Order's future hangs in the balance

There is hardly anyone in India who does not recognise with respect and affection the deeply-lined face of Mother Teresa

There is hardly anyone in India who does not recognise with respect and affection the deeply-lined face of Mother Teresa. She was simply Ma to the illiterate and poor and Mother to the educated - nationally worshipped for working tirelessly to alleviate suffering wherever it existed in India, but particularly Calcutta.

Her life in this teeming city , housing the world's most wretched, has been connected closely ever since she first came here in 1928 to teach geography to middle-class children at the Loreto Convent.

"For Calcutta she is a rare icon, the city's presiding deity and its conscience-keeper," said Mr Ravindra Kumar, editor of the Statesman, the city's oldest newspaper.

Criticism of Mother Teresa by western journalists for accepting money from suspicious sources, seeking undue publicity and providing inadequate and ineffectual medical care to patients under her care, was dismissed in Calcutta as little better than yellow journalism attacking a goddess.

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Calcuttans, normally excitable people, were furious that such harsh criticism affected Mother Teresa to the extent that she was hesitant about being admitted to hospital when ill earlier this year with heart trouble lest she be accused of accepting preferential medical treatment.

"Let her critics come and do even a tenth of what she has done" said Mrs Sohinder Grewal, who has worked as a volunteer with Mother Teresa for over a decade. Meanwhile, the future of the Missionaries of Charity hangs in the balance after Mother Teresa's death, particularly with regard to funding. Sources close to Mother Teresa said the order and its various activities were synonymous with her , with few donors even knowing what it was called.

Money sent to Mother Teresa from across the world easily found its way to her but those associated with the order were sceptical about whether this would continue.

Others said personality clashes were bound to surface within the order without Mother Teresa's strong and dominating presence.

Some had emerged already over the past two years when Mother Teresa was frequently hospitalised. But after recovery she had scotched all dissension and ensured that Sister Nirmala , head of the order's contemplative wing, succeeded her as Superior-General in March. Mother Teresa had headed the order ever since it was founded in 1950.

But volunteers associated with the order said Sister Nirmala lacked both the charisma to attract funds and her predecessor's efficiency in running and organising the vast charitable network which spread across 130 countries. Even after she became Superior-General, Sister Nirmala remained in the background, with Mother Teresa dominating the order's working.

Catholic Church sources in Calcutta said Mother Teresa would be impossible to replace and were of the opinion that while the order may not break up, its future activities might be curtailed.

Madeleine Bunting adds: Hardened Western journalists emerged from interviews with Mother Teresa with few of their questions answered but overwhelmed by her unique combination of vulnerability and shrewdness. Behind the soft voice and the gentle hand-holding lay something of the canny Albanian peasant. She had an astonishing talent for getting her way with politicians and statesmen.

She inspired thousands of young women to don the blue-bordered white sari and join her order, the Missionaries of Charity, which opened convents all over the world. Her Home for the Dying in Calcutta became a mecca for young westerners eager to help with the problems of the Third World.

But solving problems was never Mother Teresa's ambition. There were many who - discreetly - criticised her work. Yes, she took homeless, sick people off the streets of Calcutta and gave them a clean, quiet place to die, but she never tried to tackle the causes of problems such as homelessness.

Aid workers in India and the West increasingly found this charity work frustrating. In private, they argued that her work dated from a 19th-century mindset more attuned to good works than social justice, development and empowering the marginalised. She could have brought enormous influence to bear on the world stage in campaigning for the rights of children and the poor, but she kept aloof.

Concern was also voiced in private by volunteers that the standard of medical treatment in her homes left much to be desired.

Others worried that Mother Teresa's style of management was autocratic and erratic. She had set up a very hierarchical structure to the Missionaries of Charity, in which almost all decisions were referred to her and the sisters were very subservient. She groomed no successor and struggled on as head, despite extremely frail health, until six months ago. The puzzle is how this deeply conservative Roman Catholic was able to build up such a devoted following - firstly in India, a predominantly Hindu and Muslim country, with a deep mistrust of the missionary impulses of Christians - and secondly in the predominantly secular, liberal West.

In India, she was revered as a holy woman. The Indian Catholic Church, nervous of her hot-line to the Vatican, never dared to murmur a complaint of how other nuns and priests struggled with a fraction of the resources at Mother Teresa's disposal.

In the West, one would have expected some scepticism. On a string of issues, Mother Teresa represented the kind of traditional Catholicism which millions have been shaking off.

--(Guardian Service)

Rahul Bedi

Rahul Bedi

Rahul Bedi is a contributor to The Irish Times based in New Delhi