Going Her Way : As Mother Teresa Prepares to Step Down, Critics and Supporters Assess Her Single-Minded Vision

The nun in the blue and white cotton sari, her gingham apron soaked from a morning of scrubbing floors, was showing her visitors to the door of the Missionaries of Charity convent in Lynwood. They lingered a moment in the doorway for one last question.

“How is Mother?” a sister from another order asked about Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

“Oh, we hear she looks so old and frail,” the nun said.

“It seems as if the only reason she’s staying alive is to bring Jesus to Albania. . . . That is where she’s from. She has brought Jesus to Russia, to so many other places. It’s as if she won’t die until she’s able to bring him to her own country.”

Mother Teresa, 79, continues to push on with her work--she was recently in Romania to open a convent--despite a heart attack last fall and subsequent surgery to install a pacemaker. But last month, the world-famous founder of the Missionaries of Charity announced her resignation as superior general. And her successor, who will be elected at a meeting of the order in Calcutta on Sept. 8, is now a subject of concern and speculation within the Roman Catholic community.

Whoever succeeds her, probably one of six senior advisers in her council, will have an almost impossible job in following such a charismatic founder. Mother Teresa, the recipient of the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, is often called a “living saint.” She is arguably the most famous Catholic in the world, next to the Pope. What’s more, her successor will face a formidable challenge in the United States, where critics of Mother Teresa’s organization--Catholics, social workers and activists--question her approach to aiding the poor.

These critics--most of whom refused to allow their names to be used in this article--ask how an order that has come to be so closely identified with its founder can carry on without her. They question the tight control she exerts over her followers--about 3,000 nuns, 500 brothers, more than 100,000 co-workers and a handful of priests in some 90 countries. They suggest that her complete devotion to conservative hierarchical Catholicism and silence on issues of social justice have limited her effectiveness in serving the poor. They also question whether the austere lifestyle and service she established in Calcutta are appropriate for the West.

In the words of one conservative Catholic layman in Los Angeles, “Either they will have to evolve into something else now that she’s going, or they won’t last.”

Some say that personal identification with Mother Teresa, rather than the work itself, is what has drawn many nuns and others to work with her. After she’s gone, they ask, will the order continue to attract members, and will her followers remain?

To some of her detractors, that identification and veneration is excessive, and they liken it to the atmosphere that might surround a cult figure.

At times, the veneration can be jarring, although it often comes from lay people, rather than members of her order.

Last May, Mother Teresa was in San Francisco, regional headquarters of the order, when a small group of novice nuns took their vows. A small private reception for their families followed the church ceremony and ended with prayers in the bare little convent chapel, where Mother Teresa huddled barefoot on the floor. The place was packed; people had waited for hours outside, then jostled their way in.

After prayers, the patient public was rewarded. Mother Teresa entered the vestibule, smiling, warmly greeting people, placing her hands on their heads or taking their hands one by one, and blessing each with a small Miraculous Medal.

Suddenly, she disappeared into a small reception room. The door closed and people lingered until Jeanette Petrie, a friend and supporter of Mother Teresa who has co-produced a documentary about her and often acts on her behalf, started ushering people out, firmly but gently reminding them the day was for the families.

One crestfallen woman protested. She had come so far, waited so long, and gotten nothing. Petrie reached into her pocket and pulled out a fistful of medals. As the stunned and seemingly overjoyed woman’s hands closed over them, Petrie assured her, “These have all been blessed by Mother Teresa.”

A tough act to follow.

Mother Teresa has gone about her mission with purpose, seeming to have a clear idea of herself and an unapologetic explanation of how she operates. But the sisters in her order seem to live in her shadow, preferring anonymity, often seeming uneasy and reluctant to make decisions or express opinions, seeming to approach every situation with one inner question: “What would Mother do?” Such behavior reflects an earlier era, before Vatican II, when convent life was more regimented and authoritarian. Since then, in the United States especially, most orders have developed more independent and democratic structures.

Mother Teresa seems to have delegated little, and, for example, has insisted on personally approving and opening each of the 400 homes or sites where her sisters work around the world.

“The sisters do not seem to have the freedom to be themselves,” said one Catholic who has worked closely with Mother Teresa and both admires and questions aspects of her work. “They’re expected to conform to one ideology: kneel like this, say the rosary like this. There are those who would say it borders on a cult.”

