Indians criticize study attacking Mother Teresa

March 7, 2013: Days after an international study criticized Monther Teresa’s saintliness, people who knew the nun rubbished the claims saying the researchers were ill-informed and failed to understand that her existence revolved around the destitute.

"In such a huge ocean of goodness, it's always easy to find some points of criticism," says former chief election commissioner Navin Chawla, who wrote an acclaimed biography of Mother Teresa in 1992.

Chawla said that the Mother’s intention was to take care of those who had fallen by the wayside; people whom no hospital would admit. “She set up hospices and not hospitals because a hospital would have been good for just one city such as Calcutta. She wanted to care for the destitute all around the world," he added.

The study, which is set to be published in a journal called Religieuses, said that Mother Teresa’s beatification was a creation of an orchestrated and effective media campaign. It said that blessed Teresa was “anything but a saint.” She was generous with her prayers but miserly with her foundation's millions when it came to humanity's suffering,

One of the claims in the study was that while the donations received by the Missionaries of Charity were not used for improving her hospices, money was not a problem when it came to Mother Teresa's own treatment in America. "If the money did not show in her hospices, then where could it have gone? Did it show in her lifestyle?" asked Fr. Dominic Emmanuel, spokesperson of Delhi Archdiocese.

He said that the nun was running more than 500 centres across the world. “You need money to take care of the people staying there. That's not an easy job." According to Chawla, Mother Teresa always had an aversion to hospitals. He remembers how she was immediately rushed to a state-of-the-art hospital when she fainted in San Diego. "So strong was her dislike for expensive hospitals that she tried escaping from there at night. It's completely unfair to accuse such a person of spending money on her treatment and not on those she cared so much for," he said.

Sunita Kumar, who worked closely with Mother Teresa for 36 years and is the spokesperson for the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, recalls the time when the nun was ill in Calcutta and doctors from San Diego and New York had come to see her out of their own will. "Mother had no idea who was coming to treat her. It was so difficult to even convince her to go to the hospital. The fact that we forced her to, should not be held against her like this," she said.

The question of the healing of Monica Besra, which the Vatican considers a miracle, is immaterial to Mother Teresa's supporters. For them, she was a saint in her lifetime. "If her church or her faith has a process of canonization, then I am nobody to comment. For me and millions of others, she was a saint in her lifetime," says Chawla.