What do you think?
Rate this book
Mother Teresa. The Untold Story
The popular tendency is to deify myths, gurus, and personalities without investigating the claims thoroughly. Mother Teresa is one such name. Does Mother Teresa deserve her reputation as the most charitable person who ever lived? This book makes for a gripping but disconcerting read.
‘Brilliant, heroic, devastating’ – Dr. William Radice, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
‘Necessary, well-documented’ – The Times Higher Education Supplement, London
‘Painstakingly recorded, (exposes) the other side of Teresa’ – Irish Independent, Dublin
‘Very serious and deserves wide dissemination . . . Truly shocking’ – The Irish Times, Dublin
‘Explosive’ – The Asian Age
‘Written with painstaking care’ – The Telegraph, Kolkata
‘Dr. Chatterjee tackles the inaccuracies, misconceptions, and the elaborate propaganda machine enacted to portrait the albanian nun as relevant humanitarian . . .’ – Hemley Gonzalez, founder of Responsible Charity Corp
‘Mother teresa at some point in her career lost connection with reality and ballooned out of all proportion, serving the cause of the ecclesiastical politics of the vatican rather than the cause of suffering humanity. Dr. Aroup Chatterjee does an excellent job in separating the reality from the layers of myth-making’ – Dr. Ketaki Kushari Dyson, writer, translator, and researcher
‘Brilliant, heroic, devastating’ – Dr. William Radice, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
‘Necessary, well-documented’ – The Times Higher Education Supplement, London
‘Painstakingly recorded, (exposes) the other side of Teresa’ – Irish Independent, Dublin
‘Very serious and deserves wide dissemination . . . Truly shocking’ – The Irish Times, Dublin
‘Explosive’ – The Asian Age
‘Written with painstaking care’ – The Telegraph, Kolkata
‘Dr. Chatterjee tackles the inaccuracies, misconceptions, and the elaborate propaganda machine enacted to portrait the albanian nun as relevant humanitarian . . .’ – Hemley Gonzalez, founder of Responsible Charity Corp
‘Mother teresa at some point in her career lost connection with reality and ballooned out of all proportion, serving the cause of the ecclesiastical politics of the vatican rather than the cause of suffering humanity. Dr. Aroup Chatterjee does an excellent job in separating the reality from the layers of myth-making’ – Dr. Ketaki Kushari Dyson, writer, translator, and researcher
400 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2016
69 people are currently reading
704 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
August 22, 2018
Like most Indians born in the fifties and the sixties, I have been raised on a staple diet of stories about the “saintly” Mother Teresa “of Calcutta”. The standard narrative goes like this: Albanian nun comes to the city of Calcutta in India (which is hell on earth with the destitute dying on every street corner and lepers walking with rotted body parts falling off) and becomes a one-woman army patrolling the streets of this nether city and single-handedly caring for the abysmally poor. It is what the world believes even now: and for which she has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and now, in September 2016, made officially a saint of the Catholic Church.
But is this narrative correct?
No, according to Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, who has spent a large part of his life deconstructing the Teresa myth along with Christopher Hitchens. In this book, he tears apart the saint’s facade and reveals the manipulative and selfish individual beneath.
Dr. Chatterjee lists out an impressive array of evidence against Mother Teresa.
1. Mother Teresa was dishonest about her ‘picking up’ destitute from the streets when she hardly ran such a service. Her ambulances were employed as nuns’ taxis.
2. She was cruel to her residents in many ways including subjecting them to used needles, making them stay in filthy surroundings, and not allowing painkillers saying that suffering brought people ‘close to Jesus’.
3. Despite telling the world frequently she was open to other religions, Mother Teresa banned non-Catholic worship in her premises, much to the distress of her residents.
4. Her main agenda was the banning of abortion and contraception, and the conversion of people to Catholicism.
5. Most of her figures regarding the people she helped in Calcutta were fictitious and just pulled out from the air.
6. Mother Teresa possibly fudged her accounts. Even though she got a lot of money as donations, precious little was spent on her institutions in Calcutta.
7. She was a consummate politician as far as staying in the good books of the powers that be was concerned. She compelled all her nuns to vote. She frequently consorted with far right-wing dictators (such as Haiti’s Duvalier) and neoliberalists (like Ronald Reagan) to push her anti-abortion agenda and for monetary favours.
8. Even though officially publicity-shy, she was a publicity hound and would do anything to get herself and her organisation projected.
9. And most important: she did precious little for Calcutta. There are other charities who do a much better job and do not get the limelight.
Then how did Mother Teresa gain her present stature? According to Dr. Chatterjee, it was created by Malcolm Muggeridge, British journalist and author. A devout Christian (and an anti-Semite, according to Chatterjee) , Muggeridge made a movie about Teresa, then a relatively unknown nun, called Something Beautiful Before God. In it, he lionised the Mother Teresa to the point of beatification, even inventing a ‘miracle’ for the support of his arguments. The extra clarity he got for the indoor shots within Mother Teresa’s home were actually due to a better quality of film used, but he made it out to be some sort of ‘divine light’.
And to enhance the saintliness of this icon, the city of Calcutta was vilified as “Black Hole”: a place full of beggars, lepers, orphans and the destitute; a place where infectious diseases were on the rampage always; a place where people were dying on the street corners, daily. This image was carried by the Western media enthusiastically, and parroted by the servile Indian media. Thus, Calcutta the seat of Indian culture slowly became a symbol of the country’s shame.
According to the author, Vatican and the Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II ran an aggressive campaign over the years to enhance Teresa’s reputation and diminish Calcutta’s. A number of Christian and liberal intellectuals and literati did their mite: Dominique Lapierre, with his City of Joy painting the city in blackest colours, being the most obnoxious contribution. And as the Mother’s reputation mounted, she globe-trotted pushing her Catholic agenda to promote conversion and oppose abortion and contraception, all the while preserving her carefully built-up image as the saviour of the poor. Her life’s journey culminated in the Nobel Peace Prize (according to Dr. Chatterjee, a worthless award given to the promoters of the US agenda) and canonisation after death.
***
A book such as this, bashing an internationally accepted icon, stands and falls entirely on two aspects, in my opinion: (1) the authenticity of the evidence presented and (2) the possible bias of the author. On count one, I must say that Dr. Chatterjee has delivered impressively. On all the nine points listed out above, he has quoted recording evidence such as e-mails, letters, taped interviews and government documents. Of course, it may be that he is lying on a large scale to tarnish Mother Teresa’s reputation and this entire evidence is fabricated – but I think that is not easy, as most of these could easily be verified.
On count two, I have to say that I noticed a strong anti-Catholic bias in his viewpoints. Nothing blatant, but it runs as an undercurrent throughout. Maybe it is his anger at the vilification of Calcutta (something which I share): maybe he really has a religious prejudice. It does take a bit away from the otherwise strong case he presents against Mother Teresa.
I believe this is an important book, to balance the hagiographies of the Mother out there. It does present a counterpoint.
But is this narrative correct?
No, according to Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, who has spent a large part of his life deconstructing the Teresa myth along with Christopher Hitchens. In this book, he tears apart the saint’s facade and reveals the manipulative and selfish individual beneath.
Dr. Chatterjee lists out an impressive array of evidence against Mother Teresa.
1. Mother Teresa was dishonest about her ‘picking up’ destitute from the streets when she hardly ran such a service. Her ambulances were employed as nuns’ taxis.
2. She was cruel to her residents in many ways including subjecting them to used needles, making them stay in filthy surroundings, and not allowing painkillers saying that suffering brought people ‘close to Jesus’.