Requests for interviews with the Missionaries of Charity sisters were denied by Sister Sylvia (sisters in this order do not use last names), the regional superior in San Francisco. Speaking through a third party, Cathy Olson, who heads the lay support group, Co-Workers of Mother Teresa in Los Angeles, Sister Sylvia said the order preferred to see nothing written on Mother Teresa’s retirement.

At times, some of the sisters seem uneasy in unstructured situations. One evening last year, at the order’s San Francisco soup kitchen, a dishwasher in his 30s who said he had destroyed years of his life with drugs and drifting, was describing his happiness in having made his way back and finding faith. Now a regular volunteer, he said that day had been the most important day of his life. He had been invited to a private reception with Mother Teresa.

He started to ramble about Mother Teresa to the other volunteers. The sister who was supervising the cleanup listened uneasily, and then, looking inspired, spun toward him and, smiling widely, said, “Say the ‘Our Father,’ please.”

Startled, the dishwasher began to intone the Lord’s Prayer, and the others joined in.

In addition to questioning the internal workings of the order, some of her detractors fault Mother Teresa for her blind obedience to a traditional, patriarchal and authoritative church. Some find her subservience to the Vatican galling, and are angered or saddened by her remarks, such as those on the question of women’s ordination to the priesthood: “A woman would be a misfit as a priest . . . better to be ‘handmaids of the Lord.’ ”

Nuns often resent the fact she is held up to them as a model. One woman, Sister Bernadette Hillson, a nurse and Sister of Social Service in Los Angeles, said she considers Mother Teresa a saint in her “single-minded love of God,” but is disturbed by the traditional image of a nun she presents.

“I think what’s happened,” Hillson said, “is that the Church and the Right have (in effect) canonized Mother Teresa and refused to recognize the contribution of other women in the church. . . . She’s the perfect woman, the perfect daughter all of us were groomed to be.”

Tim Unsworth, a Catholic layman who has satirized Mother Teresa in the National Catholic Reporter, an independent weekly, said he is known as a “pro-nun” writer. His sister is a nun, he said, and he admires the unsung work she and others like her do daily, such as quietly and effectively running soup kitchens.

“Yet if Mother Teresa comes in and opens a soup kitchen, the press drowns her in ink.”

His comment echoed that of a Los Angeles monsignor, who sees a problem in the way “the media hypes her, while all the while sisters like the Daughters of Charity, who were founded . . . to care for the poor have been doing the same thing. It’s as if her work dismisses them. It’s painful.”

Mother Teresa is a staunch and unyielding foe of artificial birth control: “Self-control is the natural way. It is God’s way.” And she attributes India’s problems not to poverty but to ignorance.

Although she describes herself as apolitical, her campaign against abortion has become increasingly vocal and political since her acceptance speech at the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo.

There she called abortion a threat to peace, “the greatest destroyer of man in the world.” Since receiving the prize, she has seldom been out of the public eye, traveling an average of 10 months a year, always making references to abortion.

At best, progressive, or liberal, Catholics, whose faith is rooted in a commitment to social justice, face a conflict when trying to answer how a woman who so identifies with the poor refuses to criticize or question institutions or people who cause or perpetuate poverty.

In 1984, for example, in Bhopal, India, when the Union Carbide accident killed and injured thousands, Mother Teresa rushed to the scene, arriving at the airport with bananas and apples to distribute to those who had been hospitalized.

To questions about wrongdoing, negligence, lawsuits and compensation, she responded, “Forgive, forgive. I just ask people to forgive. I am here to give love and care to those who most need it in this terrible tragedy.”

She has said flatly, “I am not trying to change anything. I am only trying to live my love, to (meet) the need that the person has at that moment.” In all her endeavors, she enjoins: “Let us do something beautiful for God.”

Sister Patricia Krommer, a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet who directs the Humanitarian Law Project in Los Angeles, finds such an attitude hard to fathom.

“I really do appreciate the work that she does, and the comfort she gives the poor.” But, Krommer added, accepting money from institutions and people who help perpetuate poverty--without challenging them--”doesn’t change anything.”

Father Don Kribs, a Los Angeles priest, was closely allied with Mother Teresa in the 1970s, heading the Co-Workers of Mother Teresa in the Western United States.

