Why do critics hate Mother Teresa?

Friends —

When I was growing up, “Mother Teresa” basically meant goodness itself. She was the tiny woman in simple clothes, holding strangers pulled from the gutters of Calcutta. She had a Nobel Peace Prize. She was canonized as a saint. When she died, India gave her a state funeral on the same carriage that carried Gandhi.

These days, you’ll find her on social media with devil horns.

I’ll be honest — I was skeptical going in. Tearing down beloved figures is an easy way to get clicks, and a lot of the people dunking on her online seemed to be getting their takes entirely from Christopher Hitchens. He’s a journalist who hated organized religion and never hid it.

But some of the criticisms are real, and I wanted to find out which ones.

What I found was genuinely complicated. The medical care in her homes was poor by any clinical standard — inadequate pain relief, reused needles, and untrained volunteers making medical decisions. Some of that was a failure. Some of it, though, was an Indian legal system that made morphine almost impossible to obtain for anyone, not just nuns. Critics rarely mention that part.

The money questions are harder to answer, because the Missionaries of Charity never published a consolidated audit in 75 years. Then again … as far as we know, they were never asked to. What we do know is that donations were enormous, and the conditions in her homes stayed largely unchanged. I’m not sure if that reflects her choices or the Vatican’s hand in where the money went.

What I kept coming back to, though, is this: even with those and other criticisms, she was still pulling dying people off the streets of Calcutta and making sure they didn’t die alone. Nobody else was doing that then. Nobody else is doing it now.

I tried hard to be fair, and I think you’ll find this video worth your time.

– Ken

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