3. Despite telling the world frequently she was open to other religions, Mother Teresa banned non-Catholic worship in her premises, much to the distress of her residents.
4. Her main agenda was the banning of abortion and contraception, and the conversion of people to Catholicism.
5. Most of her figures regarding the people she helped in Calcutta were fictitious and just pulled out from the air.
6. Mother Teresa possibly fudged her accounts. Even though she got a lot of money as donations, precious little was spent on her institutions in Calcutta.
7. She was a consummate politician as far as staying in the good books of the powers that be was concerned. She compelled all her nuns to vote. She frequently consorted with far right-wing dictators (such as Haiti’s Duvalier) and neoliberalists (like Ronald Reagan) to push her anti-abortion agenda and for monetary favours.
8. Even though officially publicity-shy, she was a publicity hound and would do anything to get herself and her organisation projected.
9. And most important: she did precious little for Calcutta. There are other charities who do a much better job and do not get the limelight.
Then how did Mother Teresa gain her present stature? According to Dr. Chatterjee, it was created by Malcolm Muggeridge, British journalist and author. A devout Christian (and an anti-Semite, according to Chatterjee) , Muggeridge made a movie about Teresa, then a relatively unknown nun, called Something Beautiful Before God. In it, he lionised the Mother Teresa to the point of beatification, even inventing a ‘miracle’ for the support of his arguments. The extra clarity he got for the indoor shots within Mother Teresa’s home were actually due to a better quality of film used, but he made it out to be some sort of ‘divine light’.
And to enhance the saintliness of this icon, the city of Calcutta was vilified as “Black Hole”: a place full of beggars, lepers, orphans and the destitute; a place where infectious diseases were on the rampage always; a place where people were dying on the street corners, daily. This image was carried by the Western media enthusiastically, and parroted by the servile Indian media. Thus, Calcutta the seat of Indian culture slowly became a symbol of the country’s shame.
According to the author, Vatican and the Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II ran an aggressive campaign over the years to enhance Teresa’s reputation and diminish Calcutta’s. A number of Christian and liberal intellectuals and literati did their mite: Dominique Lapierre, with his City of Joy painting the city in blackest colours, being the most obnoxious contribution. And as the Mother’s reputation mounted, she globe-trotted pushing her Catholic agenda to promote conversion and oppose abortion and contraception, all the while preserving her carefully built-up image as the saviour of the poor. Her life’s journey culminated in the Nobel Peace Prize (according to Dr. Chatterjee, a worthless award given to the promoters of the US agenda) and canonisation after death.
***
A book such as this, bashing an internationally accepted icon, stands and falls entirely on two aspects, in my opinion: (1) the authenticity of the evidence presented and (2) the possible bias of the author. On count one, I must say that Dr. Chatterjee has delivered impressively. On all the nine points listed out above, he has quoted recording evidence such as e-mails, letters, taped interviews and government documents. Of course, it may be that he is lying on a large scale to tarnish Mother Teresa’s reputation and this entire evidence is fabricated – but I think that is not easy, as most of these could easily be verified.
On count two, I have to say that I noticed a strong anti-Catholic bias in his viewpoints. Nothing blatant, but it runs as an undercurrent throughout. Maybe it is his anger at the vilification of Calcutta (something which I share): maybe he really has a religious prejudice. It does take a bit away from the otherwise strong case he presents against Mother Teresa.
I believe this is an important book, to balance the hagiographies of the Mother out there. It does present a counterpoint.
Read
January 18, 2021Any criticism of Mother Teresa, in India, is brushed aside without consideration because, more often than not it comes from the hindu right who are lampooned as hillbillies in the popular media. However the author, Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, just as any Calcuttan worth his salt, is a Marxist or has been one during his college days. Therefore, his book cannot be dismissed as easily.
Mother Teresa is much more adored and deified in the West than in India. Criticizing her is sacrilege, yes, but she is not the epitome of charity and goodwill that the West makes her out to be. In this well crafted and meticulously researched account the author has revealed the sheer lack of christian generosity that is ascribed to "saint" Mother Teresa.
Being born and raised in Calcutta, Dr. Chatterjee has a personal stake in the infamy borne by his home town due to the "charity" of Mother Teresa. He has had numerous first hand encounters with the Missionaries of Charity - the organization run by the "saint" in question. Dozens of interviews with people from various socioeconomic backgrounds, who came in contact with the "saint" or her organization in Calcutta are recorded in this book.
The reasons behind the story remaining "untold" are discussed in great detail. It seems that the media outlets, hollywood and (obviously) the church - all these institutions acted as the PR group of "saint" Teresa. It is very disturbing, how journalist from all over the world and of every hue and colour in their political outlook could not see through the farcical aura of christian sanctimony around this "saint".
The author presents some very intelligent comments on Indian servility and the persisting condescending Western view of India. He discloses the seemingly (or, actually) fatuous process of beatification and attainment of sainthood in the Catholic Church. Towards the end is a scathing critique of the Noble Committee for presenting the Noble Peace Prize to astonishingly unworthy individuals.
Overall a very enlightening book.
Mother Teresa is much more adored and deified in the West than in India. Criticizing her is sacrilege, yes, but she is not the epitome of charity and goodwill that the West makes her out to be. In this well crafted and meticulously researched account the author has revealed the sheer lack of christian generosity that is ascribed to "saint" Mother Teresa.
Being born and raised in Calcutta, Dr. Chatterjee has a personal stake in the infamy borne by his home town due to the "charity" of Mother Teresa. He has had numerous first hand encounters with the Missionaries of Charity - the organization run by the "saint" in question. Dozens of interviews with people from various socioeconomic backgrounds, who came in contact with the "saint" or her organization in Calcutta are recorded in this book.
The reasons behind the story remaining "untold" are discussed in great detail. It seems that the media outlets, hollywood and (obviously) the church - all these institutions acted as the PR group of "saint" Teresa. It is very disturbing, how journalist from all over the world and of every hue and colour in their political outlook could not see through the farcical aura of christian sanctimony around this "saint".
The author presents some very intelligent comments on Indian servility and the persisting condescending Western view of India. He discloses the seemingly (or, actually) fatuous process of beatification and attainment of sainthood in the Catholic Church. Towards the end is a scathing critique of the Noble Committee for presenting the Noble Peace Prize to astonishingly unworthy individuals.
Overall a very enlightening book.
November 2, 2016
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
And, how right good ole Winston was, when he uttered this line. Mother Teresa lived and “worked” full time to prove how correct Winston was. She just modified it with a few twists of her own. Advertise the lie, get some cronies to publish that lie through books and articles, brainwash a few into believing the lie and lo and behold, we have a “Saint” who cures tumors with medallions.
But, I guess we Indians, especially us Kolkata people, do deserve to be fed such lies, because if we don’t make an effort to open our eyes to the truth, then I guess we get what we deserve. And, our city Kolkata becomes synonymous with the word poverty and squalor all over the world, thanks to a lady who happens to be nothing more than a petty propagandist for the Catholic Church dogmas ranging from conversion to abortion. The term Mother loses all its sanctity when placed in front of her name.
Thanks to one of our own Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, even a handful of us in search of the real face of this woman, get to know the real Teresa and her ministrations. A thoroughly researched book, backed with hard facts, this is a must read for anyone who even has a single iota of doubt on Teresa and her activities.
