6. The Missionaries of Charity Baptized People on their Death Beds
In February 2015, Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the Hindu Nationalist group in India, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, claimed that Mother Teresa’s primary reason for helping the destitute was to convert them to Christianity, not to alleviate their suffering. Speaking of Mother Teresa’s legacy, Bhagwat said, “It’s good to work for a cause with selfless intentions. But Mother Teresa’s work had an ulterior motive, which was to convert the person who was being served to Christianity.”
It is claimed that Mother Teresa instructed the nuns in charge of the care of the dying to secretly baptize them on their death bed. A former member of the Missionaries of Charity wrote that Mother Teresa told nuns to ask each dying patient, regardless of their religious faith, “if they would like to go to the God who sent the Sisters to him?” If the dying person said yes, this was taken as consent to being baptized, without this fully being explained to the patient.
A nun would then pretend to cool a patient’s forehead with a damp cloth but was, in fact, baptizing them. They would quietly say the necessary prayer, while the patient remained oblivious to what was actually occurring. Murray Kempton, a critic of Mother Teresa has argued that Muslim and Hindu patients were not provided with the necessary information to make an informed decision about whether or not they wanted to convert to Christianity.
Fr. Leo Maasburg, who was a close companion of Mother Teresa, wrote in his book, Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Personal Portrait, that Mother Teresa had said to him that “a dying person does not have to know the entire teaching of the Catholic Church in order for us to be able to baptize him. At the moment of death, it is enough for the dying person to grasp the core of the Church’s teaching, namely, the love of God.”
Mother Teresa wrote in her book, Life in the Spirit: Reflections, Meditations and Prayers: “Our purpose is to take God and his love to the poorest of the poor, irrespective of their ethnic origin or the faith they profess. We never try to convert those whom we receive to Christianity but in our work, we bear witness to the love of God’s presence and if Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists or agnostics become for this better men – simply better – we will be satisfied.”
On another occasion Mother Teresa was asked by a Catholic priest whether or not she attempted to convert people of other faiths, she replied, “Yes, I convert, I convert you to be a better Hindu, or a better Muslim, or a better Protestant, or a better Catholic, or a better Parsee, or a better Sikh, or a better Buddhist. And after you have found God, it is for you to do what God wants you to do.”