Mother Teresa: a biography

A WOMAN IN DEMAND
Beginning in the 1980s, Mother Teresa stepped up her visits, traveling
all over the world to meet with world leaders or to open another founda-
tion somewhere for the Missionaries of Charity. Her travels kept her away
from Motherhouse even more; it was usual for her to be gone for 10
months out of every year. At the behest of Pope John Paul II, with whom
she developed a very close relationship, Mother Teresa used her travels
and the media attention to air her views, giving her a platform second to
none among religious leaders.
The new decade opened with Mother Teresa traveling again to her
hometown of Skopje as a guest of the city. Months earlier, she also had
the opportunity to open a house for the elderly in Zagreb, Croatia, mark-
ing the first time the Missionaries of Charity had opened one of their
homes in a communist country. She attended a conference on family life
in Guatemala; then went to visit the desperately poor island of Haiti,
where she met the then-president Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and
his wife. From Haiti, she traveled to Egypt where, much to the Egyptian
government’s dismay, she urged Egyptian housewives to have many chil-
dren. The government, which had just finished producing a series of
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short films that urged families to limit the number of children, could do
nothing.
In addition to Mother Teresa’s traveling, the Missionaries of Charity
opened a number of new facilities throughout the world. In 1980, 14 new
homes were opened; in 1981, 18. Twelve Missionaries of Charity founda-
tions opened in 1982; in 1983, the number rose to 14. At the beginning
of the decade, the Missionaries of Charity established 140 slum schools, a
daily meal program that fed nearly 50,000 persons at 304 centers. There
were 70 Shishu Bhavans, which took care of approximately 4,000 chil-
dren, out of which 1,000 adoptions were arranged. There were 81 homes
for the dying and 670 mobile clinics that had treated some 6 million pa-
tients. Although the Missionaries of Charity were going global with their
work, the bulk of their endeavors were still based in India.
Mother Teresa also continued to show little regard for her own personal
safety as she ventured into many of the world’s hotspots. In 1982, she went
to West Beirut where the area’s hospitals had been shelled by Israeli ar-
tillery. While there, she took 37 children who had been stranded in a men-
tal hospital on a Red Cross convoy into East Beirut and safety. In 1984, she
traveled to Bhopal, India, where a poisonous gas leak at a Union Carbide
plant killed thousands of people and left many others in terrible health.
During this period, Mother Teresa also plunged into the growing AIDS
crisis. She opened a hospice in Greenwich Village in New York City to
care for patients who were suffering from what she termed as the new lep-
rosy of the West. Among her first patients were three convicts suffering
from the disease in the notorious Sing-Sing Prison near New York City.
But despite her willingness to tackle the deadly disease and provide hos-
pice care, Mother Teresa was criticized for her handling of AIDs patients.
According to one account, a doctor who was also working at the hospice
was appalled by how little the nuns knew about the disease. The doctor
told Mother Teresa that simply wearing a crucifix around her neck offered
her no protection from the disease. To this, Mother Teresa replied that
God would take care of her. But for critics this argument was flawed at
best, and dangerous at worst, as the account illustrates: “God never pro-
vides knowledge or skill. God in fact is never enough. . . . [T]he teresan
community sees it [AIDS] as a sickness that can be assuaged with loving
words and a little hot soup.”
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