Mother Teresa and the politics of charity

Comment by Terry Cook

Many people have been swept along by the popular myths surrounding Mother Teresa. They have accepted the media claims that here was someone who dedicated her life to the poor. Why then did Mother Teresa attract the support of politicians, governments and corporate figures hardly renowned for their concern for the plight of the poor?

The "saint of the gutters" was given a state funeral and her casket was borne on a gun carriage flanked by four Indian army majors. Heads of state and other "dignitaries," from Bill Clinton and Queen Elizabeth to the Indonesian dictator General Suharto, sang praises to her life and work. Of the 10,000 invited to attend her funeral ceremony, just four had actually been ministered to by the Missionaries of Charity.

If one examines the doctrine she preached the reason for this is not difficult to fathom. At a time when the profit system is producing ever greater levels of misery and governments worldwide are dismantling social welfare, a figure who worships poverty and seeks to reconcile the downtrodden with both their oppression and their oppressors is certain to be welcomed and promoted by the powers-that-be.

While television reports of her death were filled with harrowing images of Calcutta's poor, not once did a member of the international press corps ask, let alone elucidate, what has caused and perpetuated this suffering and squalor.

Calcutta gave her a halo

Even so, one commentator remarked that it was the squalor of Calcutta that built up and sustained the reputation of Mother Teresa. Sunanda K. Datta-Ray the editorial consultant to the Straits Times said: "She owed Calcutta everything. Calcutta gave her a halo. It received little in return."

Mother Teresa promoted the reactionary philosophy that the masses should resign themselves to their fate with subservience and humility. That is why donations flowed in to her order from the wealthy and powerful. Among them were dictators responsible for the most atrocious levels of poverty in their own countries, including the Duvaliers in Haiti and Enver Hoxha in Albania. She also accepted a $1.7 million donation from Charles Keating, the Californian businessman jailed for embezzling $346 million in savings funds.

When she was asked in 1981 to explain her doctrine on poverty, the good mother replied: "I think it very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor."

She once told a crowd of lepers that their affliction was a "gift from god" and contended that there was a "mystery and a gift about suffering".

The saintly mother opposed any project that would challenge the reliance of the destitute on charity or provide them with dignity or independence. She railed against abortion and birth control and opposed spending money on clean water and sanitation. As one commentator said: "The House of the Dying in Calcutta was just that."

A far greater portion of the funds she received went to the establishment of missionaries and convents than to medical services, hospices and orphanages. In 1994 Dr Robin Fox, the then editor of the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, scathingly dismissed the order's so-called medical facilities. "Souls not bodies are the grist of her mill of faith," he said.

Whenever an incident exposed the real relations in class society and threatened to raise the masses to their feet, Mother Teresa was on hand to counsel submission. In Bhopal, India, 6,000 people died and thousands more were blinded by toxic gasses in 1984 in the world's worst industrial disaster. The catastrophe was the direct result of corporate cost-cutting by Union Carbide. The advice of Mother Teresa to the victims of this atrocity was: "Forgive, forgive, forgive".

Such proclamations illuminate the very essence of the charitable work of figures such as Mother Theresa. Its only lasting result is to prolong the existence of the economic system that gives rise to society's problems in the first place. To those who remain unconvinced we recommend the compelling lines written by the author and poet Oscar Wilde:

"We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalists to tyrannise over their private lives."

"Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute.

"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and rebellion."