Mother Teresa, a saint to some and a verifiable
“Hell’s Angel” to others, might have had a big heart but the fact is it wasn’t
a very good heart. In 1983, while visiting Pope John Paul II
in Rome, it gave up on her when she had a heart attack. Six years later she was fitted with a pacemaker
after more heart trouble. Fast-forward some more years and she was in
a hospital bed surrounded by people who thought she was about to meet the angels. An archbishop who was at her bedside however
believed it was more than a biological breakdown. “It’s the devil,” he cried, “Satan
is messing with this dear, old woman!” And so, attempts were made to evict Lucifer
from the rather frail woman’s body. We guess a few of you might now be thinking,
“Mother Who?” Well, if you were alive in the 80s or 90s
or even before that you’d know that she was hardly ever off the TV. This was a woman, the church later said, that
not only devoted her life to looking after the poor, but she could also perform legitimate
miracles. Yep, healing the blind kind of stuff. That’s why she was made a saint, Saint Teresa
of Calcutta. The question is, could a saint be possessed
by the devil? Watch on and all will be revealed. She was born in 1910 in North Macedonia with
the name Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu. As a kid, she was always fascinated with missionaries,
and so when she was 18 she packed her bags and headed off to Ireland where she joined
the Sisters of Loreto. While there she touched-up on her English
and learned about becoming a missionary. It was then that she became Sister Teresa. A year later she was in Darjeeling in West
Bengal in India training as a nun. Soon she became Thérèse de Lisieux, the
patron saint of missionaries. She became a teacher in the city of Calcutta,
but all the time she was concerned about the pervasive poverty there, especially after
the famine of 1943. Three years later she was heading to the mountains
for some rest and recovery after likely contracting tuberculosis. It was on that train that she thought she
received a message from Jesus. The message was, “serve him among the poorest
of the poor.” She later said this, “I was to leave the
convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order. To fail would have been to break the faith.” So, that’s what she did. She set up her “Missionaries of Charity”
and spent much of her time in the slums. Her objective was to look after the poorest
of the poor, the blind, the lepers, the homeless, the people who walked around naked in the
street and lived off the scraps that people threw out. She started to get a bit of a name for herself
and while she’d been poor herself up until now, she started receiving donations, lots
of them. Soon she was opening up orphanages as well
as hospices for the dying, the poor, and the lepers. She became fluent in English, Bengali, and
Hindi, as well as already being able to speak Albanian and Serbian. Her charity became global, but as every TV
in the world showed, she spent most of her time in India. Ok, she doesn’t sound like such a bad person,
so where did all the talk about her being a “hell’s angel” come from? We don’t mean a biker, of course, we mean
a literal angel from hell. Well, she and all the helpers she had were
hardly medical professionals, and many of the people that were treated in her hospices
needed professionals to help them, not just some women talking about God. People screamed out in pain, and they didn’t
get painkillers but instead heard about Jesus. People were misdiagnosed all the time because
doctors rarely visited the hospices. Some of the poor also received a bit of rough
treatment from the sisters. One of her biggest critics was the writer
and lifelong agitator, Christopher Hitchens. He said members of her order baptized people
in secret. They’d be dying, and so didn’t know what
was going on. It was hush-hush because most of the people
unknowingly “buying their ticket” to the Christian heaven were Hindus or Muslims. Hitchens said she was “was not a friend
of the poor. She was a friend of poverty.” He talked about the “medieval corruption
of the church” and how she’d told the poor and sick to embrace suffering while rich
folks could look good under the eyes of God by donating cash to Mother Teresa’s charities. This is what Hitchens said after chatting
with her, “It was by talking to her that I discovered, and she assured me, that she
wasn't working to alleviate poverty. She was working to expand the number of Catholics. She said, 'I'm not a social worker. I don't do it for this reason. I do it for Christ. I do it for the church.” Hitchens however rarely ever likes to present
his quotes in context, and despite all his fabulous zingers against religion, has never
personally visited the poor to provide any sort of comfort or aid, so take his opinions
with a huge grain of salt. It was also pointed out by others that Mother
Teresa acted like a white savior, a kind of modern colonist showing all the whites in
the West how she was liberating the poor brown people. Back then there was no Twitter, but you can
bet your life she would have come under a lot of criticism. Most of this criticism again came from people
who did nothing personally to help the poor. There’s a certain luxury in criticizing
someone for being a white saviour while sitting comfortably in your first world home all your
life doing nothing to help someone else in need, so again, take these comments with a
rather large grain of salt. Ok, so is that why some people thought she
had the devil in her? No, is the answer. It was for a totally different reason. You have to remember that she was also venerated
all over the world and even handed the Nobel Peace Prize. She also had doubts, some referencing a kind
of dark side she felt being pulled towards. She once said this:
