Mother Teresa: A Complete Authorized Biography

Christian Century, Feb 4, 1998 by Lawrence S. Cunningham

By Kathryn Spink. HarperSanFrancisco, 306 pp., $23.00.

In the publicity material accompanying this biography the copy writer describes Mother Teresa as "another great humanitarian." That description gets it quite wrong. Humanitarians serve humanity, while Mother Teresa's goal was to serve concrete individuals as she and her companions met them in the specific situations of their lives. She was not much given to speaking about saving the world or humanity. In Bengali, she would say Ek. Ek. Ek: one by one by one.

It is crucial to understand this if one is to answer the criticism often made about her work, namely, that she did nothing to remedy the situations in which her "poorest of the poor" lived. Mother Teresa never felt that such strategic operations constituted her task. She passionately believed in acting in the moment when someone was in need.

Once, when shown by a government social worker in Australia a one-room hovel in which an elderly man lived so that Mother Teresa could see the need for her sisters' help, she immediately turned the visit into a cleaning expedition to make the apartment more livable. That was the exigent need of the moment.

Kathryn Spink, an English woman born in India and a longtime friend of Mother Teresa, underscores this fundamental orientation by way of anecdotes. Mother Teresa said that her task in life was to subtract--that is, to make one less person hungry or lonely or unwanted. In response to an American senator's query about her "success" she said that her goal was not success but fidelity--living a whole life in which each day, in a spirit of poverty, her work subtracted people from the rolls of the miserable, the destitute and the unwanted.

Spink's work is proclaimed to be an "authorized" biography. She enjoyed the confidence of Mother Teresa as well as access to the Missionaries of Charity and such archives as they have managed to keep. That access provided Spink an advantage over some of the other 20-odd writers who have narrated the now familiar story of the Yugoslav-born Albanian woman who joined the Irish Sisters of Loretto in Calcutta and, after some years as a teacher, left the congregation along with a few companions to start a new work. In two generations that work blossomed into a large women's religious order, with male branches and a network of co-workers around the world. In that time Mother Teresa, largely as a result of Malcolm Muggeridge's 1969 television documentary and subsequent book, Something Beautiful for God, became--if we can bear to use the current cliche--an icon of what a saint should look like.

Written with an obvious love for Mother Teresa, Spink's biography has a slight air of the hagiographical about it. Mother Teresa's critics and their criticisms are dealt with only obliquely. The notoriously critical 1994 BBC documentary and later book by Christopher Hitchens is dealt with gingerly, but Hitchens is never mentioned by name. Mother Teresa referred to him as "Hell's Angel" but could barely comprehend why he was so critical. If Spink had access to Anne Sebba's just-published biography, with its more critical judgment of some of Mother Teresa's policies (a work, alas, marred by a tin car for religious observance, judging from what I've seen), she never mentions it.

Spink discusses apologetically Mother Teresa's cavalier treatment of the organized network of coworkers, whose dedicated labors of 25 years were rudely stopped and put under the authority of her sisters. Her rough handling of the Missionary Brothers and its founder, Brother Andrew, is dismissed by Spink as a "bruising of the male ego." Spink even wheels out the old hagiographical story of someone saying that he would not touch a leper for a thousand dollars, with Mother Teresa responding that she would not either "for a thousand dollars." I heard that edifying anecdote 50 years ago as a parochial school student. Then the main characters were an American GI and a nun who worked with lepers in the Philippines.

If Spink tends to sidestep criticisms of Mother Teresa, she compensates by having a good grasp of the nun's slow development as a servant of the poor and by providing interesting background about those who were close to her in the early days, especially her Jesuit confidant Father Van Exem and the laypeople who worked for her in Europe and elsewhere. She is also quite good in documenting Mother Teresa's dealings with the church when she was attempting to get her religious community started.

Spink is sensitive to Mother Teresa's complex relationship with India, where she was widely revered as a source of blessing by the poor and a symbol of Indian pride by elements of the government, even though the Bengali intellectuals of Calcutta disliked having their city seen through the lens of its poverty and squalor.

Like all great saints, Mother Teresa was a paradoxical mixture of simple piety, powerful willfulness, single-minded vision and steely determination. She bluntly told her own religious that if they did not want to live poorly and seek for perfection, they should pack up and leave. When dealing with bishops and cardinals she almost always got her way, and that was the case for mayors, governors and other persons accustomed to wielding authority. In that sense, she reminds me of Francis of Assisi. Both faced the issue of how their followers would remain faithful to the founders' original religious insights that made them saints in the first place.