And, how right good ole Winston was, when he uttered this line. Mother Teresa lived and “worked” full time to prove how correct Winston was. She just modified it with a few twists of her own. Advertise the lie, get some cronies to publish that lie through books and articles, brainwash a few into believing the lie and lo and behold, we have a “Saint” who cures tumors with medallions.
But, I guess we Indians, especially us Kolkata people, do deserve to be fed such lies, because if we don’t make an effort to open our eyes to the truth, then I guess we get what we deserve. And, our city Kolkata becomes synonymous with the word poverty and squalor all over the world, thanks to a lady who happens to be nothing more than a petty propagandist for the Catholic Church dogmas ranging from conversion to abortion. The term Mother loses all its sanctity when placed in front of her name.
Thanks to one of our own Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, even a handful of us in search of the real face of this woman, get to know the real Teresa and her ministrations. A thoroughly researched book, backed with hard facts, this is a must read for anyone who even has a single iota of doubt on Teresa and her activities.
January 18, 2019
Like all people, I was also also enamoured by the persona of Mother Teresa when I was growing up. Her congregation Missionaries of Charity was always in the limelight when some dignitary, head of state or a celebrity visited Calcutta to meet her. I was elated when she was ordained a saint by the Vatican in 2015. After she died, her Missionaries of Charity was somewhat out of the "limelight". This book is an outright critical piece of her haloed persona and the way Calcutta was portrayed as a city teeming with beggars and diseased people. Like the author has mentioned, it aggravated the negative image of Calcutta as portrayed in the book and the film "City of Joy" and for a long time I too was influenced by the book and viewed Calcutta as a place where poverty thrived.
The protagonist in the book is the city of Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta) and the antagonist is Mother Teresa. The author has taken pains to shatter every myth surrounding Mother and her Missionaries of Charity who are viewed as doing good deeds around the world. MT is portrayed as a self-centred individual and vociferous activist of anti-abortion practices, pushing her agenda of promoting religious conversion and anti-abortion around the world.
At one point, MT bashing becomes the whole narrative in the book and it gets too tedious to continue reading. However, with all the feel-good persona of MT ingrained in us, the book presents a counterpoint argument against the same.
With all this bashing, it cannot be denied that she has done things which a commoner would not dare do. The book has a strong anti-Catholic narrative and is a scathing attack on MT.
The protagonist in the book is the city of Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta) and the antagonist is Mother Teresa. The author has taken pains to shatter every myth surrounding Mother and her Missionaries of Charity who are viewed as doing good deeds around the world. MT is portrayed as a self-centred individual and vociferous activist of anti-abortion practices, pushing her agenda of promoting religious conversion and anti-abortion around the world.
At one point, MT bashing becomes the whole narrative in the book and it gets too tedious to continue reading. However, with all the feel-good persona of MT ingrained in us, the book presents a counterpoint argument against the same.
With all this bashing, it cannot be denied that she has done things which a commoner would not dare do. The book has a strong anti-Catholic narrative and is a scathing attack on MT.
November 9, 2017
An excellent book
A well-researched and excellently written book that exposes the monster and charlatan that was Mother Teresa. Chatterjee plots the rise of the myth, shines light on the truth, and conclusively shows how she did far more harm than good.
A well-researched and excellently written book that exposes the monster and charlatan that was Mother Teresa. Chatterjee plots the rise of the myth, shines light on the truth, and conclusively shows how she did far more harm than good.
June 3, 2023
I read it after I saw it being recommended by J. Sai Deepak.
This book is deeply flawed in some following ways :-
1. It tries to tackle the bad image that was being portrayed in media about Calcutta. But does it in a way that doesn't acknowledge the reality of western thought. He compared Calcutta with various Indian cities. And concludes Calcutta is not that bad. With this approach he missed the point that in western thought whole of India is a shit-hole. To them this comparison is like saying between various shitholes Calcutta is the least shitty. This kind of argument won't work in the west. Especially when it's them that he is talking to in this section. Indians don't need Calcutta to be defended. We know how Calcutta is
2. Writer is typically secular in Indian ways. Nowhere he misses the chance to point out BJP is Hindu supremacist party.
At one place, to display religious tolerance of Calcutta he mentions how mother Teresa was allowed to open her centre so close to Kali Mandir. And he says that won't have been possible in any other place in India. He totally missed the point that this kind of tolerance is suicidal. Especially since the whole book is about how fucked up mother Teresa's organisation is. They should have never been allowed. But somehow he didn't see that. He saw secularism and religious tolerance. Even when he is aware of mother terasa's zeal of oneupmanship. He mentions it when he talks about Teresa opening a centre in Pashupatinath temple in Nepal.
3. He does an amazing job listing Nobel peace prizes that were given to people who didn't deserve it but at the end he mentioned malala as someone who deserved the award.
This is a bit confusing. It does amazing job with life of mother terasa. And her work or lack thereof. But it totally failed to put in the broader context. Which is essential here.
This book is deeply flawed in some following ways :-
1. It tries to tackle the bad image that was being portrayed in media about Calcutta. But does it in a way that doesn't acknowledge the reality of western thought. He compared Calcutta with various Indian cities. And concludes Calcutta is not that bad. With this approach he missed the point that in western thought whole of India is a shit-hole. To them this comparison is like saying between various shitholes Calcutta is the least shitty. This kind of argument won't work in the west. Especially when it's them that he is talking to in this section. Indians don't need Calcutta to be defended. We know how Calcutta is
2. Writer is typically secular in Indian ways. Nowhere he misses the chance to point out BJP is Hindu supremacist party.
At one place, to display religious tolerance of Calcutta he mentions how mother Teresa was allowed to open her centre so close to Kali Mandir. And he says that won't have been possible in any other place in India. He totally missed the point that this kind of tolerance is suicidal. Especially since the whole book is about how fucked up mother Teresa's organisation is. They should have never been allowed. But somehow he didn't see that. He saw secularism and religious tolerance. Even when he is aware of mother terasa's zeal of oneupmanship. He mentions it when he talks about Teresa opening a centre in Pashupatinath temple in Nepal.
3. He does an amazing job listing Nobel peace prizes that were given to people who didn't deserve it but at the end he mentioned malala as someone who deserved the award.
This is a bit confusing. It does amazing job with life of mother terasa. And her work or lack thereof. But it totally failed to put in the broader context. Which is essential here.
May 8, 2020
Some interesting and shocking revelations which the author claims to have video, photographic and eye witness evidence of. That is why I gave it three stars.
However ... the book was written so erratically. There was no order to it. For example it jumped from the 1960s to the 1990s back to the 1960s then to the 1970s. It was really difficult to keep up. The writer went off track quite a lot, in that the information within a chapter did not tally with the title and theme of that chapter. He also repeated himself a lot, making the same point in multiple chapters. It just seems that there was no planning to the structure of the book. The writer just felt the need to go on a rant and got all of his thoughts down in one angry go. This made it difficult to read and I could only read a small amount at a time.
Sadly, the way that the book was written made it seem as though the author just had an axe to grind. Not sticking to the point and repeating himself made him come across as somebody with a chip on his shoulder about the Catholic church or Mother Therese herself. I am sure this is not the case. I am sure that there is a very important point behind this book in that some of the most celebrated "saints" in history were not the good and selfless people they are thought to have been. If half of the information within this book are true, then Mother Therese certainly wasn't, but because I didn't like the style of writing I sadly lost interest.
