Famous people who turned out to be awful: Mother Teresa

I’m sure everyone knew that one super popular kid in school who everyone loved but later you find out he raped someone or stole a bunch of money. Before the internet, news didn’t travel very fast, or very far, and it was a lot easier to get away with being popular while failing as a human being.

In case you didn’t already know, Mother Theresa was a piece of shit. Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, aka Mother Teresa, founded the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic religious congregation which had over 4,500 sisters and was active in 133 countries in 2012. People mistakenly believe she spent her life healing the sick and the poor. She didn’t. She ran hospices. If you got dropped off at the Mission of Charity it meant you were just about dead and your family didn’t want to smell you anymore. Unfortunately, she was more concerned with having dying people love Jesus than trying to stop them from dying. I’ll put it in her own words,” There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.” She didn’t just talk the talk though. She walked the walk. If whatever was killing you hurt, you were shit out of luck. Teresa felt things like Aspirin and Codeine took away from the chance to share in Christ’s suffering.

Welcome to the Hotel Calcutta
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave

In 1968 the BBC correspondent Malcolm Muggeridge was doing a documentary in Calcutta about his conversion to Christianity and ran across Teresa’s house of horrors. His cameraman was having a hard time capturing the squalor and misery of the place because there was hardly any light so he switched to some new, state of the art, Kodak film the BBC had sent him with. He was amazed when he saw the final cut and the pictures came out beautifully. Instead of giving Kodak the credit it was due, Muggeridge proclaimed it to be the light of God. The rest is history.

The Vatican grabbed onto the story and started a PR whirlwind, which Mother Teresa was more than happy to play along with. Donations poured into the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. A man named Charles Keating Jr. donated 1.25 million. After Keating was arrested for swindling investors, a judge asked Teresa’s charity if they could have the stolen money to give back to the victims. She said she’d look into it, stopped answering the phone, and went back to polishing her Nobel Peace Prize.

Meanwhile people in her care lay on dirty blankets, eating moldy bread. Untrained workers would rinse off syringes and reuse them. Medicine in the facilities was almost non-existent. In addition to the unnecessary suffering, countless patients died who could have actually been cured. But when Teresa got sick, she flew on her private jet to America to get the best health care she could find.

The cherry on top of all this is she wrote to a friend of hers that for the last 50 years of her life she “felt no presence of God whatsoever, neither in her heart or in the Eucharist.” All the suffering she turned a blind eye to was for nothing. Also, all that money she collected; nobody knows what happened to it.

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