“Her direct service to the poor was what attracted me,” he said, adding that he still admires and loves her greatly for it. But, he said, “Her silence about social justice is devastating. She’s got a blind spot, for whatever reason, but it’s OK. She’s not perfect, and it’s time it be said she’s not perfect.”

It has been 42 years since Mother Teresa, then a member of the Missionary Sister of Loreto order, walked out of the cloistered life she knew at St. Mary’s, a high school for girls in Calcutta, and headed for the slums. The former principal and geography teacher was answering what she took to be a direct call from God to serve “the poorest of the poor.”

By 1950, she had a band of 12 followers and founded a new order, the Missionary Sisters of Charity. They had already become known in Calcutta for finding the dying poor on the streets and carrying them to Nirmal Hriday, a home for the dying and destitute. To this day, she is most closely identified with this work. By 1960, she was already described as “the saint of Calcutta,” and “a living saint.”

In 1963, she co-founded, with Brother Andrew Travers-Ball, a former Jesuit, the Brothers of Charity; in 1969, she founded the Co-Workers, a lay group devoted to prayer and good works and helping Mother Teresa. In the 1970s, she formed contemplative branches of her orders, for those who would remove themselves from the public for a life of perpetual prayer and meditation. In 1984, she formed an order of priests, most of whom are now working in Tijuana.

Wherever her followers work, what has come to be known as “the Calcutta model” prevails. But it is a model many say does not translate to American reality.

It is what prompted Unsworth to call Mother Teresa “a great woman, of terrific faith,” but add that he considers her model, “for another country, another century.”

All members of Catholic religious orders take vows of chastity, obedience and poverty. There is a general avoidance of lavish living, and the poverty vow has meant the individual owns no personal property and turns any income over to the order.

The Missionaries of Charity take a fourth vow, “whole-hearted free service to the poorest of the poor--to Christ in his distressing disguise.”

As she has branched out from Calcutta to the rest of the world, Mother Teresa has incorporated spiritual and emotional poverty into her definition of the “poorest of the poor,” observing that in many industrialized societies, including the United States, those are the greatest and worst forms of poverty.

Her followers, the sisters especially, have adopted an austere lifestyle, one that has its roots in Calcutta. Their belongings are limited to two saris. They sleep on mats, wash clothes and bedding by hand, eschew hot water, kneel and sit on the chapel floor. In their commitment to this simplicity, they have dismayed and, at times, offended some Americans, including parishioners who have lovingly readied a convent for them to occupy, only to have the sisters arrive and remove pews, rip up carpeting, even remove hot-water heaters and some plumbing. They forgo labor-saving devices such as vacuum cleaners, washing machines and dryers, and engage in much mopping and scrubbing.

The convent in Lynwood, part of St. Emydius parish, serves as home to four sisters and functions as a maternity home. Single pregnant women and mothers who have recently delivered, plus their other children, are in residence, staying for several months, until they can make more permanent arrangements. In the kitchen there is a gaping hole where the washing machine used to be. The garden and picnic area is used to dry the huge amounts of laundry.

Recently, four nuns from another order sat over dinner at a private home in Los Angeles, listening to the fate of the washing machine in Lynwood.

“That is a very easy way to be holy,” said one of them, a European-born woman in her 60s. Shaking her head gently, she asked, “What is your greatest treasure in the United States? Your time. It is your time you need to give people, and if you’re busying yourselves with tasks like that, you will have little time to truly deal with people who need you.”

Since the beginning, however, Mother Teresa has been adamant about the importance of austerity and manual labor. “If luxury creeps in,” she has said, “we lose the spirit of the order.”

The brothers have been in Los Angeles since 1975. Their services to the poor seem more relaxed and less dominated by rules than those the sisters offer. They now are working with homeless Latino youths, reaching out to them in areas such as MacArthur Park, and providing a day center in the Pico Union area, where Brother Joseph McLagham and volunteers offer meals to about 75 young people a day, showers, and a place to watch television and relax. The brothers also provide limited housing for mentally and physically disabled people, and Brother Luke Packel provides a home for a handful of youngsters who have no families but are in school.

More than lifestyle, however, the Calcutta model also refers to a way of relating to the poor. In San Francisco, the sisters operate a soup kitchen, a home for unwed mothers and a residence for people with AIDS; in Lynwood, they run the maternity home.

