Saint or sinner: who was the real Mother Teresa?
Mother Teresa: For The Love of God? (Sky Documentaries) featured quite a spectrum of opinion. “She was a modern-day Jesus.” “She was a charlatan, pure and simple.” “The most admired woman in the world.” “A bit of a psychopath, to be honest with you.”
Documentary-makers often take a position against the prevailing orthodoxy. But that has already been done in the case of Mother Teresa: Christopher Hitchens performed a demolition job on her saintly reputation in the 1990s, both in writing and in a film, Hell’s Angel. Instead, For The Love of God? remains faithful to the question mark in its title. Over three parts, it features interviews with supporters and detractors, inviting the viewer to make up their own mind. The result is a comprehensive and balanced assessment of Mother Teresa’s life, portraying her as a complex figure.
She devoted herself to the poor and worked indefatigably into her eighties. She rescued the destitute from the streets of Kolkata, taking in orphaned children and opening a home for the dying. None of that is in doubt.
But her public image obscured some uncomfortable truths. Jack Preger, a British doctor who went to work in Kolkata, was appalled by the conditions he found at her institutions. Patients were not being provided with decent
medical care or pain relief, because the sisters preferred simply to pray for the alleviation of pain. Much of the money donated by well-wishers did not find its way to the poor, but was instead handed over to the Vatican.
She ran the Missionaries of Charity almost as a cult, according to one former member, with sisters instructed to cease contact with their families. Perhaps most damningly of all, she appeared to turn a blind eye to sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. (The Missionaries of Charity told the programme that Mother Teresa had no knowledge of abuse.)
Her critics included Dr Aroup Chatterjee, who moved to London from Kolkata and was amazed by the extent to which her role had been mythologised in the West. “People kept telling me that Mother Teresa was feeding Kolkata, clothing Kolkata… I just couldn’t believe that this level of lies, misinformation and fantasy could pervade the world in such a way.”
But the Hitchens-level criticism felt as overdone as the blind loyalty displayed by some of her fiercest supporters. While Mother Teresa clearly had many faults, there was nothing here to back up the “charlatan” claim (made by the filmmaker and activist Tariq Ali). Most likely, she was neither saint nor sinner, but something in between.
Watching The Spy Who Died Twice (Channel 4) made me feel rather nostalgic. Not for MPS who fake their own death on a Miami beach and move to Australia – although we could do with a few comic escapades to lighten the political mood – but for the chat show.
Towards the end of this film, which retold the story of John Stonehouse, there was a clip of Stonehouse being interviewed by Russell Harty. Along with Michael Parkinson and Terry Wogan, Harty spoke to the most interesting people of the day, and millions of us tuned in. But what do we have now? Either political programmes or the showbiz fluff of Graham Norton or The One Show. It’s a great shame, although perhaps there is no presenter with the skill to carry it off these days.
Anyway, back to Stonehouse. The film was a rehash of his story, with no great revelations other than the claim – backed by documents from the Czech intelligence archives – that he was a spy, but everyone thought that anyway. It was a fun tale, though, both for those who remember it and those too young to have heard his name.
Stonehouse was once tipped as a future Prime Minister, a “charismatic maverick” who rose quickly through the ranks. But he amassed business debts and was in the pay of the Czechs. One or both of these predicaments pushed him to fake a drowning and assume a new identity, stolen from one of his constituents.
It turned out that Stonehouse was having an affair with his secretary, Sheila Buckley. Both she and his wife Barbara spoke to journalists and appeared on television, lending a soap opera quality to proceedings. Someone in the documentary sniffily said this was “tabloid heaven”, while barrister Geoffrey Robertson said Sheila’s appearance in the story “appealed to the sexism of the Seventies”, but really it appealed to all of us. We didn’t even have to imagine Stonehouse’s call to his wife from a Melbourne police station after being arrested, because we could listen to the recording: “Hello, darling… I’ve been deceiving you. I’m sorry about that.”
Mother Teresa: For The Love of God? ★★★★
The Spy Who Died Twice ★★★