Random Disturbing Facts and Stories That Will Change How You See Mother Teresa (12 items)

(#10) The First Miracle Involving Her Likeness Was Easily Debunked

A "miracle" involving Mother Teresa was easily debunked. A Bengali woman claimed that a beam of light emanated from a picture of Mother Teresa, curing her cancerous tumor. The woman's doctor, however, says she never even had a tumor in the first place; it was just a tubercular cyst, cured by prescription drugs.

The Vatican didn't interview the doctor or use a "devil's advocate" to investigate the claims.
(#2) She Once Made Controversial Remarks About AIDS

Hitchens wrote in his book about a 1989 International Health Organization luncheon meeting, at which Mother Teresa was honored. Hitchens quotes Emily Lewis, a nurse, who wrote him a letter about her alleged interaction with Mother Teresa at the luncheon. According to Lewis, Mother Teresa said during her acceptance speech saying that "she did not want to label it a scourge of God but that it did seem like a just retribution for improper sexual conduct."

However, she did go on to open "Gift of Love" in New York City, a house specifically for AIDS patients.
(#1) She Did Not Have Stringent Standards For Baptizing Dying People

Some who worked with Mother Teresa claimed that she was somewhat lax with standards applied to dying people baptized in her care. Fr. Leo Maasburg discussed this in his book, Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Personal Portrait. Fr. Maasburg was Teresa's "close companion for many decades" and said the dying did not need to know the entire history of the Catholic Church; it was enough to ask them if they "would like to go to the God who sent the Sisters." If the answer was yes, they could then be baptized.
(#6) Despite Millions In Donations, Her Clinics Were Short On Supplies

Mother Teresa's organization, the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, received hundreds of millions of dollars in donations while she was alive. However, former volunteers allege shortage of supplies and medications at her clinics. In his book, Hitchens wrote: "[the] point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjugation."
(#7) Hygiene At Her Clinics Was A Major Issue

Mother Teresa's clinics were run by volunteers, and despite providing medical care to the poor, they were not hospitals. As such, there have been widespread claims of "haphazard" conditions at some of the clinics.

Hitchens posited in his book that the decision to to run a "haphazard and cranky institution which would expose itself to litigation and protest were it run by any branch of the medical profession is a deliberate one," meant to promulgate Teresa's "cult" of death and suffering.
(#3) Her Beliefs Sometimes Turned The Afflicted Into "Compassion Homework"

As Murray Kempton reminds readers in his review of Christopher Hitchens's The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice in the New York Review of Books, Teresa often posited that the afflicted represented an opportunity to learn and demonstrate compassion and empathy.

Kempton counters that this directive puts the afflicted in the position of compassion homework, treating them as things rather than as agents in their own right.