The rules are strict, made to accommodate the lifestyle of the sisters, not the guests. In Lynwood, the residents may have visitors once a week, for one hour on Sunday afternoons. They may come and go during the day from 9 to 11:30 a.m. and from 3 to 4:30 p.m. Children are in bed by 8:30 p.m.; lights are out in the common room by 9 p.m.

Because the sisters live without radios, televisions and record players, there are none for those they help, although in the AIDS residences in San Francisco and New York patients are now permitted to have radios with earphones.

Last year, Sister Sylvia, who is from India, commented briefly on their lifestyle, saying “We try more or less to have the same kind of life as in India,” but added that they were sensitive to cultural differences.

“People with whom we work may be of different experience. So here, instead of rice, we may have soup. There, they eat with their hand, here we give a spoon.”

Despite such adjustments, many of their measures sound harsh, but the sisters find a spiritual value in accepting poverty, sacrifice and suffering. They see them as a way to atone for sin, not necessarily one’s own, and please God. Mother Teresa herself, for example, was hospitalized for heart trouble in the early 1980s. She refused all pain medication, saying she preferred to offer up her suffering to Christ.

It is that philosophy, perhaps, that has caused concern among health-care providers and social workers in the Bay Area. Although Sister Sylvia said all residents are given all medications prescribed by their doctors, several nurses and social workers who work with AIDS patients say they often hear complaints that residents of Gift of Love, a private facility, are discouraged from taking pain medication.

That, the refusal to allow television, the unbending rules and the schedule, seem harsh to the professionals. Moreover, they say, there is an attitude of discomfort or disapproval that the sisters convey, stemming from the Church’s condemnation of homosexual activity.

Familiar with the widespread concern and complaints, Dr. Sandra Hernandez, who directs the AIDS office at the Public Health Department in San Francisco, said, “In the type of facility this is, a typical hospice or residence, pain control is a value. Typically (care providers) want to make sure people are not in pain.”

In general, Hernandez said of the hospice, “I have two sentiments. There is a tremendous need for hospice and terminal care and the fact they are doing this, I commend. . . . My biggest concern is for a person in a program in the terminal phase of life. To have someone attempt to teach repentance, to be told to evaluate one’s life from the point of view of Catholic morality is disconcerting. . . . For some people it may be perfectly appropriate. I would hope our city could provide appropriate care for all.”

The brothers run a day center in Oakland for people with AIDS. Brother Jeremy Hollinger, regional servant (superior) and founder of the center, said Mother Teresa has visited the center.

“We had only a positive experience with her. She has a healing presence, a sign of hope and love and people pick that up. I don’t know how to put it, an aura, energy, sanctity? . . . Where you run into a problem is not with Mother Teresa herself, but in how you translate who she is and what she does into an institution and working under her name. Sometimes others do not have her depth of vision, so you get a rigidity,” he said. “I hope, we’ve taken what she is and brought it into an institutional setting.”

Without commenting on the criticisms about Gift of Love, he said it was important to remember what Mother Teresa had brought about within the Catholic Church concerning AIDS.

“(She) made AIDS acceptable to Catholics. She’s said, ‘When you’re busy judging people you have no time to love them.’ Every person with AIDS is Jesus, so you can say, Jesus has AIDS. If Jesus in his most distressing disguise, as she says, is on Skid Row, then AIDS is his most clever disguise.”

Neither retirement nor death can banish Mother Teresa from worldwide consciousness. If the world has already unofficially canonized her, there are those who think the Church will cut corners in the long formal process and proclaim her a saint “by acclamation” as soon as she dies.

Mother Teresa herself, who is not without a sense of humor, has frequently cut short the talk of her canonization with dry advice: “Let me die first.”

In the meantime, she lives, inspiring and disturbing many, containing in her something of a paradox, perhaps because people want her to be all things.

“I don’t think it’s fair to Mother Teresa to have canonized her,” said Sister Jacinta Fiebig, a Holy Family sister who works at the Oakland AIDS center. “We’re all broken, and we have to look at our own brokenness and accept it. But we don’t allow Mother Teresa to be broken. By canonizing her as perfect, we see what she does as the perfect model. It’s not the only way. You want to call her a saint? Fine. There are a lot of other saints out there, too.”