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.”