However ... the book was written so erratically. There was no order to it. For example it jumped from the 1960s to the 1990s back to the 1960s then to the 1970s. It was really difficult to keep up. The writer went off track quite a lot, in that the information within a chapter did not tally with the title and theme of that chapter. He also repeated himself a lot, making the same point in multiple chapters. It just seems that there was no planning to the structure of the book. The writer just felt the need to go on a rant and got all of his thoughts down in one angry go. This made it difficult to read and I could only read a small amount at a time.
Sadly, the way that the book was written made it seem as though the author just had an axe to grind. Not sticking to the point and repeating himself made him come across as somebody with a chip on his shoulder about the Catholic church or Mother Therese herself. I am sure this is not the case. I am sure that there is a very important point behind this book in that some of the most celebrated "saints" in history were not the good and selfless people they are thought to have been. If half of the information within this book are true, then Mother Therese certainly wasn't, but because I didn't like the style of writing I sadly lost interest.
October 29, 2017
Extremely partisan, sometimes bordering on the ranting of one obsessed. Could have been more balanced. Recommended for those that revel in taking down icons because they have feet of clay, all the while forgetting that these icons, also human, have done more good than we have
November 28, 2018
Cruelty unfolded - the untold story of a white lady with a dark heart.
January 13, 2017
There were (separate) times when I found the critique to be monotonous, contradictory or even a tad bit unfair.. Not sure if that could have been avoided- but there is no doubt that this is a story that needed to be told. The painstaking approach of the author makes it a better read.
November 21, 2016
Fantastic research work. The book reveals the hidden truth.
Got clarity on my understanding towards The Mother
Got clarity on my understanding towards The Mother
July 8, 2018
Excellently researched! An eye opener and should be read by everyone.
September 25, 2018
Great information, poorly written.
Read
May 7, 2024Want to know to what extent did really mother teresa brought change in the lives of calcuttans and whether it is at the good or the bad of the city's glory, did she did any good with her donations and funds that given by her admirers internationally did she use it or what happen to her, also raises serious questions on how well the calcuttans felt about her work and intentions of the activities run by the Missionaries of Charity.
THe otherside of the Mother Teresa
THe otherside of the Mother Teresa
April 28, 2020
Only some facts are new to me, ideologically very much aware of this creature; absolute state of this country that this organisation still exists here.
May 15, 2021
Painstakingly written
June 21, 2022
Book: Mother Teresa. The Untold Story
Author: Aroup Chatterjee
Publisher: Fingerprint! Publishing; Latest Edition (1 March 2016)
Language: English
Paperback: 400 pages
Item Weight: 281 g
Dimensions: 20.3 x 25.4 x 4.7 cm
Country of Origin: India
Price: 218/-
“We are told that the centre of gravity of Christianity is shifting from Europe and America to the Third World. This is a euphemism for saying that a lot of the countries of the Third World have been productively colonized, that the people of these countries have forgotten their native roots. They have even begun to be recruited to the missionary corps and they are taken out to countries other than their own in the Third World region for proselytizing work. They cost less and they serve as good stool-pigeons. Such recruits by now number 32,500. In India, for instance, out of a total of 5,979 foreign missionaries, 39 came from the Communist world, and 267 came from Third World countries like Burma, Brazil, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Philippines, etc.
In the last three hundred years, Imperialism used its victims themselves to subdue each other. Christianity is doing the same…”
Mother Teresa of Calcutta, for decades gripped the mainstream media. She resided amongst the “poorest of the poor.”
From Brazil to Banaras and Shimla to Sydney people’s eyes would moisten with tears as the wizened old woman held infants in her arms and proclaimed that through the power of God Almighty she would address the many wrongs of this world and help millions whose lives had been blighted by poverty.
And yet for some, their eyes only glistened with anger, their hearts were filled only with the beat of injustice, as they saw only too clearly a dark shadow cast by a woman who was far from the angel of the gutters she was said to be.
This book presents the hideous truth.
One of the people knew as well as anyone about what Mother Teresa did is Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, the author of this book. He grew up in Calcutta and while studying to be a doctor was one of few voices shouting about the terrible state of the poor. He did his shouting from the slums. He later went over to the UK where he said he was shocked by the British adulation of Mother Teresa.
She was indeed portrayed as a saint, even though when he was campaigning in the slums back in India he said he never saw any of the sisters.
Aroup writes in this book about what he calls a “cult of suffering” and spends all the chapters trying to comprehend how, if at all, Mother Teresa and her gang of sisterly angels were helping the poor.
Chatterjee spoke with many, many people who’d worked closely with the sisters, which concludes with him writing the book, “Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict.”
Maybe some people don’t trust his verdict, but he was debatably in a very excellent position to deliver one.
Into fourteen chapters this book is divided:
1. ‘She rushes in to places where we would never go. . .’
2. Ecumenical with the Truth: Saintly Tall Tales
3. How the Myth Began – The Muggeridge Connection
4. How Journalists and Authors are ‘Doing the Work of God’
5. Calcutta
6. The Destitutes of Calcutta: A Profile
7. Mother Teresa’s Homes – Views from Within
8. Vatican Asks its ‘Great Friend’ to Write a Tome and Hollywood comes to Calcutta
9. Mother Teresa’s Accounts
10. The Politics of Mother Teresa
11. What Other Charities are doing in and around Calcutta
12. Calcutta’s Relationship with Mother Teresa
13. Death and Funeral
14. From ‘Living Saint’ to Saint
If you’ve read this review up until this point, you might feel disheveled and still cannot see anything like a ‘shadowy side’ to the person who was called the patron saint of missionaries.
Maybe you’re too well aware that this woman was candid about the miserable poverty that certain residents of India were faced with back in the day.
Maybe you can recall from the pages of history, the devastation of the 1943 famine and how millions died of starvation and disease.
This was a woman who in the name of God promised to live among the poor and never waver from that path.
Like a martyr, she would suffer her own sequence of illnesses, and yet she would never turn her back on the slums. Through her “Missionaries of Charity” she would tend to the people whose home was the streets and whose daily bread were the scraps people threw away. She would hold out a hand to the blind, to the lepers, to the people that society had for the most part made pariahs. And it is true, we don’t question it, that she and her fellow missionaries held their arms out to the poor. They did indeed offer relief to people on the edge who felt vulnerable and lost. For those in the last throes of life, besieged by diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis, Mother Teresa and her sisters opened their home. For those at the start of life but without parents to care for them, she built much-needed orphanages. In her own words, Mother Teresa said, with her limitless love she would make it her life’s work to protect, “the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for all through society, people that have become a lumber to the society and are shunned by everyone.” Teresa and her sisters, with the help of funding on tap, opened hospices and orphanages and more all over the world. By the time she was done, her Missionaries of Charity consisted of 4,000 sisters and 300 brothers doing good at 610 missions that covered much of the globe. They were helped by over a million workers who did anything from giving hope to orphans to handing out free soup to the homeless. So really, why should such an apogee of humanity have to take any flak?
Aroup Chatterjee converts into the devil’s advocate.
As you will know, nothing in this life is cut and dried. Every story has myriad other narratives running through the focal narrative, or as we’re told when we are children, there are always two sides to every story.
One of the first people to start talking about chinks in Mother Teresa’s gilded armor was the critic Christopher Hitchens. In fact, while she was still alive, he co-wrote and hosted a documentary called “Hell’s Angel.”
Soon after that, he wrote the book, “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.”
This man surely had a bee in his bonnet when it came to the lady of the light. The overarching appraisal was that Mother Teresa and her sisters received millions upon millions of dollars to do God’s work and didn’t do a very good job.
