Mother Teresa

2022 - 5 - 10

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Image courtesy of "Telegraph.co.uk"

Charlatan, psychopath, saint: who was the real Mother Teresa? (Telegraph.co.uk)

This Sky documentary series explores the complexities and apparent contradictions of the modern world's most famous missionary.

She ran the Missionaries of Charity almost as a cult, according to one former member, with sisters instructed to cease contact with their families. While Mother Teresa clearly had many faults, there was nothing here to back up the “charlatan” claim (made by the filmmaker and activist Tariq Ali). Most likely, she was neither saint nor sinner, but something in between. Patients were not being provided with decent medical care or pain relief, because the sisters preferred simply to pray for the alleviation of pain. She devoted herself to the poor and worked indefatigably into her eighties. Mother Teresa: For The Love of God? (Sky Documentaries) featured quite a spectrum of opinion. But that has already been done in the case of Mother Teresa. Christopher Hitchens performed a demolition job on her saintly reputation in the 1990s, both in writing and in a film, Hell’s Angel. Instead, For The Love of God? remains faithful to the question mark in its title.

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Image courtesy of "The Guardian"

Mother Teresa: For the Love of God? review – damning testimony ... (The Guardian)

Did the nun really deserve her saintly reputation? She inspired a craze for self-flagellation among her 'sisters', says one woman in this shocking ...

For the Love of God? shows how figures such as Teresa are a key component of unjust societies, dabbing balm on the consciences of those who send “thoughts and prayers” to the vulnerable while ensuring they remain so. What is extraordinary about the stronger version of that accusation – that Teresa embodied a pain-cult version of Christianity that does not want to alleviate suffering – is that she basically agreed. It is to pass on the love of God to every human being in whom we see the suffering Christ … suffering shared with Christ’s passion is a wonderful thing.” In the absence of the late Christopher Hitchens, the writer best known for cutting down Teresa, Aroup Chatterjee, whose work inspired Hitchens’ film about her, appears, offset by a couple of friendly biographers and with first-hand witnesses to the work of Missionaries of Charity in the middle. An American woman who signed up for the mission, and who felt an electric charge akin to romantic love when Teresa put a hand on her as a welcome blessing, describes how the nuns’ devotion required being cut off from newspapers, radio and contact with friends. Who could have foreseen, when Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born in what is now Skopje, North Macedonia, in August 1910, that she would become one of the icons of the 20th century, recognised across the globe as Mother Teresa, saintly giver of comfort to the destitute?

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