The Disturbing Truth About Mother Teresa You Never Knew

It's time to rethink all the Mother Teresa facts you may know, because there's a lot more to Mother Teresa's biography than simply caring for the poor and sick. This is the unfortunate truth of Mother Teresa; a collection of well known Mother Teresa criticism that might make you reconsider just how good of a person she actually was. Was Mother Teresa evil? Was Mother Teresa bad? Check out these Mother Teresa facts and tell us what you think in the comments below!

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Here are five disturbing facts about Mother Teresa that will change the way you see the world’s most famous nun.

5) Secretly baptized the dying

Alright, let’s ease into this with something at the low end of egregiousness… According to multiple accounts in the Washington Post, She encouraged secretly baptizing dying people - whether they wanted to be baptized or not. Also, according to a close companion of Mother Teresa’s, Father Maasburg, Mother Teresa and her nuns would sneakily baptize Hindus and Muslims on their deathbed so they could go to heaven with the real God of course… not their made up one. That’s less about taking care of the dying than it is about pushing your religion on the dying.

4) Called AIDS “Retribution for improper sexual conduct”

Mother Teresa called AIDS "Just retribution for improper sexual conduct." She said that In 1989 while being honored at a luncheon for the International Health Organization in Washington, DC. To be crystal clear, Mother Teresa thought that the AIDS virus was God killing gay people for being gay. You might be thinking to yourself, “yeah but that’s just a product of that era. They were still calling AIDS ‘Gay Cancer’ in 1989!” … They weren’t. 1989 was well after AIDS was understood to be a disease that anyone could get… and it was even after Ryan White, the teenager who famously got AIDS from a blood transfusion, began speaking publicly. Mother Teresa wasn’t having it.

3) Said “Leprosy is a beautiful gift”

Continuing down the line of weird things for a person known for helping the sick to say, Mother Teresa said “Leprosy is a very beautiful gift from God.” To put that completely in context, she said that Leprosy was a beautiful gift from God because it was a way to “learn to love the unloved.” In essence, people with crippling and disfiguring diseases, and one can assume just sick and poor people in general, aren’t really people. They’re just tools from God for healthy, happy people to gawk at to learn how to be compassionate. Basically, Mother Teresa took care of sick people to help herself more than she did it to help them.

2) Hygiene at clinics was abysmal

Of course those last two things were just things she said. How about actions? Actions speak louder than words. Well, when it comes to her actual healthcare… the hygiene at her clinics was absolutely abysmal. The oftentimes untrained volunteers at Mother Teresa’s “homes” just didn’t know how to keep a medical facility running smoothly. One former volunteer at Nirmal Hriday, Mother Teresa's favorite home, claimed "needles were washed in cold water and reused." Also, according to Forbes, soiled and infected clothes were washed by hand and reused… all this despite $72 million in annual donations to her facility.

1) Where did the money go??

Speaking of that $72 million a year, which she clearly didn’t use to update any of her health clinics to provide better, or even basic care to her patients… No one knows where the money went. a 1991 investigation by a German news magazine called Stern revealed that only 7% of the money at that time was actually used for charity. The money has been controlled by the Vatican since 1965, and there's no transparency about how it is used. In 2008, former Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity, Sister Nirmala, told the media Mother Teresa’s charity received "countless" donations each year, but she wouldn't get specific about what it was used for. She said, "God knows. He is our banker." Which, as I’m sure you are aware… that is not how money works.

The takeaway from all of this is that in truth, Mother Teresa obviously wasn’t the saint you maybe thought she was. Of course, the Vatican never let’s the truth get in the way of a good story.