Does Mother Teresa Matter?

She took money from ruthless dictators, corrupt politicians, and corporate bandits. She was sometimes excoriated as a chaplain to the rich. She had nothing of substance to show for more than a half-century of work with the poor. So is Teresa of Calcutta really a saint?

By David Scott

She did not lead a stirring life. She has no dramatic conversion story. She wasn’t knocked off a horse and blinded by a brilliant light from heaven, like Saint Paul. There is none of the high sexual drama of Augustine. There is none of the shuttle diplomacy of Bridget of Sweden or Catherine of Siena. She didn’t have her head chopped off, like Thomas More. Her story is ostensibly simple: She became a nun at age eighteen and was riding on a train one day and heard a voice telling her to leave her religious order to serve the poor. So that’s what she did until she died. Her work wasn’t all that exceptional, especially for a nun. Plenty of people do what she did — take care of the sick and the dying, find homes for abandoned children, defend the poor, the unwanted, the unborn. “There was nothing otherworldly or divine about her,” said the musician Bob Geldhof, who met her in Ethiopia. And his opinion is echoed again and again of Teresa. For all the photographs and books and fame and prizes, for all that Pope John Paul II not only beatified her immediately but reportedly had to be persuaded against rushing her right to canonization, we don’t actually know much about the person. Who actually was Mother Teresa?

Here is what we know: She was born Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu on August 26, 1910, in Skopje — in present-day Macedonia. She was the youngest of three children born to Nikola and Drana Bojaxhiu. She was an Albanian Catholic, born in the year of the great Albanian uprising, and during her first years, her home city was invaded by Serbians who spent days on an ethnic tirade — raping, torturing, and murdering her neighbors and kin, impaling infants, hanging men from trees.

Her father was a successful merchant and investor, served on the town council, and was often out of the country on business. But Nikola’s passion was Albanian independence; he hosted political strategy sessions in his home and apparently helped bankroll the movement to establish an Albanian state in the Kosovo region. That’s what apparently got him killed. At a political fundraising dinner in 1919 he was poisoned, presumably by vengeful Yugoslavian authorities.

After Nikola’s death, his business partners grabbed his share of everything and ran, leaving the Bojaxhius in financial straits. Drana supported the family by sewing and rug-making. She went to Mass daily at the Church of the Sacred Heart down the street, brought food to the poor, opened the family dinner table to the homeless, and gave refuge to women in need. “We had guests at table every day,” remembered Teresa. “At first I used to ask: ‘Who are they?’ and Mother would answer: ‘Some are our relatives, but all of them are our people.’ When I was older, I realized that the strangers were poor people who had nothing.”

Gonxha seems to have been a serious, bookish, and sickly girl, prone to whooping cough and other infections. She loved music, played a mean piano and mandolin, wrote poetry, acted in plays. She sang in the church choir and led a girls’ society devoted to the Virgin Mary. Attracted by what she had read of their work in India, she decided to join the Sisters of Our Lady of Loretto. When she told her mother, her mother locked herself in her room and didn’t come out for a day. When she finally emerged, she said to her daughter, “Put your hand in His … and walk all the way with Him.” Gonxha set sail for India in late 1928 and never saw her mother again.

Mother Teresa gave us next to nothing of her own story, and we should wonder why. She lived in our times of utter revelation, and yet her personal life is a closed book. You might say her first miracle was living in this age but flying beneath the radar, preserving her zone of personal privacy. Would-be muckrakers of her order’s operations stumbled in their own muck. There were no whistle-blowers, no believable tales told out of school by disgruntled former co-workers. Even the forces of nature behaved as if carrying out some unspoken mandate; when an earthquake leveled her childhood home and neighborhood in 1963, it was like a divine conversation-stopper, God forever interring her past in rubble and ruin.

We are left without a clue. Except for one thing: her name. In an instance of self-disclosure so rare and isolated that should to notice, she made her official biographers report that she took the name of St. Thérèse of Lisieux and not St. Teresa of Ávila. “Not the big St. Teresa but the little one,” she said, without further explanation. So: she takes the name of a bourgeois girl who entered a convent at fifteen, spent her days praying and doing the laundry, and accomplishing so little of moment that a fellow nun worried aloud that Thérèse would be hard to eulogize at her funeral, as “she has certainly never done anything worth speaking of.”

However, Thérèse was asked by her Mother Superior to write her life story, which she dutifully did, expressing in simple language her philosophy of life, which came to be called “the little way” — living with a childlike sense of wonder at God’s gifts, with a child’s sense of dependence and trust. It meant, Thérèse said, finding the true divine significance “in the least action done out of love.”

