Religion_Christ_Mother

Mother Teresa

The Economist, September 13, 1997

OBITUARY

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MOTHER TERESA

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HAD Mother Teresa not become an international celebrity, she might not have lived so long. Several times in her last years, against her will, she was admitted to exclusive and expensive hospitals for heart surgery. She herself saw no point in taking care to prolong her earthly existence; her only concession to frailty, ever, was to step aside last March to allow the leadership of her order of nuns to be assumed by someone else. Nor did she see any point in interventionist medicine: she would have been happy to die, as most of her patients did, on a thin pallet in a communal dormitory, having spent her last days on a diet of rice, water, weak medicine, and love.

Her fame obliged her to continue. Since the order of nuns she had founded made it a principle never to ask for money, they came to rely on her personality to open the purses of the rich and the not-so-rich. She was tremendously good at it. Charles Keating gave her half a million dollars and the use of a jet. Robert Maxwell became her co-sponsor. A government minister in Ethiopia was persuaded, on television, to give her a building for an orphanage. Once, having bought $800-worth of goods for the poor in a supermarket, she refused to move from the checkout until someone else in the queue paid for them. A fund-raiser of Mother Teresa's virtuosity could not merely decline into the peaceful embrace of God she recommended for her patients; she had a duty to survive.

As the list of her helpers suggests, Mother Teresa was not fastidious about the sources of her money. She got into trouble, too, for accepting Haiti's Legion d'Honneur from Baby Doc Duvalier, and for laying a wreath on the tomb of Enver Hoxha, the former Communist leader of Albania, where she was born. People supposed she was ignorant, or, worse, complicit in the tyranny or corruption of these men. The truth was simpler and more extraordinary: she saw Christ in them, and believed they could be redeemed. Her attitude to Maxwell was exactly the same as her attitude to the first woman she rescued from a Calcutta street, already half-eaten by rats and ants: this was ``Christ in his distressing disguise'', demanding to be healed by love.

From the few to the many

Her fascination with India began as a child, when missionaries from the subcontinent gave a talk at her school in Skopje. She went to India at the age of 18 after joining the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish order, and became principal of St Mary's High School in Calcutta; but life there seemed too comfortable. In 1948 she left the order and founded her own, dedicated on Franciscan principles to serving the destitute and dying in the slums. She began with a few sisters and a handful of rupees; by her death, she headed a network of 4,000 nuns and 120,000 lay workers in hospitals, orphanages, leper houses and AIDS centres in 450 sites across the world.

The hectic growth of her order was accompanied by a faint anxiety in India (where she was suspected, wrongly, of converting dying Hindus to Christianity), and by scepticism in the West. Mother Teresa admitted, in a famous series of BBC interviews, that she was not really doing all that much to ease the lot of the poor in India. The editor of the Lancet, visiting her Home for the Dying in 1994, reported that stocks of medicine were insufficient, and that not enough was done to cure the sick or ease the pain of the dying. But Mother Teresa believed it was not ``things'' her patients needed; they needed to feel wanted, and to die at peace with God. The secular view of death, as something to be resisted, met, in Mother Teresa, the religious view that death should be joyfully surrendered to. Neither side could hope to understand the other.

Her views on population were equally controversial. In common with most members of the Roman Catholic church, she opposed abortion; in common with a tiny minority, she opposed contraception. To those who argued that India's problem was too many people, she would reply that, on the contrary, there could never be enough people; they were God's life and, if he had created them, he would provide for them, as he did for the birds and the trees. The fact that this belief was called into question all around her did not shake her. She never queried the teaching of her church in any particular. But she performed one small, bold act of independence: when Pope John Paul II left her the white limousine that he had used on his visit to India, she almost immediately raffled it to raise funds.

People said she was a saint. She had most of the attributes of sainthood: a dauntingly selfless life, devotion to a higher cause, rude single-mindedness, a thick skin, and a capacity to wring the withers of the rich and powerful. Teresa of Avila would have embraced her as a sister. She was the secular West's adopted holy person; Prince Charles and Princess Diana, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan all improved their moral standing by appearing in public beside her. Yet her unadulterated message, like the message of most saints and of Christ himself, was undoubtedly too difficult for most of her adoring public to take.



