Sept. 4 marks the 10-year anniversary of the canonization of Mother Teresa, a saint whom Pope John Paul II called “an icon of the Good Samaritan” who lived her life “as a total gift to the poor.”
The nun was world famous for having established a network of houses in some of the most destitute regions in the world, including her “home for the dying” in Kalighat, Calcutta.
That hospice center, which is still operating today, cares for those who have nowhere else to go, including many dying individuals, with the religious sisters there working to serve Jesus “hidden under the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor,” as John Paul II put it.
Yet though Mother Teresa was hailed for her lifetime of sacrifice and her relentless commitment to caring for the poor, she has periodically come under fire by some critics who allege that she did not effectively minister to impoverished people, including by allegedly denying painkillers to those suffering greatly while dying in her care.
Those allegations were espoused most famously by Christopher Hitchens, the outspoken British atheist who visited the Kalighat house and later wrote critically about the standard of care provided there — including the claim that the sisters refused to provide anesthetics to suffering patients.
‘On the front line of alleviating pain and suffering’
Jim Towey, an American attorney who first met Mother Teresa in 1985 and who would go on to serve as legal counsel for her and the Missionaries of Charity for years, strongly disputed the claim that the nun was “indifferent to the pain of people.”
Towey, who detailed his years of service to Mother Teresa in his acclaimed 2022 book “To Love and Be Loved,” told EWTN News that she was “constantly on the front line of alleviating pain and suffering” across the world.
Hitchens’ widely-repeated criticism, Towey argued, was based off of accounts of a few ex-Missionaries of Charity as well as a visit Hitchens himself paid to the Kalighat facility in the early 1980s, which he wrote about years later.
Critics of the Kalighat home, Towey said, “have no idea what it was like on the streets [of Calcutta], where people were literally dying outside Mother Teresa’s doors.”
“She would bring them in and clean them and make them comfortable,” he said. “Half of them would die, half would eventually recover and leave.”
He said regional circumstances in eastern India in the early 1980s made strong painkillers almost impossible to get.
“There was no available morphine in Calcutta, even in the hospitals,” Towey said. “You couldn’t get anesthesia. The supply routes in and out of West Bengal, even into the 21st century, were terrible. They denied Western investment and trade was nonexistent.” Regional Soviet politics also constrained the exchange of goods, he said.
“There was no reliable stream of medical supplies,” Towey said. Yet “if [Mother Teresa] had them, she used them.”
The standards of care at the Kalighat facility have greatly improved in the decades since Hitchens visited, Towey pointed out. He said he most recently visited the home in May. “It’s changed dramatically. The quality of care, the medical care they provide, the pain relief they give to people [have all improved].”
Still, he cautioned against applying hospital standards to what is effectively a hospice home. “Mother was not running a hospital,” he said. Yet she was committed to alleviating the suffering of her charges to the greatest extent she could, he said. She herself regularly took medicine to manage instances of chronic back pain and numerous broken bones including a broken shoulder.
“This was a person whose life was immersed in suffering,” Towey said. “But when it became terrible she took pain medicine. She understood redemptive suffering, but she also knew the Church encourages people to manage pain.”
Towey, who did the first reading at Mother Teresa’s canonization Mass at the Vatican in 2016, said Mother Teresa “did what she could” and “used what she had” in order to alleviate the suffering of those in her care. And beyond that she worked to ensure that those suffering or dying in her facilities were loved and cared for.
“She tried to help people make sense of the pain if it wasn’t something she could alleviate,” he said.
And ultimately “she let people know they were loved, that they had God-given dignity, and that their suffering would not diminish that dignity.”
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