Did the nun really deserve her saintly reputation? She inspired a craze for self-flagellation among her ‘sisters’, says one woman in this shocking three-parter, while a street doctor is even more scathing
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? More specifically, who could have predicted that she would embody so much of what was wrong with that century and the next? The three-part documentary Mother Teresa: For the Love of God? (Sky Documentaries) sets out the pros and cons of Teresa mania, finding the good to be fragile and the bad, profound.
Briskly we are given the backstory of a family made vulnerable by the death – perhaps by poisoning – of their patriarch, after which they leaned heavily on the church. Having moved to India and become a nun, Anjezë heard the voice of Jesus calling her on a train near Darjeeling in 1946. By 1969, she was revered enough under the name Mother Teresa of Calcutta – as the boss of donation-funded sanctuaries for orphans, people with leprosy and the dying – for a laudatory BBC film to be made about her. The attention boosted Teresa’s effort to expand her organisation, Missionaries of Charity, beyond India, opening orders around the world.
For the Love of God? tries to offer an unimpeachably balanced range of contributors. 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. The problem, for Teresa’s defenders, at least, is that as soon as you mount a description of her that goes into more detail than “she spent her life caring for the poor”, the illusion melts.
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. A craze for self-flagellation developed among the “sisters”, inspired by Teresa’s dictum that “love, to be real, has to hurt”. Even a man who was a Kolkata orphan stricken with polio in the late 1970s, and who credits the Missionaries of Charity with saving his life, talks of the psychological effects of the sometimes “brutal” atmosphere.
