Mother Teresa’s saintly image comes under fire in new study
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How has the saintly image of Mother Teresa managed to survive largely intact in this age of such intense media scrutiny?
Three Canadian academics tackled this thorny question in a new article in the journal Studies in Religion
“Everyone who thinks of altruism thinks immediately of Mother Teresa,” says Geneviève Chénard, explaining why she and her co-authors decided to undertake this study.
The researchers — Chénard and Serge Larivée of l’Université de Montréal and Carola Sénéchal of the University of Ottawa — examined 287 documents about the Albanian nun who died at age 87 in 1997.
Mother Teresa, who founded the Kolkata-based Missionaries of Charity, an order of nuns that has expanded to 123 countries, has been beatified by the Vatican, one step short of sainthood.
According to the study, the unassailable image of Mother Teresa appeals to the collective imagination looking to help the dying and the poor. It feeds a need in people to have someone to look up to. For the church, it also helps promote Roman Catholic religious values.
Mother Teresa’s beatification process was also the fastest in the history of the Catholic Church, the study says.
One of the key steps in that beatification: A non-Christian woman in India woke up on the first anniversary of Mother Teresa’s death to find her abdominal tumour had disappeared. Members of the Missionaries of Charity has prayed for Mother Teresa’s help. Pope John Paul II recognized this as a miracle.
Mother Teresa, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997, has been the subject of 153 hagiographies from 1948 until 2011 and only six balanced biographies, the study says.
Largely unexamined have been questions about how millions in donations were spent, the hygiene and lack of care in her hospices and why the woman herself supported corrupt regimes such as the Duvaliers in Haiti.
Even the “miracle” ascribed to her is questionable, the study says, citing doctors who treated the woman who found no cancer and no miracle, but instead a tuberculosis repaired by traditional medicine.
Despite criticism of Mother Teresa, most notably by writer Christopher Hitchens , the glowing accounts of her saintliness persist as the dominant story of her life, polished by a less-than-rigorous general media examination of her, the study concluded.
The study’s findings have not been happily received by everyone.
“There is a lot of hate against us now,” says Chénard. “I’m surprised how far it goes. I didn’t think the research would go around the world and we would have that much reaction, but there are many people who are writing us every day and calling us very bad names.”
With files from Kate Allen
Correction: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said Mother Teresa was born in Albania.
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