	Mother Teresa The Economist, September 13, 1997 OBITUARY ======== MOTHER TERESA ------------- HAD Mother Teresa not become an international celebrity, she might not have lived so long. Several times in her last years, against her will, she was admitted to exclusive and expensive hospitals for heart surgery. She herself saw no point in taking care to prolong her earthly existence; her only concession to frailty, ever, was to step aside last March to allow the leadership of her order of nuns to be assumed by someone else. Nor did she see any point in interventionist medicine: she would have been happy to die, as most of her patients did, on a thin pallet in a communal dormitory, having spent her last days on a diet of rice, water, weak medicine, and love. Her fame obliged her to continue. Since the order of nuns she had founded made it a principle never to ask for money, they came to rely on her personality to open the purses of the rich and the not-so-rich. She was tremendously good at it. Charles Keating gave her half a million dollars and the use of a jet. Robert Maxwell became her co-sponsor. A government minister in Ethiopia was persuaded, on television, to give her a building for an orphanage. Once, having bought $800-worth of goods for the poor in a supermarket, she refused to move from the checkout until someone else in the queue paid for them. A fund-raiser of Mother Teresa's virtuosity could not merely decline into the peaceful embrace of God she recommended for her patients; she had a duty to survive. As the list of her helpers suggests, Mother Teresa was not fastidious about the sources of her money. She got into trouble, too, for accepting Haiti's Legion d'Honneur from Baby Doc Duvalier, and for laying a wreath on the tomb of Enver Hoxha, the former Communist leader of Albania, where she was born. People supposed she was ignorant, or, worse, complicit in the tyranny or corruption of these men. The truth was simpler and more extraordinary: she saw Christ in them, and believed they could be redeemed. Her attitude to Maxwell was exactly the same as her attitude to the first woman she rescued from a Calcutta street, already half-eaten by rats and ants: this was ``Christ in his distressing disguise'', demanding to be healed by love. From the few to the many Her fascination with India began as a child, when missionaries from the subcontinent gave a talk at her school in Skopje. She went to India at the age of 18 after joining the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish order, and became principal of St Mary's High School in Calcutta; but life there seemed too comfortable. In 1948 she left the order and founded her own, dedicated on Franciscan principles to serving the destitute and dying in the slums. She began with a few sisters and a handful of rupees; by her death, she headed a network of 4,000 nuns and 120,000 lay workers in hospitals, orphanages, leper houses and AIDS centres in 450 sites across the world. The hectic growth of her order was accompanied by a faint anxiety in India (where she was suspected, wrongly, of converting dying Hindus to Christianity), and by scepticism in the West. Mother Teresa admitted, in a famous series of BBC interviews, that she was not really doing all that much to ease the lot of the poor in India. The editor of the Lancet, visiting her Home for the Dying in 1994, reported that stocks of medicine were insufficient, and that not enough was done to cure the sick or ease the pain of the dying. But Mother Teresa believed it was not ``things'' her patients needed; they needed to feel wanted, and to die at peace with God. The secular view of death, as something to be resisted, met, in Mother Teresa, the religious view that death should be joyfully surrendered to. Neither side could hope to understand the other. Her views on population were equally controversial. In common with most members of the Roman Catholic church, she opposed abortion; in common with a tiny minority, she opposed contraception. To those who argued that India's problem was too many people, she would reply that, on the contrary, there could never be enough people; they were God's life and, if he had created them, he would provide for them, as he did for the birds and the trees. The fact that this belief was called into question all around her did not shake her. She never queried the teaching of her church in any particular. But she performed one small, bold act of independence: when Pope John Paul II left her the white limousine that he had used on his visit to India, she almost immediately raffled it to raise funds. People said she was a saint. She had most of the attributes of sainthood: a dauntingly selfless life, devotion to a higher cause, rude single-mindedness, a thick skin, and a capacity to wring the withers of the rich and powerful. Teresa of Avila would have embraced her as a sister. She was the secular West's adopted holy person; Prince Charles and Princess Diana, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan all improved their moral standing by appearing in public beside her. Yet her unadulterated message, like the message of most saints and of Christ himself, was undoubtedly too difficult for most of her adoring public to take.