Published a year after her early death, the book became a surprise best seller. It was translated into countless languages and catapulted Thérèse to the ranks of the most beloved and important saints ever. Canonizing her between the world wars, at a time of social unrest and uncertainty, Pope Pius XI declared that if everyone followed her little way, “the reformation of human society would be easily realized.” A few years after that, Pope Pius XII called her “the greatest saint of modern times.”

This was the saint Gonxha chose as her patron. Not the big Teresa, the bold reformer and mystic who mapped the soul’s interior mansions, landing herself in hot water with the Spanish Inquisition. Gonxha chose the little way. Is there a lesson for us in that choice? Is there a lesson in the holiness of the ordinary, of the divine in the routine, in the idea that God comes to us not like a bolt out of the blue but in the din of the day, in families and workplaces, in struggles and joys, in the people He puts in our path, in the trials and sufferings He sends our way?

Subshasini Das came to Mother Teresa in 1949 during the first days of her ministry on the streets of Calcutta. A privileged Bengali girl, she presented herself decked out in jewels and a fine dress and saying she wanted to give her life to the poor.

“You must first forget yourself, so that you can dedicate yourself to God and your neighbor,” said Teresa, perhaps thinking of John the Baptist: I must decrease so that Jesus might increase.

Das returned after weeks of soul-searching, clad in a plain white robe. She went on to become the first nun in Mother Teresa’s new religious order, the Missionaries of Charity.

You must first forget yourself, said Teresa to a narcissistic generation, to people self-occupied yet still strangers to themselves. She watched patiently as wave after wave of young women and men shucked off their parents’ Christianity and turned their hearts east, following some star they thought was rising, some new wisdom they thought would save them from the phoniness and soullessness of their consumer-material world.

“People come to India,” she would say, “because they believe that in India we have a lot of spirituality and this they want to find … many of them are completely lost ...”

But for Mother Teresa, detachment and self-denial were not the end goals of our striving; we struggle against selfishness in order to purify our vision, to see, to love.

“Once we take our eyes away from ourselves,” she said, “from our interests, from our own rights, privileges, ambitions — then we will become clear to see Jesus around us,” she promised. In every face, in every heart, in every moment.

One of the lost seekers who crossed her path was Morris Siegel. In 1969, he launched an herbal tea company, Celestial Seasonings, that caught the first wave of the all-natural, organic health craze and rode it all the way to the bank. By 1985, he had sold his company for $40 million and was desperately seeking meaning. He showed up as a volunteer at Mother Teresa’s home for the destitute dying. She poked him in the chest and sent him home with these words: “Grow where you are planted.”

It’s so easy to love people we don’t know; so easy that it is no love at all. We like love in the abstract — the poor, the sick, the handicapped — but we’re afraid of close-ups, the flesh and blood poor people and sick people, the family members and friends whom God plants in our midst. “It is easier to give a cup of rice to relieve hunger than to relieve the loneliness and pain of someone unloved in our own home. Bring love into your home … the world today is upside down, and is suffering so much, because there is so very little love in the homes … we have not time for our children, we have not time for each other …”

She came slowly to the work that would define her. From 1929, when she first landed in Calcutta, until 1947, she lived and worked mostly within the insular confines of St. Mary’s School, a prim-lawned, high-walled campus run by the Loretto Sisters. She spent her days teaching history and geography to girls from colonial India’s professional and political classes. Had she wanted to, she could have looked beyond the walls and down upon one of Calcutta’s worst bustees, or slums: Motijhil, “Pearl Lake,” a foul pond in the center of the teeming maze of mud alley-ways and shacks home to thousands of the poor.

A group of girls from her school, led by its Jesuit chaplain, used to visit Motijhil every Sunday, bringing food and doing some charitable works. Mother Teresa never went with them. In fact, during her years as a teacher and later, as principal of the school, she never said or did anything about the poor that anyone can remember.

Her hour had not yet come, say her biographers, lamely.

But then her hour did come: August 16, 1946, when the world crashed up against the walls of St. Mary’s, and Mother Teresa could ignore it no longer. Mob violence between Muslims and Hindus put the compound under virtual siege, and she was driven out in a desperate search for food for the 300 girls in her care. What she saw made her blood run cold: fires burning inside shattered storefronts; human remains splattered and dripping down from brick walls; bodies and parts of bodies strewn everywhere, on sidewalks, gutters, roads; vultures picking bones. Five thousand people were killed that day, fifteen thousand that number wounded.

Less than one month later, on September 10, 1946, Mother Teresa was riding the train from Calcutta to Darjeeling, on her way to make her annual retreat, when she heard a voice, speaking in her heart, as she later described it. It was Jesus telling her to quit the convent to live and work with the poor. All the rest of her life she ducked every inquiry about that voice. She would say only that she was sure it was Jesus and that His message was unmistakable.

