Cody Tucker apparently wants us to believe that one of the most admired humanitarians of the twentieth century was actually a fraud.
Appearing recently on The Joe Rogan Experience, Tucker described Mother Teresa as a horrible person and confidently declared that she “never did anything good.” He claimed that she warehoused dying people in dreadful conditions, deliberately withheld medical treatment because she believed that suffering is spiritually beneficial, and funneled donated money to the Vatican instead of using it for the poor.
There are two possibilities here. Tucker is repeating decades-old accusations without seriously investigating whether they are true, or he understands that attacking Mother Teresa generates attention and clicks.
Either way, he is recycling a very old script.
The late atheist polemicist Christopher Hitchens popularized many of these accusations more than thirty years ago. They have been repeated ever since, usually stripped of the historical and religious context necessary to understand Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity.
Start with Tucker’s extraordinary assertion that Mother Teresa “never did anything good.”
The Norwegian Nobel Committee might disagree. It awarded her the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize specifically for helping suffering humanity. The committee praised her defense of human dignity and noted that several million people had already benefited from the Missionaries of Charity’s rescue and social welfare work.
So might the countless Hindus, Muslims, and Christians who mourned her death, or the Indian government, which honored this Catholic nun with a state funeral.
The fundamental mistake critics make is pretending Mother Teresa established a modern hospital and then failed to operate it properly.
She didn’t.
She opened her first famous home for the dying, Nirmal Hriday, in Calcutta in 1952 as a place where desperately poor, abandoned, and terminally ill people could be brought in from the streets, washed, fed, cared for, and allowed to die with human companionship and dignity.
In my book Icons of Mercy, I address this fundamental misunderstanding: “If you judge a lifeboat for not being an ocean liner, you will miss the miracle of those saved by climbing aboard.”
Mother Teresa promised that people who had been discarded by society would not be abandoned. The sisters offered clean sheets, food, medicine when available, a gentle touch, and someone to hold a dying person’s hand. Hospitals sometimes refused patients who had no money. The Missionaries of Charity accepted them anyway.
To judge these homes exclusively by modern Western medical standards, without acknowledging the desperate poverty in which they operated, is to misunderstand their purpose. Worse, Tucker seems determined to perpetuate that misunderstanding.
Critics also grotesquely distort Mother Teresa’s Catholic understanding of suffering. Mother Teresa certainly believed that suffering could be united with the suffering of Christ. That is basic Christian theology. But believing that suffering can have redemptive meaning is hardly the same thing as deliberately inflicting it or refusing to relieve it.
Mother Teresa’s life demonstrates the opposite. She left a comfortable teaching position to wash wounds, care for tuberculosis patients, embrace lepers, and pick dying men and women off the streets. Before beginning that work, she even received medical training with the Medical Mission Sisters in Patna.
Certainly, the medical care available in those early homes was limited. Supplies were scarce, pain medication was often difficult to obtain, and the sisters were not trained physicians. But those limitations cannot automatically be equated with cruelty. Moreover, standards of care at Missionaries of Charity facilities have improved considerably since many of these criticisms first surfaced in the 1990s.
Then there is Tucker’s claim that Mother Teresa was simply sending donated money to the Vatican. A Vatican bank account is not evidence that money was donated to the Vatican. By Mother Teresa’s death in 1997, nearly 4,000 sisters were serving in roughly 600 missions in 123 countries. Money had to move internationally to support that work.
Mother Teresa was not beyond criticism. No saint is. Reasonable people can debate whether her homes should have adopted different medical practices or whether her rapidly expanding congregation could have handled resources differently. But that is a long way from claiming she “never did anything good.”
Mother Teresa spent nearly half a century touching people almost everyone else avoided. She cared for people with leprosy when others feared approaching them. Her sisters served AIDS patients when fear of the disease was widespread. She opened homes for abandoned children and dying adults and inspired thousands of men and women to give their lives to the poor.
Tucker’s sweeping condemnation does not reveal some newly discovered truth about Mother Teresa. It merely repackages old accusations for a new audience, apparently without the curiosity to investigate the extraordinary life he so casually dismisses.
Mother Teresa understood something her critics seem incapable of grasping: every human being, no matter how poor, sick, disfigured, or forgotten, bears the image of God and deserves to be loved. She lived that truth, day after day, among the poorest of the poor.
The Church canonized Mother Teresa not because she was perfect, but because she practiced heroic virtue and allowed Christ’s love to transform countless lives.
Cody Tucker can disparage her legacy all he likes. But his recycled accusations cannot erase a lifetime of extraordinary charity or the enduring witness of a saint who saw the face of Jesus in those the world had abandoned.