister Nirmala.

Remarkably she continued the work believing she was just a tool - a pencil, as she put it, in the hands of God.

“God will find someone more helpless, even less efficient than me and will make her do even greater things,” Mother Teresa had said.

After beatifying her in 2001 the Vatican is now waiting for another miracle to declare Mother Teresa a saint. Does she deserve the honour?

“As millions of people believe, she was a living saint. I don’t believe in miracles but her life was a miracle,” says Navin Chawla.

“I don’t think she did all that much to serve the needs of the poor,” says Tariq Ali.

Though she has been dead 10 years the Missionaries of Charity continue Mother Teresa's legacy. They say it is as relevant today as it was when she began.

“Our organization is based on the gospel that is the eternal truth for all ages. So there is no question of change,” says Superior General, Missionaries Of Charity, Sister Nirmala.

Even though her motives might have been questioned, even though her views on abortion and family planning were not the most practical, there is no denying the good work that Mother Teresa did. So was she a saint or human? You decide.

“We just try to put into action the words of Christ. ‘I was hungry and you fed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and in prison, you visited me, I was homeless and you took me in,” Mother Teresa once said.