The Suffering She Required

The Home for the Dying — Nirmal Hriday — in Kolkata is Teresa's most iconic institution, the place where her mythology was most powerfully built. The accounts of medical professionals who volunteered there tell a story that complicates the mythology without erasing it. C2

Dr. Robin Fox, editor of The Lancet, visited in 1994 and published his observations. He described the reuse of hypodermic needles washed in cold water, the lack of pain control for patients with treatable and manageable pain conditions, and the absence of protocols for identifying and transferring patients with conditions that would be treatable in a hospital setting. He noted that the sisters appeared to accept suffering as integral to the mission rather than as a problem to be minimized. C1 Other medical volunteers have made similar observations. C2

Teresa's theological framework explains this, though it does not resolve the ethical question it raises. She explicitly believed that suffering was spiritually valuable — that dying in proximity to Christ's suffering was a gift rather than a failure to be corrected. She told patients their suffering was a "kiss from Jesus." C1 The question is whether people dying in her care — who had not necessarily chosen her theological framework — were entitled to the best available medical care regardless of that framework, and whether the substantial financial resources of her organization could have provided it. OA

A 2013 study by researchers at the Universities of Ottawa and Montreal analyzed 287 written sources about Teresa's homes and found a significant gap between her public image and the documented conditions, including concerns about sterilization practices, the treatment of pain, and the ambiguity of what happened to the large sums of money donated to her organization. C2

The Missionaries of Charity received enormous sums through Teresa's global celebrity — tens of millions of dollars annually by the later decades of her life. The organization's financial transparency was, by most assessments, extremely limited. C2 The conditions in many of her homes did not appear to reflect the availability of these resources. Where the money went — how much was spent on operations versus how much was transferred to the Vatican or held in bank accounts — has not been fully accounted for publicly. C2

Among the documented donors was Jean-Claude Duvalier ("Baby Doc"), the Haitian dictator whose government was documented by human rights organizations as brutally repressive and whose family personally looted the Haitian treasury. Teresa accepted his donation, traveled to Haiti to receive it in person, and spoke positively of his government. C1 She also accepted substantial donations from Charles Keating, whose Lincoln Savings fraud cost investors — many of them elderly people who lost their savings — approximately $2.5 billion. When Los Angeles deputy district attorney Paul Turley wrote to Teresa explaining the source of Keating's donations and asking that the money be returned to the victims, she did not respond. C1

Teresa used her extraordinary global platform — amplified by the Nobel Peace Prize, the celebrity that came with it, and her access to heads of state and international media — to oppose contraception and abortion consistently and globally. C1 These positions are consistent with Roman Catholic doctrine. Their consequences were not abstract.

In sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV/AIDS was killing millions and where condom access was the most effective available tool for limiting the epidemic's spread among sexually active populations, Teresa's institutional opposition to contraception — and the institutional weight of the Catholic Church's global healthcare network in advocating against condom distribution — had real-world public health consequences that medical researchers have documented. C2 Teresa herself was not responsible for Catholic health policy in Africa. She was its most globally visible advocate and gave it her most recognizable face. LI