Mother Teresa: Beyond The Image. - Book Reviews
In the international orchestra of hyperbole that has sprung up around Mother Teresa - which now, after her death, will no doubt multiply - Jose Luis Gonzalez-Balado has been a major player. The Spanish journalist has written half a dozen volumes on Mother Teresa, which are almost identical in form and content. The present book contains one new revelation: that Mother Teresa had wished she could found a prison for doctors who perform abortions. Yet when asked how to deal with paedophile Catholic priests, she is on record elsewhere as saying that we ought to "pray for them because they are passing through terrible temptations".
Gonzalez-Balado gives us his usual distortions, such as the stark denial that Mother Teresa ever voted in parliamentary elections in India; her official biographer, Eileen Egan, has stated that she did, describing how a socialist Calcutta politician was chafed at this patently political behaviour from a deeply religious woman.
Gonzalez-Balado's book represents the tabloid of religious writing. It is curious to see that Anne Sebba, who was once a minor player in the Teresan orchestra (many years back she wrote a slim hagiography for children), is now sounding a faintly discordant note. Although Sebba's publicists would have us believe it is almost a hatchet-job, she wrote the book while securely sitting on the fence - and I do not say it in a pejorative sense.
Mother Teresa and Princess Diana might have been the two most famous women of this century, and both were pursued by the paparazzi. But there was a crucial difference: Mother Teresa's goodness and charity have hardly been questioned. It was assumed she always threw herself headlong into disasters around the world, or at least in India. Neither Sebba nor anybody else has paused to ask why she never came to the aid of the 1993 Latur earthquake victims after India's biggest natural disaster, or what she was doing during the country's plague epidemic in 1994. Millions saw pictures of her scurrying from hospital to hospital after the 1984 Bhopal gas leak, but nobody - least of all the media- said that she was merely visiting as a world dignitary and not bringing aid.
The image of Mother Teresa as the epitome of purer than pure has been carefully nurtured by the western media; the west has a vested interest in projecting the east in a dependent, capitulating posture.
Sebba does raise some uncomfortable questions, such as why needles need to be reused in Mother Teresa's 100-bed home for the dying in Calcutta, and she also laments that "after 50 years it [her charitable work in the city] remains a drop". But there is no analysis of the charity-religion divide in the allocation of funds and nuns' time. Why are so many nunneries masquerading as "homes"? Why must nuns drop a spoon intended for the mouth of a sick child and rush to the chapel as soon as the prayer bells ring?
Sebba does touch on the issue of birth control and how it put Mother Teresa at loggerheads with other non-governmental organisations working in Calcutta and India. But the question one needs to ask is whether someone could be deemed to be doing charitable work if she opposed contraception in a country such as India, where the equivalent of the population of Australia is being added every year.
Unlike Gonzalez-Balado, who has claimed intimate knowledge of Calcutta's poor and dispossessed, Sebba at least doesn't try to pretend that she ever spoke to Mother Teresa's purported constituency. Her book gives the impression that her subject and the brouhaha surrounding her are complex world phenomena, less to do with the activities of a "living [as she was then] saint" than with Vatican might and western attitudes to the third world. It leaves one with the feeling that this is the life-story of a wily president of a multinational corporation with some charitable functions, rather than of an other-worldly nun - though one cannot be sure if the author really meant it to be so.
About The Author
Aroup Chatterjee is working on "The Mother of All Myths", an account of Mother Teresa's charitable activities