It’s significant we say, “God’s work” and not just volunteer work. Actually, many people criticized her charities, saying that even with untold millions they were run by people who could not provide adequate care.
Pain relief was seldom given to anyone and professional medical personnel were not often seen in the thrum of volunteers who really didn’t know what they were doing. Still, for the public in the West who watched her on TV, they only saw a saint. For those who donated money, it was like doing good in the eyes of God.
That can of course have certain benefits come judgment day. You see, during the medieval period, there was something called indulgences.
In a nutshell, a person could buy their way out of hell or at least get a few of their sins scratched off God’s ethereal chalkboard.
Critics believed Mother Teresa was selling indulgences and to them, it was a kind of con.
Here’s what Hitchens said about that: “This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty.
She said that suffering was a gift from God.”
Hitchens said he once got to talk with her face-to-face and she told him outright that she wasn’t trying to get rid of poverty and that she was certainly not a social worker. Her mission was to create more Catholics in the world and expand the Catholic Church. He and others argued that she was never trying to fix poverty or lessen some of the pains that come with it.
How could she be, they said, her facilities were badly run and they did not focus on methods of poverty reduction in terms of education or the empowerment of women?
In 2010, long after the so-called “Angel of Mercy” had passed away, a writer for Forbes visited one of the Missionaries of Charity and said what she found were volunteers and other people questioning what exactly was going down in there. Aroup records this in his book.
The article said those places had always been resistant to change and things had to be done the way Mother Teresa wanted them done, which most of the time meant volunteers doing the jobs that they were not trained to do.
The writer said, “Missionaries has always kept change at bay. But in a world where it is very hard to hide behind secrecy, the number of disillusioned followers is increasing.”
She interviewed one of the volunteers, a gentleman from the United States who went over to India to do some good.
It should be mentioned here that the volunteers don’t get any say in the running of the places nor do they have any idea about all the money coming in and where it goes. This particular volunteer expressed surprise at what he first discovered over the first few days.
In his own words, he said, “I was shocked to see the negligence. Needles were washed in cold water and reused and expired medicines were given to the inmates. There were people who had a chance to live if given proper care…”
So, again, people have asked about how so much cash can do so little, but that volunteer said in no time at all he witnessed someone needlessly dying. He said another volunteer without any medical training had tried to feed a paralyzed person, but he did it wrong and that person died.
He said he also saw someone having a toe amputated and not being given any kind of anesthetic.
Yet another volunteer said she saw in one facility, “syringes run under cold water and reused, aspirin given to those with terminal cancer, and cold baths given to everyone.”
Mother Teresa allowed no criticism of such practices.
People countered such criticisms, saying, “Hang on, these places are home to the sick, the poor, and the dying; they are not a hospital”.
Ok, state the naysayers, fine, but why not offer some real medical expertise with all that cash?
As Aroup Chatterjee shows, the money donated was not exactly pennies.
And what about the ones who recovered, certainly there should be some sort of rehabilitation going on to help them when they were ready to leave?
One European volunteer said sometimes people left of their own accord, but other times they were forced back onto the streets with no help or guidance as to how to survive. For that reason, they might soon be back.
In this respect, it almost sounds like the prison system in many countries and their “revolving doors.”
Some of them would rather not have empty beds.
In the world of perpetual poverty, there’s the term, ‘The Charitable-Industrial Complex’.
Aroup accuses Mother Teresa of being part of that, perhaps even a lodestone.
That same volunteer as we just mentioned said one woman was very sick with diabetes, and then she was gone.
The sisters said she had been placed in another facility, but a few days later the volunteer saw her back on the streets.
She still couldn’t walk right.
There are numerous reports of money being donated to certain Missionaries of Charity facilities but not much of that money being seen.
A German report going all the way back to 1991 said that only seven percent of the donated cash in fact appeared at the place it was donated to.
Ok, so where is the mislaid money?
No one knows, but Forbes points out that it’s controlled by the Vatican now that Mother Teresa is resting in peace.
Support was never a bad thing for her, of course.
One investigation found that the Vatican Bank, aka, the ‘Institute for the Works of Religion’, had one mammoth account in her name.
It said the account was worth billions upon billions upon billions --- and had she one day just decided to make just as mammoth withdrawals the bank would have been on its knees.
If that’s not enough to suspend this book on this thin ice it’s skating on, she was also called a racist…well, in fact, a white saviour-type of racist who pitied a people that could not save themselves and needed her as benefactor-in-chief.
She was of course clapped on by frivolous white people who thought their clapping helped those poor brown people, while not thinking too much about the details and genesis of widespread abject poverty.
As for the western media with its decades-long grandstanding of Mother Teresa, it too, say the critics, played a part in a kind of white colonialism.
Chatterjee says, “I spent months in libraries in London. I also traveled the world researching it. I followed slum dwellers, beggars, destitute children with a video camera. I interviewed hundreds of people. I stood with a video camera outside Teresa's home for hours.”
Chatterjee’s verdict is simply this: Mother Teresa, or the idea of her great, brilliant, immutable goodness was “bogus.”
He talks about the sorry state of the facilities he visited, the lack of hygiene, the needless deaths, and of course the baptisms that were given to people on their deathbeds without their consent.
Even worse, he says, when Mother Teresa claimed her Nobel Peace Prize, she was quick to state how she had saved the lives of tens of thousands of people in India.
Well, after Chatterjee did his research, he said you could possibly give her the number 700, which isn’t a lot considering the many, many billions of dollars she received.
His research also found that in Calcutta, the Missionaries of Charity was giving very little help in terms of food and water compared to most other charities. In some countries, help was hardly given at all, and conversion to Christianity was what was really going on.
But the media loved her, of course.
Many of you young readers of this review were likely not alive when she was, but rest assured, she was hardly ever off the TV.
Politicians could get brownie points for shaking her hand while fraudsters, dictators, and other very bad people were only too happy to appear on with her before the flashing cameras.
Speaking of politicians, Bill Clinton made her an honorary citizen of the US, because she showed "how we can make real our dreams for a just and good society.”
Everyone wanted a piece of her. It was as if she had received a television canonization, which Chatterjee ascribes mostly to the US media.
This was happening, he says, while the most vulnerable people in India were still not getting the help they needed…
The New York Times caught up with him fairly recently, and for the most part, he said what we have already told you, minus the “blankets stained with feces… washed in the same sink used to clean dishes.”
He said at least nowadays the Missionaries of Charity do have medical professionals that come in and when things are bad for people they are taken to a hospital. Back in the day, he said he struggled to explain the myth of her to the people of Calcutta.
They weren’t interested when he expressed that the miracles people claimed she’d performed were perhaps not miracles at all.
He wasn’t precisely popular for his opinions.
Mother Teresa was finally made a saint in 2016 for allegedly healing a man with a brain tumor.
Thousands upon thousands of people around the world wept tears of joy. Chatterjee’s contention that this was more hocus-pocus fell on many deaf ears in the West. He concluded his chat with the Times, saying, “They don’t care about whether a third-world city’s dignity or prestige has been hampered by an Albanian nun. So, obviously, they may be interested in the lies and the charlatans and the fraud that’s going on, but the whole story, they’re not interested in.” On top of all this, Mother was known to move with some very hazy and shady people, including neo-fascists in Italy and a dictatorship in Argentina whose members were later convicted of genocide and other crimes against humanity. Her friend in Haiti, Jean-Claude Duvalier, was also accused of torture and genocide. She received billions from fraudster Charles Keating and flew on his private jet. In the US this humble, modest woman only got the best medical treatment that wealthy people can buy. After her death, even NPR gave credence to her performance of a real-life, bonafide miracle, writing, “Hard-core rationalists would not be likely to see such cases as evidence of a ‘miracle’ even while acknowledging they have no alternative explanation.”
