Very few modern figures have been as misunderstood as Agnese Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, commonly known as Mother Teresa of Kolkata. She is widely praised for her supposedly humanitarian efforts, chief among which are the Missionaries of Charity, a group of nuns that she founded. Criticism of Mother Teresa is anathema in polite discourse and readily attracts strong opposition of dogmatic followers. However, the enormous popularity of Mother Teresa exemplifies the bandwagon effect; most of her acolytes cannot state anything aside from vapid platitudes about her, and upon close examination Mother Teresa proves to be an elaborate fraud.

            Born in Skopje, Macedonia (then part of the Ottoman Empire) on August 26, 1910 to an Albanian family, Bojaxhiu’s fanaticism began from a young age. Raised in a devoutly Roman Catholic family, Bojaxhiu determined at age twelve to become a nun, abandoning her family to join the Sisters of Loreto at age eighteen. In 1929, she was sent to Darjeeling, India, and took the name Teresa when she formally became a nun. While teaching at Kolkata, Mother Teresa claimed that she was influenced by the widespread poverty in the city, and decided to found a new order of Christians, the Missionaries of Charity, in 1950.

            From the beginning, Mother Teresa’s behavior was highly questionable. Although she opened the Kalinghat Home for the Dying in 1952 and accepted a variety of ill and homeless people, the care that she provided was lackluster and virtually medical malpractice. According to The Lancet, a premier medical journal, the conditions in Mother Teresa’s shelters were haphazardly maintained. The staff, mostly nuns, was not medically trained and therefore was not able to provide high-quality care. Mother Teresa’s Christian fanaticism refused to allow those with curable diseases to receive medical care from hospitals, subjecting them to miserable deaths.

            Mother Teresa was first vaulted into the public consciousness by the 1969 documentary Something Beautiful for God. Afterwards, with access to a worldwide audience, Mother Teresa proceeded to defraud on a much larger scale. Although she received millions of dollars of donations worldwide, she nevertheless masqueraded as a poor, pitiable angel. The Missionaries of Charity’s bank accounts at various times contained up to fifty million dollars, almost all of which went to the Roman Catholic Church in Vatican City; very little was used for improving the conditions of the hospices. With fame usually comes severe scrutiny, but this was not the case for Mother Teresa: she persisted in keeping the shelters in filth and squalor.

            Knowing that she was beyond audit, Mother Teresa proceeded to engage in many corrupt activities. She accepted donations from the totalitarian Duvaliers of Haiti and praised them publicly, shielding them from international criticism for their horrific human rights record and public administration. She also received over one million dollars from Charles Keating, who defrauded thousands of people and contributed to the Savings and Loan Crisis. Most unforgivably, Mother Teresa wrote to the judge of Keating’s trial, advocating leniency, a clear indication that she operated not for the benefit of the poor but for the ecclesiastical elite.

            Mother Teresa’s actions also exemplify the idea of the “white man’s burden” and are cultural imperialism at its worst. For egotistical reasons, she has propagated the myth of Kolkata and the entirety of India as a destitute place; while Kolkata, like other large cities in developing countries, certainly has a large underclass, the extraordinarily deprived individuals whom Mother Teresa purports to help are still a small percentage of the total population. The average denizen is poor, but not unbearably so, and maintains a sense of dignity.

            Even after Mother Teresa’s death on September 5, 1997, she continues to be internationally revered, because of the false image she had so faithfully cultivated of her piety and innocence. Any rejection of the myth of Saint Teresa is taken as a slight by sycophants, no matter how justified. Yet she deserves to be remembered as a mass murderer, not a heroine.