To open the life of someone like Mother Teresa to scrutiny is always a difficult task. First, there is an aura that surrounds her image, one which seems to disallow any form of criticism. Second, there is a sense of inadequacy in all of us because of her spartan life filled with a genuine sense of service. There are some similarities with Gandhi, who also made criticism seem absurd as he sat amongst the poor in their clothes and with a smile on his ineffable face.
Certainly, Mother Teresa was an extraordinary person, or else there would not be such attention paid at the time of her death. This critique of Mother Teresa is not intended to downplay her role in the amelioration of suffering among some of the world's poor. Our interest does not lie in the intricacies of her theology but in the limitations of her work. For, in the end, her work was part of a global enterprise for the alleviation of bourgeois guilt rather than a genuine challenge to those forces that produce and maintain poverty.
Proto-Saint of Calcutta
The problem with Mother Teresa begins with her glorifiers who have removed her from the realm of history and deposited her, during her lifetime, in the realm of myth. It all began with Malcolm Muggeridge's 1969 documentary and 1971 book, Something Beautiful for God, which transformed a local social worker into a saint. Soon, the entire panoply of media and professional mendicants descended upon Calcutta to put the city down in order to lift Mother Teresa up.
Calcutta became the ahistorical emblem of distress. Its imperial past and communist present did not enter into this representation of the city. There was no sense of the destruction wrought by the East India Company and, later, by the British Empire. Further, there was no interest in the events in East Pakistan (Bangladesh, after 1971), from where 12 million refugees descended upon West Bengal. Muggeridge and his ilk pay little heed to the creation and maintenance of poverty in Bengal.