Dig on the fine-points that Chatterjee’s book comes uyp with – grim conclusions, if tryth be told –
*Mother Teresa was dishonest about her ‘picking up’ destitute from streets when she hardly ran such a service. Her ambulances were employed as nuns’ taxis.
*She was cruel to her residents in many ways including subjecting them to used needles.
*Despite telling the world frequently that she was open to other religions she banned non-Catholic worship in her premises, much to the distress of her residents.
*She operated a strict closed-door policy at her orphanages in Calcutta – street-children had no chance of getting help there, neither did poor women with babies.
*She used dangerous baby milk called Belgomilk which she got free – this concoction can cause serious harm to babies.
*Her claim that she fed up to 9,000 in her soup kitchens in Calcutta had no basis in truth – she fed a handful.
*She made up an arbitrary figure of 61,273 – fewer babies born due to natural contraception – even in her Nobel speech, without a jot of evidence.
*Despite telling journalists that she wanted to die like the poor she received the most expensive treatments countless times in various clinics in India and abroad.
*She recurrently meddled in politics. She used to vote in Indian elections. She criticised India’s Freedom of Religion Bill. Most alarmingly, she supported Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency when democracy was suspended and torture was routine; thousands of men were compulsorily sterilised during Emergency. Contrast all this with her feigning gullibility about politics.
*She would accept money from anyone, no matter how corrupt, even if she knew that the money had been stolen from very poor people.
*It would be a disservice to her to be called ‘of Calcutta’ as Calcutta is one of the world’s most pro-abortion cities.
To this day the world has no proof that she was selling children to Catholic couples after falsifying their documents, hence this issue does not feature in the book with vociferousness.
Author: Aroup Chatterjee
Publisher: Fingerprint! Publishing; Latest Edition (1 March 2016)
Language: English
Paperback: 400 pages
Item Weight: 281 g
Dimensions: 20.3 x 25.4 x 4.7 cm
Country of Origin: India
Price: 218/-
“We are told that the centre of gravity of Christianity is shifting from Europe and America to the Third World. This is a euphemism for saying that a lot of the countries of the Third World have been productively colonized, that the people of these countries have forgotten their native roots. They have even begun to be recruited to the missionary corps and they are taken out to countries other than their own in the Third World region for proselytizing work. They cost less and they serve as good stool-pigeons. Such recruits by now number 32,500. In India, for instance, out of a total of 5,979 foreign missionaries, 39 came from the Communist world, and 267 came from Third World countries like Burma, Brazil, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Philippines, etc.
In the last three hundred years, Imperialism used its victims themselves to subdue each other. Christianity is doing the same…”
Mother Teresa of Calcutta, for decades gripped the mainstream media. She resided amongst the “poorest of the poor.”
From Brazil to Banaras and Shimla to Sydney people’s eyes would moisten with tears as the wizened old woman held infants in her arms and proclaimed that through the power of God Almighty she would address the many wrongs of this world and help millions whose lives had been blighted by poverty.
And yet for some, their eyes only glistened with anger, their hearts were filled only with the beat of injustice, as they saw only too clearly a dark shadow cast by a woman who was far from the angel of the gutters she was said to be.
This book presents the hideous truth.
One of the people knew as well as anyone about what Mother Teresa did is Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, the author of this book. He grew up in Calcutta and while studying to be a doctor was one of few voices shouting about the terrible state of the poor. He did his shouting from the slums. He later went over to the UK where he said he was shocked by the British adulation of Mother Teresa.
She was indeed portrayed as a saint, even though when he was campaigning in the slums back in India he said he never saw any of the sisters.
Aroup writes in this book about what he calls a “cult of suffering” and spends all the chapters trying to comprehend how, if at all, Mother Teresa and her gang of sisterly angels were helping the poor.
Chatterjee spoke with many, many people who’d worked closely with the sisters, which concludes with him writing the book, “Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict.”
Maybe some people don’t trust his verdict, but he was debatably in a very excellent position to deliver one.
Into fourteen chapters this book is divided:
1. ‘She rushes in to places where we would never go. . .’
2. Ecumenical with the Truth: Saintly Tall Tales
3. How the Myth Began – The Muggeridge Connection
4. How Journalists and Authors are ‘Doing the Work of God’
5. Calcutta
6. The Destitutes of Calcutta: A Profile
7. Mother Teresa’s Homes – Views from Within
8. Vatican Asks its ‘Great Friend’ to Write a Tome and Hollywood comes to Calcutta
9. Mother Teresa’s Accounts
10. The Politics of Mother Teresa
11. What Other Charities are doing in and around Calcutta
12. Calcutta’s Relationship with Mother Teresa
13. Death and Funeral
14. From ‘Living Saint’ to Saint
If you’ve read this review up until this point, you might feel disheveled and still cannot see anything like a ‘shadowy side’ to the person who was called the patron saint of missionaries.
Maybe you’re too well aware that this woman was candid about the miserable poverty that certain residents of India were faced with back in the day.
Maybe you can recall from the pages of history, the devastation of the 1943 famine and how millions died of starvation and disease.
This was a woman who in the name of God promised to live among the poor and never waver from that path.
Like a martyr, she would suffer her own sequence of illnesses, and yet she would never turn her back on the slums. Through her “Missionaries of Charity” she would tend to the people whose home was the streets and whose daily bread were the scraps people threw away. She would hold out a hand to the blind, to the lepers, to the people that society had for the most part made pariahs. And it is true, we don’t question it, that she and her fellow missionaries held their arms out to the poor. They did indeed offer relief to people on the edge who felt vulnerable and lost. For those in the last throes of life, besieged by diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis, Mother Teresa and her sisters opened their home. For those at the start of life but without parents to care for them, she built much-needed orphanages. In her own words, Mother Teresa said, with her limitless love she would make it her life’s work to protect, “the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for all through society, people that have become a lumber to the society and are shunned by everyone.” Teresa and her sisters, with the help of funding on tap, opened hospices and orphanages and more all over the world. By the time she was done, her Missionaries of Charity consisted of 4,000 sisters and 300 brothers doing good at 610 missions that covered much of the globe. They were helped by over a million workers who did anything from giving hope to orphans to handing out free soup to the homeless. So really, why should such an apogee of humanity have to take any flak?
Aroup Chatterjee converts into the devil’s advocate.
As you will know, nothing in this life is cut and dried. Every story has myriad other narratives running through the focal narrative, or as we’re told when we are children, there are always two sides to every story.
One of the first people to start talking about chinks in Mother Teresa’s gilded armor was the critic Christopher Hitchens. In fact, while she was still alive, he co-wrote and hosted a documentary called “Hell’s Angel.”
Soon after that, he wrote the book, “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.”
This man surely had a bee in his bonnet when it came to the lady of the light. The overarching appraisal was that Mother Teresa and her sisters received millions upon millions of dollars to do God’s work and didn’t do a very good job.
It’s significant we say, “God’s work” and not just volunteer work. Actually, many people criticized her charities, saying that even with untold millions they were run by people who could not provide adequate care.
Pain relief was seldom given to anyone and professional medical personnel were not often seen in the thrum of volunteers who really didn’t know what they were doing. Still, for the public in the West who watched her on TV, they only saw a saint. For those who donated money, it was like doing good in the eyes of God.
