Mother Teresa's dubious miracle

Archive: Catholic • Archive: Wishful Thinking

The beatification of the Albanian nun is the fastest in the Vatican's history. The convents of Rome are packed with pilgrims eager to witness the great event, none of whom doubt the “miracle” that triggered the process. …

No Calcuttans dispute that she is one of their biggest celebrities. On her death in 1997, she was given a state funeral. A boulevard will soon be named after her, and she is to have a statue. Indians speak admiringly of her as a strong, good person.

That is where consensus ends. The Bengali intelligentsia, immersed in a long tradition of pragmatic Marxism - communists have run West Bengal state for 25 years - fret over the position that history should accord her.

They say that TV pictures focusing on her work with the dying and desperately poor were bad for Calcutta. They point out that other charitable organisations - such as the Ram Krishna Mission, a reformist Hindu organisation that runs a large hospital and several schools in Calcutta - do more effective work but have gone unacknowledged. And they echo the view of left-wing commentators in the West, who say that Mother Teresa's order, the Missionaries of Charity, cops out of tackling the root causes of poverty, preferring merely to treat the wounds of its victims. …

On Friday, a few score members of India's pro-Marxist Science and Rationalists' Association held a demonstration to protest against the beatification. They brandished banners praising Mother Teresa, but denouncing the miracle that set her on the path to sainthood. Their point was simple. India's mass of uneducated poor are fatally superstitious and will resort to harmful bogus cures - going to witch doctors for snake bites, for instance. How do you stop this, they ask, if credence is given to miracles by the Vatican?

They say they have investigated in detail the miracle that set Mother Teresa on the path to sainthood - a village woman who was allegedly cured of a tumour by holding a medal of Mother Teresa on her stomach. “It turned out to be nonsense,” said Sumitra Padmanabhan, who edits The Rationalist magazine. “She was cured by the medicines given to her by doctors.”

Phil Reeves, The Independent: Saint or celebrity? Cult of Mother Teresa faces tough questions