7. The Media Portrayed an Inaccurate Image of Mother Teresa
The most notable challengers to the prevailing depiction of Mother Teresa by the media were Christopher Hitchens, and physicist and author, Aroup Chatterjee. Hitchens wrote a very critical book about Mother Teresa, entitled the Missionary Position, and made a documentary about her in 1994 called Hell’s Angel. Hitchens claimed that Mother Teresa’s global fame began as a result of a 1969 BBC documentary, entitled Something Beautiful for God. Hitchens says that Malcolm Muggeridge’s claim of having captured the first “T.V. miracle” during the filming of his documentary led to the media hype which surrounded Mother Teresa.
Ken McMillan, a cameraman for the documentary described how they had concerns that the House of the Dying facility that they were about to film may have been too dark to capture useful footage, and that they were using new film which had not been tested beforehand. Despite their concerns, the crew decided to begin filming the work carried out by the nuns and volunteers.
A few weeks later when they sat down to have a look at the footage, McMillan was surprised to see the brightness and clarity of the images, which were so illuminated that every detail could be seen. Just before McMillan was about to praise Kodak for their new high-quality film, Muggeridge claimed that it was “divine light.” From there McMillan began receiving phone calls from London newspaper journalists, saying that “we hear that you have just come back from India with Malcolm Muggeridge and that you were the witness of a miracle.” Hitchens believes that this was the birth of the media hype surrounding Mother Teresa.
Aroup Chatterjee, another critic of Mother Teresa, wrote a book criticizing Mother Teresa entitled Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict, which was published in 2002. It was later reissued in 2016 under a new title, Mother Teresa: The Untold Story. The book covers Mother Teresa’s rise to fame and the conditions of the House of the Dying facility in Calcutta, the non-consensual conversions of Hindus and Muslims on their deathbeds, financial and other controversies.
Both Hitchens and Chatterjee acted as “Devil’s Advocates” during the beatification process of Mother Teresa in 2003.