That can of course have certain benefits come judgment day. You see, during the medieval period, there was something called indulgences.
In a nutshell, a person could buy their way out of hell or at least get a few of their sins scratched off God’s ethereal chalkboard.
Critics believed Mother Teresa was selling indulgences and to them, it was a kind of con.
Here’s what Hitchens said about that: “This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty.
She said that suffering was a gift from God.”
Hitchens said he once got to talk with her face-to-face and she told him outright that she wasn’t trying to get rid of poverty and that she was certainly not a social worker. Her mission was to create more Catholics in the world and expand the Catholic Church. He and others argued that she was never trying to fix poverty or lessen some of the pains that come with it.
How could she be, they said, her facilities were badly run and they did not focus on methods of poverty reduction in terms of education or the empowerment of women?
In 2010, long after the so-called “Angel of Mercy” had passed away, a writer for Forbes visited one of the Missionaries of Charity and said what she found were volunteers and other people questioning what exactly was going down in there. Aroup records this in his book.
The article said those places had always been resistant to change and things had to be done the way Mother Teresa wanted them done, which most of the time meant volunteers doing the jobs that they were not trained to do.
The writer said, “Missionaries has always kept change at bay. But in a world where it is very hard to hide behind secrecy, the number of disillusioned followers is increasing.”
She interviewed one of the volunteers, a gentleman from the United States who went over to India to do some good.
It should be mentioned here that the volunteers don’t get any say in the running of the places nor do they have any idea about all the money coming in and where it goes. This particular volunteer expressed surprise at what he first discovered over the first few days.
In his own words, he said, “I was shocked to see the negligence. Needles were washed in cold water and reused and expired medicines were given to the inmates. There were people who had a chance to live if given proper care…”
So, again, people have asked about how so much cash can do so little, but that volunteer said in no time at all he witnessed someone needlessly dying. He said another volunteer without any medical training had tried to feed a paralyzed person, but he did it wrong and that person died.
He said he also saw someone having a toe amputated and not being given any kind of anesthetic.
Yet another volunteer said she saw in one facility, “syringes run under cold water and reused, aspirin given to those with terminal cancer, and cold baths given to everyone.”
Mother Teresa allowed no criticism of such practices.
People countered such criticisms, saying, “Hang on, these places are home to the sick, the poor, and the dying; they are not a hospital”.
Ok, state the naysayers, fine, but why not offer some real medical expertise with all that cash?
As Aroup Chatterjee shows, the money donated was not exactly pennies.
And what about the ones who recovered, certainly there should be some sort of rehabilitation going on to help them when they were ready to leave?
One European volunteer said sometimes people left of their own accord, but other times they were forced back onto the streets with no help or guidance as to how to survive. For that reason, they might soon be back.
In this respect, it almost sounds like the prison system in many countries and their “revolving doors.”
Some of them would rather not have empty beds.
In the world of perpetual poverty, there’s the term, ‘The Charitable-Industrial Complex’.
Aroup accuses Mother Teresa of being part of that, perhaps even a lodestone.
That same volunteer as we just mentioned said one woman was very sick with diabetes, and then she was gone.
The sisters said she had been placed in another facility, but a few days later the volunteer saw her back on the streets.
She still couldn’t walk right.
There are numerous reports of money being donated to certain Missionaries of Charity facilities but not much of that money being seen.
A German report going all the way back to 1991 said that only seven percent of the donated cash in fact appeared at the place it was donated to.
Ok, so where is the mislaid money?
No one knows, but Forbes points out that it’s controlled by the Vatican now that Mother Teresa is resting in peace.
Support was never a bad thing for her, of course.
One investigation found that the Vatican Bank, aka, the ‘Institute for the Works of Religion’, had one mammoth account in her name.
It said the account was worth billions upon billions upon billions --- and had she one day just decided to make just as mammoth withdrawals the bank would have been on its knees.
If that’s not enough to suspend this book on this thin ice it’s skating on, she was also called a racist…well, in fact, a white saviour-type of racist who pitied a people that could not save themselves and needed her as benefactor-in-chief.
She was of course clapped on by frivolous white people who thought their clapping helped those poor brown people, while not thinking too much about the details and genesis of widespread abject poverty.
As for the western media with its decades-long grandstanding of Mother Teresa, it too, say the critics, played a part in a kind of white colonialism.
Chatterjee says, “I spent months in libraries in London. I also traveled the world researching it. I followed slum dwellers, beggars, destitute children with a video camera. I interviewed hundreds of people. I stood with a video camera outside Teresa's home for hours.”
Chatterjee’s verdict is simply this: Mother Teresa, or the idea of her great, brilliant, immutable goodness was “bogus.”
He talks about the sorry state of the facilities he visited, the lack of hygiene, the needless deaths, and of course the baptisms that were given to people on their deathbeds without their consent.
Even worse, he says, when Mother Teresa claimed her Nobel Peace Prize, she was quick to state how she had saved the lives of tens of thousands of people in India.
Well, after Chatterjee did his research, he said you could possibly give her the number 700, which isn’t a lot considering the many, many billions of dollars she received.
His research also found that in Calcutta, the Missionaries of Charity was giving very little help in terms of food and water compared to most other charities. In some countries, help was hardly given at all, and conversion to Christianity was what was really going on.
But the media loved her, of course.
Many of you young readers of this review were likely not alive when she was, but rest assured, she was hardly ever off the TV.
Politicians could get brownie points for shaking her hand while fraudsters, dictators, and other very bad people were only too happy to appear on with her before the flashing cameras.
Speaking of politicians, Bill Clinton made her an honorary citizen of the US, because she showed "how we can make real our dreams for a just and good society.”
Everyone wanted a piece of her. It was as if she had received a television canonization, which Chatterjee ascribes mostly to the US media.
This was happening, he says, while the most vulnerable people in India were still not getting the help they needed…
The New York Times caught up with him fairly recently, and for the most part, he said what we have already told you, minus the “blankets stained with feces… washed in the same sink used to clean dishes.”
He said at least nowadays the Missionaries of Charity do have medical professionals that come in and when things are bad for people they are taken to a hospital. Back in the day, he said he struggled to explain the myth of her to the people of Calcutta.
They weren’t interested when he expressed that the miracles people claimed she’d performed were perhaps not miracles at all.
He wasn’t precisely popular for his opinions.
Mother Teresa was finally made a saint in 2016 for allegedly healing a man with a brain tumor.
Thousands upon thousands of people around the world wept tears of joy. Chatterjee’s contention that this was more hocus-pocus fell on many deaf ears in the West. He concluded his chat with the Times, saying, “They don’t care about whether a third-world city’s dignity or prestige has been hampered by an Albanian nun. So, obviously, they may be interested in the lies and the charlatans and the fraud that’s going on, but the whole story, they’re not interested in.” On top of all this, Mother was known to move with some very hazy and shady people, including neo-fascists in Italy and a dictatorship in Argentina whose members were later convicted of genocide and other crimes against humanity. Her friend in Haiti, Jean-Claude Duvalier, was also accused of torture and genocide. She received billions from fraudster Charles Keating and flew on his private jet. In the US this humble, modest woman only got the best medical treatment that wealthy people can buy. After her death, even NPR gave credence to her performance of a real-life, bonafide miracle, writing, “Hard-core rationalists would not be likely to see such cases as evidence of a ‘miracle’ even while acknowledging they have no alternative explanation.”
