Many Asking Who’ll Be Next Mother Teresa

Tarak Das, 65, his legs paralyzed and his lungs badly eaten by tuberculosis, lies on an air mattress in the Immaculate Heart Home for the Dying Destitute. He was kicked out of his home by his family and had nowhere else to go but the hospice run here by Mother Teresa and her nuns.

“Who else is there for us but Mother?” the ailing man asks, feebly raising a thin arm to lend drama to his question.

For Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity and the Roman Catholic Church, events in recent weeks have lent great urgency to the sickly Bengali’s question. Mother Teresa, the world’s most celebrated missionary and perhaps its most admired and respected woman, had to be rushed last month to a Calcutta hospital for her own health problems--malaria and pneumonia.

While in intensive care, the frail, bird-like nun suffered heart failure. She also turned 86 while breathing through a tube hooked to a respirator. On Friday, breathing on her own and reportedly feeling fit again, she was released at her own request.

“I am fit enough,” Dr. S. K. Sen, medical director at Calcutta’s Woodlands Nursing Home, had earlier quoted his patient as saying. “Nothing will happen to me. I have a pacemaker.”

Mother Teresa was given a pacemaker in 1989, when she suffered a heart attack, and doctors have said that despite her current improvement, her heartbeat remains irregular.

Although she may have rallied this time, a decade-long list of health problems and Mother Teresa’s mounting age combine to give immediacy to the matter of who her successor will be, and how the Missionaries of Charity will fare without its creator.

The successor to the group’s founder, leader and abiding inspiration--who was honored with the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to help the poor, sick and dying--will have enormous shoes to fill. The next superior general will supplant Christendom’s most famous figure after Pope John Paul II, and perhaps its most beloved.

Her organizational responsibilities will be no less than those of the chief executive of a Fortune 500 corporation doing business worldwide. She will also have to keep the contributions flowing and maintain the aura that persuades many people in rich countries to put their lives on hold for a while and do volunteer work with the poorest of the poor.

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Founded single-handedly in 1950 by Mother Teresa when she had just five rupees--now about 15 cents--in her pocket, the Missionaries of Charity has mushroomed to encompass 4,000 nuns working in 570 missions in 120 countries. The order operates homes and hospices for AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis patients; soup kitchens; children’s programs; and family counseling and schooling for the destitute in locales from Tanzania to San Francisco.

In Calcutta, the order’s cradle and home base, the nuns, clad in their distinctive white cowls with blue stripes, dish out U.S. farm-surplus wheat and oil to the hungry and perform other tasks.

“When they say Mother Teresa is involved, everyone thinks it’s bona fide,” said an Indian businessman who has extensive dealings with the order.

So what will happen when this ubiquitous and trusted figure, who can raise tens of millions of dollars annually in contributions throughout the world, is gone? Prognoses differ.

“It’ll collapse in 10 years. Nothing is holding it up,” predicted Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, a British-educated general practitioner who is one of Calcutta’s most outspoken critics of the missionary others admiringly call the “saint of the gutters.”

“It’s not going to stop with her,” countered Father T. C. Joseph, a south Indian-born member of another Catholic order, the Salesians of Don Bosco. “This show is not run by human reckonings, senior management and things like that. It is run by another hand, which they seem to believe in.”

Succession is not a matter that members of the order care to talk about.

“Everything we have had to say, we have said, so we’re giving no more interviews,” said Sister Priscilla Lewis, the sole nun at the order’s four-story, whitewashed “Mother House” headquarters who is empowered to speak to reporters. “God bless you.”

Sister Priscilla, an Anglo Indian and former schoolteacher, is considered at the moment to be the top candidate to follow Mother Teresa as the order’s leader.

“She’s the one who does the organization, the coordination,” the Indian businessman said. People who know Sister Priscilla have called her “businesslike,” “no-nonsense” and “taciturn.”

Sister Priscilla joined the order in 1957 and has done service in the United States. When a public relations storm erupted in 1994 over a British TV documentary that lambasted Mother Teresa’s brand of politics, religion and medical care, Sister Priscilla was the point woman for the order’s defense.

Another reputed successor, Sister Agnes Das, a Bengali who was Mother Teresa’s first disciple, has been dropped from the council created in 1989 to help run the order’s affairs.

Lately, the star of Sister Shanti D’Souza, a physician from Bombay who once worked for a pharmaceutical company and who was put in charge of training sisters before they take their final vows, has reportedly been on the rise, and some Calcuttans who have dealings with the nuns mention her as the top challenger to Sister Priscilla.

Under church procedure, the Missionaries of Charity selects its own leader by assembling a conclave of nuns, known as a “general chapter,” to represent all of the sisters scattered throughout the world. The Catholic hierarchy, however, has the power to veto the general chapter’s choice.

When the 103-member general chapter last voted for a superior, in 1990, the nuns reelected Mother Teresa for a sixth consecutive term despite the fact that she had announced she was retiring on health grounds. A hunt for another consensus candidate failed.

That election was held behind closed doors in a hall outside Calcutta. Such practices make it difficult to pierce the secrecy that cloaks the inner doings of the order and to predict the group’s future.

Until now, Mother Teresa has remained silent about her own preferences, if she has any, about who should follow her.

“God sent Teresa. He will send somebody else to carry on the work,” she once said.

Dahlburg was recently on assignment in Calcutta.