By Ann Neumann
If Monica Besra didn’t believe in miracles in 1998 when she was diagnosed with a tumor in her abdomen, disbelief didn’t stop her from praying. Besra lived with her husband and five children in a mud-brick house without running water or electricity in a rural part of India, about 400 miles northeast of Calcutta. She and her husband were poor and in debt when she was diagnosed; they had already taken two of the children out of school to pay for health care bills. For care, Besra turned to a local hospice run by the Missionaries of Charity, an international aid organization founded by Mother Teresa and headquartered in Calcutta. What happened to Besra at the charity is either a miracle or a great fraud, depending on whom you talk to. To the Vatican and its Catholic adherents, Besra is living proof of the sainthood of one of its most celebrated sisters; Mother Teresa’s official recognition by the Catholic Church can begin thanks to Besra’s miracle. But to most of the rest of the world, Besra’s enduring health is being used as a high-level marketing coup designed to bring increased attention to the Church and heightened faith to its believers.
The timing of Besra’s miracle was fortuitous, the one year anniversary of Mother’s Teresa’s death, September 5, 1998.. By most accounts, including Besra’s, this is how it happened: the nuns at Missionaries of Charity gave Besra a “medallion” bearing Mother Teresa’s image to press to her side, where the tumor was, as she prayed. An image of “Mother” hung on the wall. When Besra awoke the next morning, her tumor was gone.
As she recalled to the Economic Times of India last month, “When I looked at Mother’s picture, I saw rays of white light coming out from her eyes. Then I fell unconscious. When I woke up the next morning, the lump was gone.” When the Missionaries of Charity nuns claimed that Besra’s cancerous tumor had miraculously disappeared, Besra became a celebrity around the world. Her recovery, if confirmed, will qualify the most famous and adored nun of our era for the first step on the path to beatification and ultimately sainthood.
But reports of Besra’s illness and recovery have been broadly challenged. In 2003, The New York Times spoke with Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, who had treated the ill woman before she entered the Missionaries of Charity hospice. The paper reported that Mustafi said,
…medicines he prescribed had eliminated the tumor. He also said it was a cyst caused by tuberculosis, not a cancerous tumor. The Vatican team that traveled to India and certified Ms. Besra’s account, he added, never made contact with him. ‘’It was not a miracle,’’ he said. ‘’She took medicines for nine months to one year.”
Tuberculosis or cancer? The two are quite different. It seems that the doctors and nurses at the Missionaries of Charity—a global organization with more than 4,500 nuns in 120 countries, millions of dollars in assets and unlimited fundraising potential, thanks to its revered founder—should be able to confirm what illness Besra came to them with. They should have charts documenting the ailing woman’s diagnosis and treatment. But expecting unbiased claims of miracles, clear documentation, or even reliable medical expertise from Missionaries of Charity is to grossly misunderstand the practice and purpose of the organization.
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In October 2003, thanks to Besra’s miracle, Pope John Paul II beatified Mother Teresa, who died in 1997 at the age of 87, thus officiating the first of two primary steps to sainthood. Saints are given feast days on the Catholic liturgical calendar, many have shrines and churches named after them, and are seen by the church as role models for believers. Pope John Paul II apparently felt the world needed more role models. He was an avid saint-maker, racking up 483 saints in his tenure, when his predecessors’ appointments can be counted in the dozens. The process is highly political, secretive, and a major moneymaker for the church, an organization with an annual payroll of $180 million and accounts estimated at more than $1.4 billion. Canonization can cost more than a quarter million dollars per saint.
It’s a two-part process. Beautification requires one miracle, preferably performed from the grave. Although consideration generally doesn’t begin until at least five years after the person has died, Mother Teresa is on a fast track, thanks to her global popularity, the ecstatic devotion of her followers, and a 1999 dispensation from Pope John Paul II. The Mother’s followers claim that she worked thousands of miracles, when living and dead, but a miracle, by Church definition is something very specific. As Charles Duhigg at Slate reported at the time of beatification, a “miraculous cure must be instantaneous or sudden, complete and permanent, and without apparent scientific explanation.” Applications for sainthood go through a series of reviews, first by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, a Vatican office which in turn asks the Consulta Medica board (first established in the mid-1950s) to verify the miracle. Three of a panel of five (Italian and Catholic) doctors must agree. The individual is then deemed “Blessed.” A second miracle is required for canonization for full sainthood.
Mother Teresa’s second miracle was announced by Pope Francis on his birthday last month, December 17. Described by the New York Times as a comatose “Brazilian man who suffered a viral brain infection that caused multiple abscesses,” the unnamed man awoke after his wife had prayed to Mother Teresa for months. According to the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, a Canadian priest who is overseeing Mother Teresa’s canonization, not only did he recover, but he did so without surgery and returned to work as a mechanical engineer. He also fathered two children when the couple had been told that treatment made parenthood impossible. Mother Teresa, whose name has been synonymous with “saint” for decades, may now officially become one as soon as this year.