“It was an order,” she said.

After she died a small cache of her letters was found — letters written to her spiritual directors and superiors during her early years. In one, to Ferdinand Perier, a Jesuit who was Archbishop of Calcutta, she describes the Voice she heard on the train and in the days and weeks that followed.

“I want … My fire of love amongst the very poor — the sick, the dying, the little street children,” Jesus told her. “The poor I want you to bring to Me … come, come, carry Me into the holes of the poor … their dark, unhappy homes … you are, I know, the most incapable person, weak and sinful, but just because you are that, I want to use you for My glory! Wilt thou refuse!?”

Go to the slums she did. On August 17, 1948, she walked out beyond the walls of St. Mary’s wearing a plain white sari. She had five rupees in her pocket. She took a short course in basic medicine, found a place to live in a convent of the Little Sisters of the Poor, and began her work. She started by teaching the alphabet to poor children in classes she conducted under a plum tree in the middle of the slum. Soon she was going from hovel to hovel, visiting the children’s families, bringing them food and conversation. One by one, she was joined in the work by former students. By 1950, this group of women was recognized by the Church as an official religious order, the Missionaries of Charity, now working in 123 countries.

“We have a terrible hunger for God,” she said. “We have been created to be loved … He makes Himself the hungry one, not only for bread, but for love. He makes Himself the naked one, not only for a piece of cloth but for that understanding love, that dignity, human dignity. He makes Himself the homeless one, not only for the piece of a small room, but for that deep sincere love for the other. This is the Eucharist …”

For her, our failure to see Christ in the beggar was a sign that we had lost our ability to find Him in the Eucharist. We might think we believe these things, but we’re wrong. We were playing out the mystery recorded in the Gospel — of Jesus coming into the world and not being recognized as God. “Today, as before, when Jesus comes amongst His own, His own don’t know Him,” she said. “He comes in the rotting bodies of the poor. … Jesus comes to you and me. And often, very often, we pass Him by.”

St. John Chrysostom: “Do you wish to honor the body of Christ? Do not ignore Him when He is naked. Do not pay Him homage in the temple clad in silk only then to neglect Him outside where He suffers cold and nakedness.”

Teresa insists this, in a way that no saint ever has: our salvation is bound up in some mysterious way with our love of the poor. “The poor are the hope of the people of America, for in them we see the hungry Christ looking up at us. Will we refuse Him?”

“Mother Teresa takes care of the poorest of the poor but never deals with why they are poor,” a charities official for the British Catholic bishops once complained. “We are fighting for justice,” said another Briton, and she “deals only with the disease [of poverty] and not with preventing it. But people in the West continue to give her money.” She did refuse to point accusing fingers at ruthless dictators, corrupt politicians, and multinational corporate bandits. She did meet with them and accept donations from them and suffer being called a chaplain to the rich.

Her critics were right, of course. She had nothing of substance to show for more than a half-century of work with the poor. The poor were poor and badly treated in Calcutta before she arrived, and they are poor and badly treated still today. The same is true in every other of the 122 countries where her nuns have set up shop. She did criticize the arms race as theft from the poor; she did decry the avarice and greed by which some nations live high on the hog while others barely survive; she did denounce rich nations forcing birth control, abortion, and sterilization on the poor; she did appeal to world leaders on behalf of refugees and victims of war; she was vocal against the death penalty, euthanasia, and abortion. But she had no illusions about the power of her voice. She worked from below. “There are thousands and thousands of poor, but I think of only one at a time,” she said. “Jesus was only one and I take Jesus at His word …you can save only one at a time. We can only love one at a time.”

Once in London she was walking down the street and came upon a drunk man. She took him by the hand, looked into his eyes, and asked him how he was doing. His face lit up, “Oh, after so long I feel the warmth of a human hand,” he said.

She will forever be remembered as Mother Teresa of Calcutta: a Christian holy woman in the city named for the Hindu goddess Kali.

To start her home for the dying, Calcutta’s city fathers gave Mother Teresa an abandoned building attached to one of Hinduism’s most revered Kali shrines. No doubt they congratulated themselves on finding her an eminently practical location; the shrine was joined to Kalighat — a sort of perpetual municipal funeral pyre, where day and night the bodies of the dead are wrapped in white linen and consigned to the flames, to be reduced to ash and scattered in the Hooghy River that flows into the sacred Ganges.

It was a good plan. The destitute could come to Mother Teresa’s to die and could then be carted over to the crematory for the final disposition of their mortal remains.

