Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa: The Saint Who Could Not Feel God

On 10 September 1946 a thirty-six-year-old convent schoolteacher was riding a train to Darjeeling when she heard, as she described it, a call within the call: an instruction to leave the school and go to the poorest people in Calcutta. She obeyed it and spent the next fifty-one years building the most recognisable charitable order on earth. Her private letters, published after her death, reveal that for almost all of those fifty-one years she could no longer feel the God who had given the instruction.

Skopje to Calcutta

She was born Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu on 26 August 1910 in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire and now the capital of North Macedonia, into a Kosovar Albanian Catholic family. She always regarded 27 August, the day of her baptism, as her real birthday, which is an early clue to how she understood a life: it began when it was consecrated, not when it started.

By the Nobel Foundation's account she felt the pull toward missionary work at the age of twelve. At eighteen, in 1928, she left home for Ireland and joined the Sisters of Loreto, principally in order to learn English, the language of the Indian missions. She trained in Dublin, reached India in 1929, and took her first vows on 24 May 1931, choosing the religious name Teresa after Therese de Lisieux.

Then came seventeen years that biographies tend to skip. From 1931 to 1948 she taught at St Mary's High School in Calcutta, an ordinary and respectable life inside a convent wall, while the poverty of the city pressed against the other side of it. She was not a young radical. She was a middle-aged schoolmistress when she changed course.

The Call Within the Call

After the experience on the Darjeeling train she left teaching in 1948 and went out into the slums with no institution behind her. On 7 October 1950 she obtained permission from the Holy See to found her own order, the Missionaries of Charity, dedicated, in the Nobel Foundation's formulation, to loving those persons nobody was prepared to look after.

That is a narrower and stranger mission than it first appears. She was not primarily attempting to cure the sick or end poverty. She was attempting to ensure that nobody died unattended. In 1952 she opened the Kalighat Home for the Dying, and the logic of the place was that a person with hours left should spend them being touched and spoken to rather than lying in a gutter. Whether that is a sufficient response to destitution is the central question of her life, and it has never been settled.

Building an Order

What she then demonstrated was administrative capacity on an extraordinary scale. She began with twelve sisters. By her death the Missionaries of Charity numbered more than four thousand sisters running 610 missions in 123 countries.

The expansion was structured, not improvised. Pope Paul VI's decree of 1965 made the society international. Branches multiplied to fit different vocations: Contemplative Sisters and Active Brothers in 1963, Contemplative Brothers in 1979, a branch for priests in 1984. Around the professed religious she assembled a lay auxiliary, the Co-Workers, which by the 1990s numbered over a million people across more than forty countries. She had, in effect, built a multinational organisation from nothing, in one of the poorest cities in the world, without capital.

The Nobel

The honours arrived steadily: the Ramon Magsaysay Peace Prize in 1962, the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize in 1971, the Nehru Prize in 1972, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, and India's Bharat Ratna in 1980.

Her response to the Nobel was characteristic and slightly deflating. Handed the largest platform in the world, she declined to call for policy, aid or structural change, and told her audience instead to go home and love their families. It was either a profound redirection of attention from the abstract to the immediate, or an evasion of every systemic question the prize existed to raise. Both readings have serious defenders.

The Darkness

The most extraordinary fact about her only became public after she died. Decades of private letters revealed that from soon after she began her work until near the end of her life, a period of close to fifty years, she experienced no sense of God's presence at all. She described emptiness and darkness. The woman whose face was used worldwide as an advertisement for religious certainty was, privately, sustaining an institution built entirely on a faith she could not feel.

Her critics have read this as evidence that the whole edifice was hollow. That is the least persuasive available interpretation. Continuing for fifty years without the consolation that makes such work bearable is harder, not easier, than doing it in a state of belief.

The Case Against Her

It must be stated in full, because the hagiography has done her reputation more damage than the criticism. Christopher Hitchens attacked both the medical standards in her homes and what he characterised as conversion practices among the dying. The physician Aroup Chatterjee argued that hygiene in her Calcutta facilities improved only after her death in 1997. She was criticised for accepting donations from disreputable figures without inquiry into their origin. And her absolute opposition to abortion and contraception, expressed from the world's most prominent moral platforms, is regarded by many as having caused measurable harm in the poorest communities she served.

The underlying charge is coherent: that vast sums flowed through an organisation that chose to provide comfort rather than competent medicine, and that its founder's fame outran its results.

Why Teresa Is Called a Genius

The faculty here is neither intellectual nor artistic. It is organisational and moral, and it consists of two distinct things.

The first is institution-building of a very rare kind. She took twelve women and no money and produced an order of four thousand sisters, 610 houses in 123 countries and a lay network of a million people, structured into specialised branches, capable of operating in states with no shared language, legal system or religion. Almost no founder of any organisation, secular or religious, has achieved comparable scale from a comparable base within a single lifetime. That is a demonstrable, measurable capability.

The second is a kind of moral attention that functions like an artistic insight: she identified a need nobody else had named. The world was full of agencies addressing hunger and disease. She noticed that the specific horror of extreme poverty is dying unwitnessed, and she built an entire global apparatus around that single observation. Reframing a problem so that a previously invisible category of suffering becomes obvious is what original thinkers do.

The counter-case is real and cannot be waved away. If the metric is lives saved or poverty reduced, her operation performed poorly relative to its resources, and the criticisms of its medical standards are substantive rather than malicious. Her theology of suffering arguably valued the redemptive meaning of pain over its relief. And she was, by any standard, an exceptional celebrity as well as an exceptional nun, which complicates every assessment of what the fame actually delivered. She was not a genius of solutions. She was a genius of noticing, and of building.

Legacy

She died on 5 September 1997, was beatified on 19 October 2003, and was canonised on 4 September 2016 as Saint Teresa of Calcutta. The order she founded still runs its houses in 123 countries, and the argument about whether she was a saint or a scandal has now outlived both her defenders' and her attackers' best efforts to end it. What is not in dispute is the fact she began with: that thousands of people who would otherwise have died alone in the street did not.

Achievements

• Balzan Prize — 1978
• Nobel Peace Prize — 1979
• Worked as missionary, nun and founder of Catholic religious community