ONE WILD WORLD — NEWSLETTER

Issue #007  |  I Wish I Didn't Know That  |  April 2026

She won the Nobel Peace Prize. She was canonised as a saint. Her face is on postage stamps in a dozen countries. And in 1994, the editor of the world's most respected medical journal visited her flagship home for the dying — and described what he saw as "haphazard." This is the story the West never told.

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born in Skopje in 1910. At 18 she left home to become a nun, took the name Teresa, and travelled to Calcutta in 1929. For almost two decades she taught at a convent school. Then, in 1948, she walked out into the slums and started picking up dying people off the streets.

By the 1970s she was famous. By the 1980s she was untouchable. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan. She was photographed with every major world leader of her era. When she died in 1997, she was given a state funeral in India and mourned on every continent.

Pope John Paul II fast-tracked her for sainthood. She was beatified in 2003 — just six years after her death, a speed almost unheard of in Catholic history. In 2016, she was officially canonised as Saint Teresa of Calcutta.

But while the West was building her legend, a small group of doctors, journalists and former volunteers were quietly compiling a very different record.

In September 1994, Dr Robin Fox — editor of The Lancet, one of the most respected medical journals in the world — flew to Calcutta and walked into the Home for the Dying at Kalighat. He came expecting to be moved. He left with notes that became one of the most damning medical assessments of a celebrated institution ever published.

Fox described the care he witnessed as haphazard. Doctors visited only occasionally. Most decisions about patient care were made by nuns and volunteers, many of whom had no medical training at all. He watched a young man admitted with a high fever being treated with an antibiotic and paracetamol. A visiting doctor later diagnosed malaria and had to switch his treatment to chloroquine.

Diagnoses were rarely made. Routine blood tests were not performed. Patients with treatable conditions were lumped in with the terminally ill and given the same minimal care. And most striking of all: strong painkillers were not available to people dying in agony from cancer.

Susan Shields spent nearly a decade as a nun in the Missionaries of Charity before leaving the order. Her testimony, later quoted by Christopher Hitchens, described something that had nothing to do with Indian drug laws.

In Haiti, Shields wrote, the sisters reused hypodermic needles on patient after patient until the tips became blunt. When volunteers — horrified at the pain this was causing — offered to buy new needles themselves, the sisters refused. The reason had nothing to do with cost or regulation. It was theological. Mother Teresa believed that the spirit of poverty had to be preserved. Spending money on better equipment would, in her view, dilute the order's holy mission.

This was not a failure of resources. The Missionaries of Charity were swimming in donations. By the late 1990s, Stern magazine's investigative reporter Walter Wüllenweber estimated the order was receiving tens of millions of dollars per year. One branch in the Bronx reportedly had over $50 million sitting in its bank account. Money was not the problem. Philosophy was.

Mother Teresa was not trying to run a hospital. She was running a religious order with a specific theological mission — and that mission was not, fundamentally, about curing people. It was about preparing them for death.

She said so herself, repeatedly, in her own words. "There is something beautiful," she once remarked, "in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's Passion. The world gains much from their suffering." In another speech she described how her nuns had baptised 29,000 dying patients in Kalighat alone — people from Hindu and Muslim backgrounds who, critics argued, had no meaningful way to consent to a Catholic sacrament while semi-conscious and dying.

For Mother Teresa, suffering was not a problem to be solved. It was a spiritual gift. Pain brought you closer to Christ. Painkillers, by extension, distanced you from Him. This was not a hidden belief. She said it in interviews. She said it in speeches. The West just chose not to hear it.

The most uncomfortable detail in the entire story is this. When Mother Teresa herself became ill, she did not suffer like Christ. She did not receive the kind of care she had prescribed for others.

She was flown to some of the most advanced hospitals in the world. She received treatment at the Scripps Clinic in California. She had heart surgery performed by specialists in the United States. When she had cardiac problems in her final years, she was attended by Dr Patricia Aubanel, a cardiologist who flew in from San Diego.

Her defenders argue that she accepted this care reluctantly, only when pressed by those around her. That may well be true. But the gap — between the philosophy she preached to her patients and the medicine she accepted for herself — is the single hardest part of her legacy to defend.

The other uncomfortable piece of the record is the money. The Missionaries of Charity received donations from some of the 20th century's most notorious figures — and Mother Teresa personally intervened on behalf of at least one of them.

Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, the Haitian dictator whose regime was responsible for the torture and murder of thousands, was a major donor. Mother Teresa visited Haiti and publicly praised him, saying she had never seen the poor so at home with their president. Charles Keating, the American financier convicted of defrauding small investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars in the Savings and Loan scandal, donated $1.25 million to her order. When Keating was put on trial, Mother Teresa wrote a personal letter to the judge asking for leniency.

The prosecutor, Paul Turley, wrote back. He pointed out that the money Keating had given her had been stolen from ordinary working people, and suggested she return it. There is no public record that she ever did.

Mother Teresa ran a global religious order that provided shelter, food and a bed to die in for hundreds of thousands of people who had nowhere else to go. That is not nothing. For the destitute of Calcutta who would otherwise have died alone in the street, even a crowded room with an untrained nun was better than the alternative.

But she was not what the West wanted her to be. She was not running hospitals. She was not trying to save lives. She was running a theological project about the spiritual value of suffering — and she used hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from people who thought they were funding medical care to fund that project instead.

Hitchens called her a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud. Chatterjee, the Calcutta-born doctor whose research informed much of the criticism, was more measured: he simply said she did more harm than good. The truth, as usual, is somewhere between the hagiography and the hit-piece.

A Nobel Prize. A fast-tracked sainthood. Tens of millions in donations from dictators and fraudsters. Reused needles in Haiti. Aspirin for terminal cancer. And first-class cardiac care in California for the woman who told the dying that suffering was beautiful.

The Angel of Hell was not a nickname the locals gave her. It was the title of the documentary that tried to tell you the truth.

SOURCES

Fox, Robin — "Mother Teresa's care for the dying", The Lancet, 344(8925):807–808, September 17, 1994 (PMID: 7818649)

Hitchens, Christopher — The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Verso, 1995)

Hitchens, Christopher & Ali, Tariq — Hell's Angel, Channel 4 documentary, 1994

Chatterjee, Aroup — Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict (Meteor Books, 2003; reissued as The Untold Story, 2016)

Wüllenweber, Walter — "Mother Teresa: Where Are Her Millions?", Stern Magazine, September 1998

Shields, Susan — "Mother Teresa's House of Illusions", Free Inquiry, 1998

Université de Montréal — Larivée, Sénéchal & Chénard, "The Dark Side of Mother Teresa", Studies in Religion, 2013