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According to the scathing 1995 book by Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position, Mother Teresa was more of a savvy political shaker and a ruthless, domineering aesthete than a saint. Hitchens and countless others have toured Missionaries of Charity facilities around the world and balked at their surprising squalor—a state that is by design rather than neglect or destitution. Mother Teresa has always been a money maker—her organization, by all accounts, has never lacked for resources. And those resources have always been used, with her Church’s blessing, to promote the most conservative positions of the faith, from anti-abortion policy (in a country, India,—and world—where overpopulation is a glaring problem) to more radical ideas of Christian sovereignty in her home country of Albania.
Abject poverty was the Mother’s commitment, her devotion to pain and suffering extreme, meted out on those who flocked to her and her mission houses around the world. The ill and suffering were never properly medicated—Mother Teresa was not a builder of hospitals or clinics! Her blessed poor were coarsely treated by those who aimed to earn their way to heaven through the pain of the sick. Here’s an account Hitchens points us to, by Dr. Robin Fox, the former editor of the British medical journal The Lancet*:
Investigations [into a patient’s cause of illness] are seldom permissible. How about simple algorithms that might help the sisters and volunteers distinguish the curable from the incurable? Again no. Such systematic approaches are alien to the ethos of the home. Mother Teresa prefers providence to planning; her rules are designed to prevent any drift towards materialism: the sisters must remain on equal terms with the poor….
Hitchens hastens to point out that this was no assessment of a fly-by-night operation in a destitute war-zone area where resources were limited. This was a doctor’s account of a facility that had been in operation for decades, that was able to raise millions of dollars a year. And another account Hitchen’s describes, from an interview with Mother Teresa as she attends “a person who was in the last agonies of cancer and suffering unbearable pain”:
With a smile, Mother Teresa told the camera what she told this terminal patient: ‘You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.’ Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told the sufferer’s reply, ‘Then please tell him to stop kissing me.’
Pain is a great tool of power and coercion. Our human history is rife with examples of the use of pain for subjugation, corruption, and conversion. Indeed, the Catholic Church has a vested interest in pain, the heart of its central symbol, the crucifixion. But pain and suffering as an element of health care? This, like the conditions in Mother Teresa’s missions, may seem foreign to us, even barbaric: the idea that suffering is beneficial. But it is inherent in our current dialogue about end of life care (dying is painful), about aid in dying (avoiding pain is giving up), about pain relief of any sort (the human condition is suffering). “For the Christian, our encounter with suffering and death can take on a positive and distinctive meaning through the redemptive power of Jesus’ suffering and death,” read the Ethical and Religious Directives, written by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and approved by the Vatican to govern the provision of health care in the US (which the Church oversees at one-fifth of all hospital beds).
In 2007, on the 10th anniversary of Mother Teresa’s death, Monica Besra very publicly declared her dissatisfaction with the Missionaries of Charity, claiming that after celebrating the miracle that saved her life, the organization abandoned her to destitution. She did not recant her belief that Mother Teresa saved her life from the grave, but she felt the organization had lost interest in her. Besra told the Telegraph:
“My hut was frequented by nuns of the Missionaries of Charity before the beatification of Mother Teresa. They made of lot of promises to me and assured me of financial help for my livelihood and my children’s education. After that, they forgot me. I am living in penury. My husband is sick. My children have stopped going to school as I have no money. I have to work in the fields to feed my husband and five children.”
These accounts of suffering and neglect get us closer to the gross problems with the canonization of Mother Teresa. I’m not bothered by the fact that the nature of the medical cases is questionable—nor even the Church’s claim that saints still move among us performing miracles. I’ve seen saints, those with abilities many of us can’t conceive or achieve. And the existence of miracles neither boggles my mind nor stirs my disbelief; the body remains in many ways a mystery to us—what’s to prevent us from calling the unknown miraculous? But it is the commitment to pain and suffering, the allowance given to a global organization with a deliberate neglect of care, that saddens and outrages me. As it should anyone concerned with patients’ care and rights.
Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity facilities continue, operating in the very same way they did when she died in 1997, with little concern for healing or ending the suffering of their incarcerated. The veneration of Mother, the radical misunderstanding of what she stood for, the glorification of her willing sacrifice—even as she enforced painful sacrifice on those who had no choice—should be considered a modern medical tragedy. But our banal acquiescence to the sovereignty of the Catholic Church in healthcare, to pain as an inescapable part of the human experience, even our need to view non-Westerners as inveterate sufferers we must save, prevents us from seeing the legacy of Mother Teresa clearly. And from addressing the paradoxical role of pain and suffering and faith in our current health care system.
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*excerpted from The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Christopher Hitchens, Twelve Books, 1995, pp. 40.
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Past “The Patient Body” columns can be found here.
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Ann Neumann is a contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine and a visiting scholar at The Center for Religion and Media, NYU. Neumann‘s book, The Good Death, will be published by Beacon Press in February 2016.