Mother Teresa: a biography

A GROWING MINORITY
The bitter arguments over Hitchens’s charges in both 
Hell’s Angel
and
The Missionary Position
might have ended there, if it had not been for
other, more moderate voices also coming forward with their criticisms of
Mother Teresa. Dr. Robin Fox, a thoracic specialist and editor of the
highly respected medical journal, the 
Lancet,
wrote in 1994 of the poor
medical facilities found at Nirmal Hriday in Calcutta. According to Fox,
he was astonished to find that there were no simple testing procedures im-
plemented to distinguish an incurable from a curable disease: “Such sys-
tematic approaches are alien to the ethos of the home. . . . Along with the
neglect of diagnosis, the lack of good analgesia marks Mother Teresa’s ap-
proach as clearly separate from the hospice movement. I know which I
prefer.”
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Further, although it appeared that the poor in the facilities that
the Missionaries of Charity operated could not receive even basic treat-
ment, Mother Teresa herself had access to the most modern medical treat-
ment in the world, especially when her heart problems came to light.
Not long after Dr. Fox’s criticism appeared, a thoughtful piece by Clif-
ford Longley, a writer and former religious affairs correspondent for the
London
Times,
warned of Mother Teresa’s reverence for death. Such an
emphasis, Longley feared, threatened to turn suffering into a goal. In ad-
dition, many health workers who visited the clinics and listened to
Mother Teresa’s views on abortion wondered how anyone who concerned
themselves with the problems of the poor could not also be concerned
with the problems of fertility, overpopulation, and other questions of re-
productive health. The furor over 
Hell’s Angel
had in fact opened up the
debate over Mother Teresa’s work during the last 50 years; for the first
time, opposition to her seemed to be emerging and hardening. Was
Mother Teresa’s way of dealing with the poor outmoded as some of her
critics charged, or, as some of her supporters suggested, would there always
be the need for the kind of Christian charity Mother Teresa exemplified?
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M O T H E R T E R E S A

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In her article “No Humanitarian,” Mary Poplin who spent two months
working as a volunteer, described the rough conditions of Mother Teresa’s
medical facilities:
Like many Western visitors, I initially found the experience
disorienting. Despite Mother Teresa’s repeated reminders that
the order’s mission is religious, not social work, most Western-
ers who visit the homes for sick and handicapped children ex-
pect them to look like medical clinics or hospitals. They don’t.
Most shocking is the absence of hospital-like procedures and
equipment. This can be particularly disconcerting for people
who have worked in hospital settings in America and Eu-
rope. . . . Surely, given Mother Teresa’s fame, such equipment
was available?. . . . The Missionaries of Charity, one learns, re-
sist owning anything, even medical equipment that is not
widely available to the poor.
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