MOTHER TERESA: IN THE NAME OF GOD’S POOR

Anyone who has visited India will find MOTHER TERESA: IN THE NAME OF GOD’S POOR an incredibly accurate portrait of the impoverished Indian subcontinent. This HBO movie by the MOVIEGUIDE award-winning Hallmark company presents an insight into the early years of Mother Teresa and attempts to show the forces that shaped her into a unique woman of God. During the 1946 Muslim/Hindu battles which accompanied the separation of India into India and Pakistan, Sister Teresa served in the Loreto Convent School for wealthy young Indian girls.

Inside the walls of the convent school the street skirmishes seem remote until the school runs out of food because the riots have stopped all shipments into the city. Headstrong and impetuous, Sister Teresa leaves the convent to find food and, in the process, finds incredible suffering. This troubles her so much that her superior suggests that she go on a retreat to regain her emotional balance.

However, on her retreat, she experiences more of the haunting poverty of India. When she returns to the convent, she asks for a year outside the convent to minister to the poor without relinquishing her orders. This is a unique type of request which the Vatican has not granted for many years. Therefore, when her request is granted, her superior realizes that God must be at work.

Sister Teresa goes into the worst slums and starts teaching the children and taking care of the sick. Without guile, she confronts the bigotry and anti-Christian, anti-colonial attitudes of the Hindus, the outcasts and the bureaucrats. By God’s grace, she surmounts each obstacle and is eventually granted the right to start a new order, the Missionaries of Charity, and so becomes Mother Teresa.

This excellent production is well worth viewing. The direction, acting and set direction are superb. It is so well produced that it will captivate children and adults, drawing them in to the story of this remarkable woman.

Most of the movie is very accurate, but in light of Mother Teresa’s speeches and the excellent 1986 documentary on her life (see MOVIEGUIDE ® Volume XII#20: 971007, October A), the missing ingredient in this made for TV movie seems to be her real-life focus on Jesus Christ. Mother Teresa does say in the movie that everything she does is because of God and for God, but, in the movie, she seems to have some ambivalence toward the faith of the Hindus and Muslims to which she ministers, and, even toward her call. In real life, Mother Teresa made it quite clear whenever she spoke that Jesus was the only answer and that He alone had called her.

On the other hand, it must be noted that the program does not promote ecumenism, diversity or watered-down Christianity; rather, the movie merely avoids fully examining the strength of Mother Teresa’s Christ-centered faith which allowed her to minister to the poorest of the poor, people that most people shunned because of their horrible diseases.

However, this movie does stress that her life was a miracle, not just in what she did, but the fact that God sustained her in the midst of such horrible conditions. When a plague-ridden man throws up on the shoe of an international war correspondent, the correspondent is devastated, crying, “I’ve been contaminated.” Every day for fifty years, mother Teresa wiped the wounds and the sores of people with dreadful toxic diseases, and yet, Christ sustained her in her faith and in her health to triumph in the midst of adversity. This is a movie that should be watched. It sets standards to which all men and women can aspire.