Judging Mother Teresa now is a waste of time
Mother Teresa: For The Love Of God? Sky Documentaries, Monday
Róisín Murphy’s Big City Plan
RTÉ One, Thursday
Eurovision Song Contest
Semi-Finals
RTÉ2, Tuesday/Thursday
In 1969, Malcolm Muggeridge, the celebrated journalist, made a BBC documentary about Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and turned her into an instant celebrity. The world was captivated by this tiny Albanian nun and her Missionaries of Charity who administered to the sick of the Indian city. Her story was remarkable. Born in Skopje in what now is North Macedonia in 1910, she was fascinated as a child by stories of missionary work. At the age of 18, she left home and entered Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham in Dublin as a postulant, and this is where she also learned to speak English, so she could join the Sisters of Loreto on their mission work in India. In 1946, she believed she heard a calling to tend to the poor and the sick, and founded the Missionaries of Charity, adopting the blue and white sari-style habit with which she become synonymous.
After Muggeridge’s programme, money started to flow in, and when her fame spread to the United States, that steady stream became a dam burst. One American woman who joined the order recalled hundreds of thousands of dollars washing through the accounts.
She was one of the contributors to the new Sky Documentaries series, For The Love Of God?, which once again addressed the worrisome issues surrounding Teresa’s mission.
We learned how painkillers and other medicines sent from rich countries lay untouched and unused, because Teresa’s core belief, once enunciated as ‘pain is the kiss of Jesus’, was that suffering had to be endured to give a greater understanding of what Christ went through on the cross.
Privately, self-flagellation was common among the nuns. The American recalled hearing of how they went to the bathrooms at night to whip themselves, and when she asked about it, was supplied with the equipment to do it to herself.
An English doctor, Jack Preger, was so fired by enthusiasm for her work, he went to Calcutta to join her, but quickly became disillusioned, and set up his own street medical service. Standards of nursing care were abysmally poor, and when needles were used at all, they were reused and often blunt at the tip.
As one biographer recalled, Mother Teresa used to say, ‘Suffering shared with Christ’s passion is a wonderful thing’. Except, one imagines, for the person needlessly suffering with a mountain of painkillers just metres away.
Over the years, there has been a significant reassessment not only of her work, but also of her motivation.
In particular, the late journalist Christopher Hitchens was relentless in his criticisms of her. Like all such stories, though, the truth probably lay somewhere in the middle. An Indian man told how he was grateful to be alive having been taken in as an orphan, yet still traumatised by some of what he endured and witnessed.
Of course, Mother Teresa is Saint Teresa now, having been canonised in 2016 by Pope Francis, while the order she founded refused to participate in the documentary. What we do know, though, is that when she was ill herself, she got the best treatment available, including an angioplasty in La Jolla in California.
There was little new in the documentary, and you could come to any conclusion you wished after watching it. Applying what we know now to work begun in the middle of the last century, and how it might have been done better, is a futile exercise in many respects.
Not nearly as futile is planning for how we wish to live in the future, and architect Róisín Murphy made a fine job of outlining the best options in Big City Plan on RTÉ One on Thursday. Paris is a fine model, having largely banned cars from the congested centre, and set about developing the socalled ‘15-minute city’, in which no one lives more that quarter of an hour’s walk or cycle from everything they need – shops, public transport hubs, primary health care centres, and so on.
It is an admirable ambition, and one that involves multiple factors – getting derelict buildings back into service, even if that means repurposing multi-storey car parks as accommodation, more cycle lanes, and so on. We learned that an old flour mill complex in Dublin Port is earmarked as a new cultural quarter, because rents in the city centre are driving arts organisations out of town.
With a drift to working from home, services will have to be decentralised too, and while it all sounded like it would cost a lot of money, it is better to start spending it now than wait until inflation makes it next to impossible. Murphy is a genial guide to this brave new world, and it was a fascinating hour of possibilities.
Not so, alas, for Brooke Scullion, who in Thursday night’s second Eurovision semi-final failed to progress to last night’s gala. She put in a good performance of That’s Rich, but there’s the nagging feeling that Ireland always is looking to the recent past for inspiration for its songs, just as other nations have decided Europop is over for now, and it’s time for that sweeping ballad, or a folk-driven sound that speaks of the country, and not just tawdry nightclubs that could be anywhere.
Brooke sold the song well, but the song was the problem. If we’re serious about ever qualifying for the final again, never mind actually winning the contest, it’s time, just like we’re doing in our cities, to think outside the box and embrace the future, not the past.