“Where is my faith? Even deep down ... there is nothing but emptiness
and darkness. ... If there be God – please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven,
there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and
hurt my very soul.” Living amongst all that poverty seriously
tested Mother Theresa’s faith, raising doubts. So, is this why she was exorcised? Well, it could partly be the reason. You already know that she got sick a lot. She likely had TB in her life, and she definitely
had malaria. She had that heart attack in 1983 while visiting
the big man in Rome, and the heart attack she had after that one almost killed her. She had a few good years, but slumming it
all her life really started to take its toll. In 1995, she was due to go to Calcutta airport
and pick up a cool $12 million in donations, but her trip was canceled after she fell out
of her bed and broke her collarbone. Man, this woman had some rotten luck…or
was it the devil playing tricks and meddling with her... A few months later she contracted malaria
and yet again had heart failure. The 86-year wizened woman turned to her doctor
and said, “God will take care of me.” The surgeons performed an angioplasty on her,
and then they gave a little electric shock to get her heart beating correctly. What happened next no one talked about. The TV news that had for decades swooned over
this wrinkled lady talked about her impending death, but no one had an inkling that Mother
Teresa was about to be exorcised. But why, why would anyone think she had the
devil in her?? Well, to any religious zealot the answer was
clear: only the devil could bring down a woman of such great faith! So, naturally, the Archbishop of Calcutta,
Mr. Henry Sebastian D'Souza, ordered an exorcism. He was actually staying in the same hospital
as her at the time. He was sure her heart problems were Satan’s
doing, especially when he heard she was having problems sleeping, too. He found out that during the day she was quiet,
but when darkness fell, she would start thrashing around in her hospital bed. Mother Teresa didn’t have one foot in the
grave just yet so she knew exactly what was going on. She greenlighted the whole process and laid
back and waited for the priest to do his best. The Archbishop later said, “She was quite
happy about it. She thought she might be troubled by the evil
one.” The exorcist, 75-year old Priest Rosario Stroscio,
stood over the aging nun and began to recite a prayer of exorcism. She also joined in. There were no spinning heads or crosses falling
from walls, neither did Mother Teresa embarrass herself by using rather colorful language. In fact, she just smiled after the exorcism
and drifted off into a blissful sleep. Stroscio would later say that what he did
wasn’t so special. He said she’d been acting strangely, so
it was pretty obvious to everyone that she was “getting attacked by the devil.” He said this had happened hundreds of times
to saintly people and that’s why so many exorcists are there when there’s an emergency. After she fell asleep, it was as if God was
shining down on her. As her breath whistled through her teeth,
for a second it seemed a golden halo formed around her head. The archbishop later said about that magical
day, “She was totally restless. The doctor could not understand it. She was pulling all of her wires out. But the night after the exorcism she slept
very well. She was totally calm.” Hallelujah, she was saved…for now. The archbishop said right up until her death
she was troubled by evil spirits. She didn’t have to wait too long until she
found out for good if the devil and his adversary up in heaven existed because just over a year
later she was dead. She left behind 4,000 sisters and 300 brothers
helping out the needy in 123 countries. Four years after her death the archbishop
talked about the exorcism in public for the first time. Mother Teresa was still getting a lot of TV
time since she‘d been canonized, aka, made into a saint. For that to happen you need to prove without
any doubt that someone has performed a miracle. You actually need lots of documents to back
it up. This allegedly happened. There were documents showing that Mother Teresa
had miraculously made a woman’s tumor disappear. In fact, she performed the miracle in absentia,
meaning she wasn’t even there. If that’s confusing, this is what her nemesis
Christopher Hitchens said about that: “Surely any respectable Catholic cringes
with shame at the obviousness of the fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims
that a beam of light emerged from a picture of Mother Teresa, which she happened to have
in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor.” The woman’s doctor told the media that no
such miracle happened and good old medicine and treatment had got rid of the tumor. The woman’s husband said, “My wife was
cured by the doctors and not by any miracle ... This miracle is a hoax.” As for all the woman’s medical records,
Sister Betta of the Missionaries of Charity made them all just disappear. Still, if doubts persisted as to Mother Teresa’s
sainthood there were people who were sure this woman performed miracles with God’s
touch. In 2015, Pope Francis signed off on a document
that said her second miracle was touching a man’s head in Brazil. The guy had had multiple brain tumors, but
miraculously they disappeared when Mother Teresa’s fingers graced his skull. It was later found out by some investigators
that part of the Vatican that researches possible sainthood cases spends over half a million
bucks on every case. When the office was asked where “tens of
millions of Euros” actually went, the church didn’t have the receipts and wasn’t very
talkative on the subject. Now you need to watch, “Is There Life After
Death?” Or, scare yourself with, “The Real Life
Exorcism Even Scarier Than The Movie.”
