On Monday, the Sky Documentaries released a new documentary on ‘Mother’ Teresa to reveal the dark side of her life and the NGO ‘Missionaries of Charity’ that was set up by her in the city of Kolkata, West Bengal. The documentary named ‘Mother Teresa: For the Love of God’ shows stories coming directly from her close aides and her enemies and allows the audiences to know the evangelical zeal that she possessed under the veils of love and care.
For years, ‘Mother’ Teresa has been accused of being a fraud. Her problematic history of following primitive health practices and her evangelical zeal to convert the weak and the vulnerable into the Christian fold were long cited by her critics to call out the unwarranted adulation that was showered on her. The latest documentary aims to catalogue and reinforce the dark side of ‘Mother’ Teresa’s ‘sainthood’ and assess the veracity of allegations levelled against the contentious evangelist.
According to the reports, the documentary claims that the globally known ‘saint’ had a severe dark side and that she defended the serial abusers and criminals. She also allowed her image to be used as a propaganda tool for the Catholic church.
Saint or sinner? Uncover the darker side to Mother Teresa’s story.
— Sky TV (@skytv) May 7, 2022
9 May | Sky Documentaries pic.twitter.com/KhuOaQ3yGB
‘Mother’ Teresa has been also a controversial figure for allegedly converting the dying patients and making them defecate in front of each other. For years, she has been accused of being a fraudster. In India, she started a Non-Government Organisation called ‘Missionaries of Charity’ that has long been accused of forcefully converting people on the pretext of social service.
The three-part series serves as the answers to many significant questions like ‘Did the nun deserve her saintly reputation?’ ‘Was she a global saint or a corporate sinner?’ or ‘Was her show of affection and care all a charade to conceal her evangelist objectives?’ The testimonies reportedly come from the persons closely associated with ‘Mother’ Teresa, giving a fair and authentic assessment of the darker side of her sainthood.
While the reel is set on air to serve the balanced range of contributors, reports mention that the documentary manages to melt the ‘life caring’ image of the widely claimed global ‘saint’. The documentary says that ‘Mother’ Teresa used to make the poor believe in theories like ‘pain is important and necessary’ or ‘love, to be real, has to hurt’. The hospitals run by the ‘Missionaries of Charity’ therefore never believed in maintaining hygiene or serving the patients with proper, required medical care.
“Our calling is not necessarily to cure. It is to pass on the love of God to every human being in whom we see the suffering Christ … suffering shared with Christ’s passion is a wonderful thing”, the claimed saint believed. According to the Daily Mail report, Mary Johnson, who worked with ‘Mother’ Teresa for 20 years said that the ‘saint’ believed that being poor was good since Jesus was poor. “It’s schizophrenia, you know”, she said.
Also, Dr Jack Preger who worked as a street physician for 40 years in Kolkata claimed that the hospitals run by the Missionaries of Charity were unhygienic and that the nuns never delivered proper care to the patients. “Needles were used over and over again. They were blunt”, he said adding that there was outright neglect behind the rhetoric about selflessly attending to the needy.
Teresa had made a business out of charity, and even after her death the Missionaries of Charity has been under public scrutiny numerous times, with the most recent being a human trafficking scandal that was exposed in 2018 by law enforcement agencies.
There were also reports earlier that revealed that the nuns at the Nirmal Hriday, a hospice established by ‘Mother’ Teresa were into the business of selling kids. On July 7, 2018, a nun had been arrested and remanded to judicial custody by a court for allegedly selling a 14-day-old baby at the Nirmal Hriday home in Ranchi, Jharkhand.
Also, in December 2021, the Gujarat Police had registered an FIR against Missionaries of Charity in Vadodara on the charges of allegedly hurting Hindu religious sentiments and luring young girls to convert to Christianity. The FIR stated that the girls living in the house were forced to read Christian religious texts and that they were forced to participate in Christian prayers with the intention to lure them to Christianity.
The documentary series ‘Mother Teresa: For the Love of God’ is streaming exclusively on the Sky App from May 9, 2022.
Past documentaries and podcasts shine a light on the wicked practices of ‘Mother’ Teresa and her organisation ‘Missionaries of Charity’
However, this is not the first time that a documentary made on ‘Mother’ Teresa reveals the dark side of the ‘saint’ and her ‘social work’. Earlier in the year 1994, Christopher Hitchens and Journalist Tariq Ali had released a documentary film called ‘Hell’s Angels’ which brought the disgusting reality of Teresa’s organizations in front of the public.
Hitchens had described her organization as a ‘cult’ that promoted suffering and did not help those in need. Last year, a podcast titled “The Turning: The Sisters Who Left,” was released that brought to light gory details of what it was to lead a life inside the closed walls of ‘Mother’ Teresa’s Charity.
From providing ‘military training’ to ‘isolating’ nuns from the rest of the world to the daily routine of ‘self flogging’, forcing them to wear spiked chains pointing inwards to not allowing them to take baths, the podcast bore testimonies of ex-sisters who blew the lid off the wicked practices that continued inside the Missionaries of Charity, making it a cult organisation.