But how interesting that Mother Teresa’s home for the dying winds up alongside a shrine to Kali — “the Black One,” the giver of all life and the one who takes it all away. Idols of Kali are terrifying — black as soot, eyes wild, tongue lolling, dripping with blood, wearing a necklace of freshly severed human heads, carrying a cleaver and a noose, posed in a feverish dance. Kali priests are said to have murdered the first Christian missionary, running the doubting apostle St. Thomas through with a spear in the year 72. Deep into the nineteenth century, Kali worship often entailed human sacrifice, and even today Kali priests still offer her blood sacrifices from the slit throats of black goats.

Mother Teresa never said a word publicly about Kali or her cult. She named her new home Nirmal Hriday, the Place of the Immaculate Heart, in honor of Mary. It was a blunt contrast, to say the least: the image of the gentle mother alongside the violent mother. Was Mother Teresa lobbing a potshot at her Hindu neighbors, making a wry slur against their goddess? They thought so at first. In the early days of Nirmal Hriday, angry mobs, whipped up by the temple priests, staged protests and made death threats against Mother Teresa, accusing her of a stealth campaign to convert Hindus. That all ended when she took in and nursed one of her most virulent enemies, a young Kali priest who was dying of tuberculosis and had been denied care by the city’s hospitals. That was her way.

I believe that she viewed the world as caught up in an apocalyptic struggle between maternal love and a dark, demonic perversion of motherhood at work in the world. In the divine script written for her life, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was based alongside the cultic center of Kali to illuminate this clash of worldviews. She was not sent into the world to offer Catholic commentary on Hindu deities or devotions. Far more was at stake than any superficial concerns for religious tolerance and diversity. She was sent at a post-Christian moment in history, when Western societies were in the process of rejecting and moving beyond 2,000 years of beliefs, values, and assumptions based on the teachings of Christ. In moving beyond Christianity the world was actually sliding back into paganism — the shape of religion before revelation, before God chose to make His covenant with Abraham and to show us His face in Jesus.

Without ever using the word, Mother Teresa showed us the new paganism of our post-Christian world. In the West, the fervid orgies of fertility cults had been replaced by an idolatrous glorification of sex. In place of ancient child sacrifices there was now a state-sanctioned cult of abortion and the “assisted suicide” of the weak. The new paganism she prophesied against was a sort of secular religion promoted by multinational corporations, rulers of nations, and international agencies.

It was no accident that when she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, Mother Teresa devoted her speech to abortion, which she described as the “greatest destroyer of peace today.” Her colleagues had prepped her to talk about the nuclear arms race and neoimperialism in the Third World. The diplomats who had nominated her for the prize came expecting tales of uplift from her work among the poor and dying. Instead she spoke from the heart about the Kali-esque — “a direct war, a direct killing — direct murder by the mother herself.” For her, abortion was finally the mother of all issues, of every violence, of all poverty. “Nations who destroy life by abortion and euthanasia are the poorest,” she said. “For they have not got food for one more child, a home for one old person. So they must add one more cruel murder into this world.”

If a mother is permitted to kill her baby, she said, everything must be permitted, every violence should be expected. “We must not be surprised when we hear of murders, of killings, of wars. If a mother can kill her own child, what is left but for us to kill each other? I do not want to talk about what should be legal or illegal. I do not think any human heart should dare to take life, or any human hand be raised to destroy life. Life is the life of God in us, even in an unborn child.”

After 1946, we discover now, Mother Teresa only once more heard the voice of God, and she believed the doors of heaven had been closed and bolted against her. The more she longed for some sign, the more empty and desolate she became. We always saw her smiling. She had a playful smile, mischievous, as if privy to some secret joke. Especially when she was around children, she beamed with delight. In private, she had a quick, self-deprecating sense of humor, and sometimes doubled over from laughing so hard. So many people who spent time with her came away saying that she was the most joyful person they had ever met.

But we find from the secret letters that her life was a living hell. As she wrote in 1957, “I call, I cling, I want, and there is no one to answer … the emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul …” As if by some strange formula, the greater her success and public adulation, the more abandoned, humiliated, and desperate she felt. “I feel like refusing God,” she wrote.

In her dark night we can hear all the anguish of our time — the desolation of the poor, the cries of unwanted children, of all those who cannot bring themselves to pray or to love. We hear … us. But what we see is a tiny smiling woman who did not refuse the voice she heard on a train one day.

She died on September 5, 1997, the great apostle of joy and light in the dark final hours of the second Christian millennium. She died almost one hundred years to the day after her patron Thérèse of the little way. She died as one of the century’s great living expressions of love for children. She died as, perhaps, the first bud of a new Christian life, flowering from the bloody soil of the most murderous century in history.

David Scott is the author of A Revolution of Love (Loyola Press), from which this essay was gently extracted.