Dig on the fine-points that Chatterjee’s book comes uyp with – grim conclusions, if tryth be told –
*Mother Teresa was dishonest about her ‘picking up’ destitute from streets when she hardly ran such a service. Her ambulances were employed as nuns’ taxis.
*She was cruel to her residents in many ways including subjecting them to used needles.
*Despite telling the world frequently that she was open to other religions she banned non-Catholic worship in her premises, much to the distress of her residents.
*She operated a strict closed-door policy at her orphanages in Calcutta – street-children had no chance of getting help there, neither did poor women with babies.
*She used dangerous baby milk called Belgomilk which she got free – this concoction can cause serious harm to babies.
*Her claim that she fed up to 9,000 in her soup kitchens in Calcutta had no basis in truth – she fed a handful.
*She made up an arbitrary figure of 61,273 – fewer babies born due to natural contraception – even in her Nobel speech, without a jot of evidence.
*Despite telling journalists that she wanted to die like the poor she received the most expensive treatments countless times in various clinics in India and abroad.
*She recurrently meddled in politics. She used to vote in Indian elections. She criticised India’s Freedom of Religion Bill. Most alarmingly, she supported Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency when democracy was suspended and torture was routine; thousands of men were compulsorily sterilised during Emergency. Contrast all this with her feigning gullibility about politics.
*She would accept money from anyone, no matter how corrupt, even if she knew that the money had been stolen from very poor people.
*It would be a disservice to her to be called ‘of Calcutta’ as Calcutta is one of the world’s most pro-abortion cities.
To this day the world has no proof that she was selling children to Catholic couples after falsifying their documents, hence this issue does not feature in the book with vociferousness.
December 24, 2023
Mother Teresa represents the perfect picture of a white man’s (or in this case, woman’s burden) to civilise the heathens. The stories that have been piled up and concocted to make the Catholic saint saintly are just mind-boggling when compared to cold hard facts. This book is an absolute must read to understand the truth behind the apparent saviour of Calcutta.
June 27, 2024
A must read.
It’s incredible how narratives built by media go such a long way in shaping public opinions, truth would sit out in a corner and the lies would be feted across the world. Mother Teresa has been such a big name for as far as I can think. This book was an eye opener. I had read few articles questioning her whole persona but this book just shakes all the foundations her credibility is built on. The religious angle, the political clout, the unashamed embellishments of her charitable deeds, all of it is very disturbing. Although, everybody inflates figures but someone in her place, someone so revered, their falsities, however small, attain a different dimension.
The author seems to have spent his entire life scouring for truth and trying to bring it forward. The truest charity never seeks adulation, it gives without expecting reverence.
It’s incredible how narratives built by media go such a long way in shaping public opinions, truth would sit out in a corner and the lies would be feted across the world. Mother Teresa has been such a big name for as far as I can think. This book was an eye opener. I had read few articles questioning her whole persona but this book just shakes all the foundations her credibility is built on. The religious angle, the political clout, the unashamed embellishments of her charitable deeds, all of it is very disturbing. Although, everybody inflates figures but someone in her place, someone so revered, their falsities, however small, attain a different dimension.
The author seems to have spent his entire life scouring for truth and trying to bring it forward. The truest charity never seeks adulation, it gives without expecting reverence.
June 27, 2023
A lot of people don't know the real intensions of Mother Teresa and regard her highly from hear say. She hid her reality quite cunningly behind the show of helping the poor and orphaned. She did not want to help anybody except Vatican!
Her real intention and goal was
1. to spread Christianity,
2. ban abortion and contraception.
If attaining the above goals by all means good and bad(even evil) resonates with you then she is your idol. But if not then think before blindly praising her.
A thoroughly researched book, backed wirh hard facts. A must read for everyone to understand how to think critically before making someone a 'saint'.
Her real intention and goal was
1. to spread Christianity,
2. ban abortion and contraception.
If attaining the above goals by all means good and bad(even evil) resonates with you then she is your idol. But if not then think before blindly praising her.
A thoroughly researched book, backed wirh hard facts. A must read for everyone to understand how to think critically before making someone a 'saint'.
December 17, 2024
Disturbing. I knew few facts about Teressa ( Albanian nun ) but all the information provided by the author is horrifying. Idk why people are still worshipping such a woman. A must read for everybody. For me it's a 4.5 stars. Also I didn't give it a 5 star because sometimes author's portrayal of Hindus or Indian right wing is flawed which I don't like it. Otherwise the book is a must read. I will definitely reread this.
June 5, 2025
Well written summary of various aspects of her public life. Chatterjee does a good job of exposing many of her issues and the 'impact' she had on the poor. This book should be more well read or at least the hightlights of it. Teresa did not help many and added to the suffering of the people around her. If Father Mycah Judge was not cannonized, she should not have been.
September 19, 2024
I rarely leave negative reviews, but this book was truly disappointing. The writing felt incredibly amateurish, as if it had been hastily thrown together without any real thought or care. Honestly, I've seen kids write with more creativity and coherence than what was presented here.
September 11, 2025
An interesting critical account of the mainstream narrative of Mother Teresa that is let down by bad writing and a sense of subjective opinion and ideology on the part of the author.
I would recommend Hitchens work over this.
I would recommend Hitchens work over this.
February 22, 2021
The author has done a good research, but the style of writing is slow and dragging. There is definitely a need to edit the book and make is more investigative type of reading.
February 20, 2022
Unveiled dark inside truth of Mother Teresa.
August 26, 2023
An eye opener and must read. I wish there was a good editor/ proof reader for the book though.
July 15, 2025
A well researched book that shatters many myths about a well known figure. Also uncovers how a propaganda machinery led to legendary status being awarded to someone.
April 28, 2025
Mother Teresa- 'The Untold Story'
-Aroup Chatterjee
Imagine waking up one day to find out what you ever knew about the world was incorrect?
This is how i felt when i started reading this book.
Every notion, quote & story i had heard about Mother teresa had been shattered.
This book by Aroup Chatterjee questions history taught in schools & provides the harsh reality of Mother Teresa, Missionaries of Charity (MC) & Calcutta itself.
This book brings out her side which is unexposed to media, A devious women who was against abortion & who used to exaggerate everything for publicity and who used to just only 'pray' for the poor.
All she was , ever was a devout Christian , there is no doubt in that, but whether she was a saint who deserved the Nobel prize? I don't think so.
Mother Teresa: Saint or Sinner ?
If you ask me, i would say : Human.
She can't be a saint , because she never acted like one.....or just maybe, she did 'act'?
High time everyone reads this book..
-Aroup Chatterjee
Imagine waking up one day to find out what you ever knew about the world was incorrect?
This is how i felt when i started reading this book.
Every notion, quote & story i had heard about Mother teresa had been shattered.
This book by Aroup Chatterjee questions history taught in schools & provides the harsh reality of Mother Teresa, Missionaries of Charity (MC) & Calcutta itself.
This book brings out her side which is unexposed to media, A devious women who was against abortion & who used to exaggerate everything for publicity and who used to just only 'pray' for the poor.
All she was , ever was a devout Christian , there is no doubt in that, but whether she was a saint who deserved the Nobel prize? I don't think so.
Mother Teresa: Saint or Sinner ?
If you ask me, i would say : Human.
She can't be a saint , because she never acted like one.....or just maybe, she did 'act'?
High time everyone reads this book..
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 26, 2017
Very slow sluggish book with lots of pain and struggle mentioned.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews