Was Mother Teresa a Champion of the poor or Champion of poverty? Carol Hunt answers this in an article published in ‘The Independent’ in year 2015. Hunt writes, “Evidence – and her own words – show that Mother Teresa was not so much a “champion of the poor” but a religious fanatic who took pleasure in their suffering. Not only did she refuse to alleviate the pain of her patients but she gloried in it. As she herself said: “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.”Her famous ‘Home for the Dying’ in Calcutta was deliberately kept as barren, destitute and inadequate to the needs of her patients as possible. This, according to Teresa, was God’s will. Even though the donations from wealthy patrons were enough to fund a number of world-class clinics, her patients languished in Dickensian poverty.”In 1994, Robin Fox, editor of prestigious medical journal The Lancet, visited a ‘home’ run by Mother Teresa’s ‘Missionaries of Charity’ in Kolkata. His scathing observations are recorded in an article titled “Calcutta Perspective: Mother Teresa’s care for the dying”. Fox observed, “TB patients were not isolated and syringes were washed in lukewarm water before being used again. Even patients in unbearable pain were refused painkillers, not because the order did not have them but on principle”. Hemley Gonzale, another volunteer who worked at Missionaries of Charity home in Kolkata in 2008 made some shocking revelations in an interview. Gonzale said, “It happened almost instantly, literally on my first day volunteering. I was shocked to discover the horrifically negligent manner in which this charity operates and the direct contradiction of the public’s general understanding of their work. Workers wash needles under tap water and then reuse them. Medicine and other vital items are stored for months on end, expiring and still applied sporadically to patients. Volunteers with little or no training carry out dangerous work on patients with highly contagious cases of tuberculosis and other life-threatening illnesses. The individuals who operate the charity refuse to accept and implement medical equipment and machinery that would safely automate processes and save lives.

After further investigation and research, I realized that all of the events I had witnessed amounted to nothing more than a systematic human rights violation and a financial scam of monumental proportions. Not once in its sixty-year history have the Missionaries of Charity reported the total amount of funds they’ve collected in donations, what percentage they use for administration and where the rest has been applied and how.” (to be continued)