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1 Mother Teresa and celebrity culture
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.
William Shakespeare
The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
Daniel J. Boorstin
In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.
Andy Warhol
i. The democratization of fame
In this chapter I assess Mother Teresa’s celebrity status in the context of contemporary celebrity culture. In the first part of the chapter I identify some of the changes ‘fame’ and ‘status’ went through in the West from the start of the seventeenth century. I then assess Mother Teresa’s fame from three perspectives: subjectivist, structuralist and post-structuralist. Of particular interest in this chapter is the origin of the discourse about Mother Teresa’s saintly nature and the information provided about those who originated, endorsed and sustained it. Also in this chapter, I identify what Mother Teresa had in common with celebrities from the world of entertainment, politics and sport as well as what set her apart from them.
As a species, we have always been and will always be preoccupied with fame. Distinguishing ourselves, craving for and securing recognition and acknowledgement, is neither a ‘sin’ nor a ‘virtue’: fame-seeking is an innate human drive. There has never been a society without famous people and, as Thomas Carlyle once put it, ‘[t]he History of the world is but the Biography of great men’.1
In pre-industrialized societies ‘fame’ and ‘status’ were almost synonymous and they were usually inherited, but there were cases when ‘commoners’ too earned them as a result of achievements and heroic deeds that elevated them above the rest of the populace, thus legitimizing their rise to power and prominence. From the first half of the seventeenth century, the period which saw the emergence of newspapers in some Western European countries as a novel means of disseminating the news, and especially from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, thanks to the development of other technologies – dry-plate photography, telephone, phonograph, the roll film, radio, motion picture, television and the Internet – that facilitated the continuous distribution of information at a much greater speed and to an ever-expanding audience, the notions of ‘fame’ and ‘status’ underwent significant denotative and connotative changes.
Technology paved the way for the democratization of fame, and the media heightened further two of our basic instincts: eagerness to know as much as possible about other people’s personal lives, and craving to convince the world as much as ourselves of our importance as individuals. It is hardly surprising that gossiping and mimicry found a new lease of life in the media age.
Being famous in the industrialized world gradually came mainly to mean being in the public eye. Capitalism produced a new brand of famous person: the celebrity. In his acclaimed 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, Daniel J. Boorstin defined the modern-type celebrity as ‘a person who is known for his well-knownness’.2
In true capitalistic fashion, the media industry manufactures celebrities by the bushel. So much so that it would be no exaggeration if we described them as constituting a social class of their own. Andrew Smith goes even further in his article ‘All in a good cause?’ which appeared in the Observer on 27 January 2002. In his view, Live Aid in 1985 demonstrated the truth that ‘a new social world had been made, in which there were only two categories of people – the celebrity corps and what Liz Hurley would later notoriously characterize as “civilians”, i.e. the rest of us’.
In a media-saturated world where the attainment of celebrity status is seen as an end in itself and where, for better or for worse, celebrities are such influential role models for an ever-growing fandom, there is always the possibility of either equating fake prominence with genuine greatness or ignoring some of our real heroes.
Concentrating on the figure of Mother Teresa, this chapter identifies some of the approaches and flaws apparent in the contemporary celebrity discourse. Although she was a global ‘celebrity’, there are very few references in the academic debate about Mother Teresa to the nature of her celebrity status and her relationship with the media. This is even more surprising considering that, as a rule, Mother Teresa experts approach her more or less in the same way as we would normally approach celebrities from the fields of theatre, cinema, television, music, politics and sport.
Mother Teresa became a global celebrity when she started making headlines as a Nobel Prize laureate. Reporters were among the first to see and treat Mother Teresa as a star. ‘How wonderful to see the world press for once spellbound by a true star,’ an editor of the Norwegian paper Aftenposten exclaimed in December 1979, ‘a star without false eyelashes and makeup, without jewels and fur coats, without theatrical gestures.’3
Mother Teresa is yet another example of the extent to which celebrity culture has permeated every aspect of life. The nun’s relationship with the media also reveals that, like any famous person, religious personalities often employ the press and every other medium of mass communication with dexterity and, at times, unscrupulously, to reach out to their intended audiences.
In spite of the similarities between her and many celebrities, Mother Teresa was a media icon with a difference. The main aim of this chapter is to identify some of these differences and highlight the uniqueness of this celebrated nun in a world that abounds in big names.
Mother Teresa was one of the most written about and publicized women in modern times. Except for Pope John Paul II, she was arguably the most famous religious celebrity in the last quarter of the twentieth century. After her death, as during her life, Mother Teresa continues to generate a huge level of interest and heated debate from those who either praise or criticize her. The ongoing argument about whether or not the celebrity nun deserves her fame or notoriety is further proof of our increasing fascination with media celebrities from every walk of life.
ii. Sanctified by the media
People approach Mother Teresa’s celebrity status mainly from three different perspectives: subjectivism, structuralism and post-structuralism. The employment of these approaches indicates the complexity of the media icon called Mother Teresa and the ‘liquid’ nature of the notion of celebrity nowadays.
Subjectivists maintain that talent, which eventually leads to fame, is innate and God-given. In Mother Teresa’s case, this attitude is apparent in the numerous books, authorized and unauthorized biographies, pictorial histories, television programmes, films (documentary, feature and animated), plays, novels, poems, paintings, musicals and sculptures that often bear the signature of her friends, colleagues, admirers and supporters all over the world. In the media, this interpretation surfaced when she was first spotted by the Indian Catholic press in Calcutta shortly after she had set up the Missionaries of Charity order in 1950. Referring to this time, the reporter Desmond Doig, an Indian Catholic of Anglo-Irish origin, remarked in 1976 that twenty-seven years earlier he was tipped off by a Catholic functionary and fellow journalist to watch the European nun because ‘she’s quite extraordinary. She’s going to be a saint.’4
In the first instance, the myth about Mother Teresa’s ‘sainted’ status was apparently started by Mother Teresa herself, something, which, as will be explained later in this chapter, she came to regret. Mother Teresa always maintained that she received the first call from God to serve the poor some time in 1922 before her twelfth birthday.5 A quarter of a century later she claimed she was the recipient of another call, which she would refer to as ‘the call within a call’. On 10 September 1946, during a train journey she heard God ‘calling me. The message was clear. I must leave the convent to help the poor by living among them.’6 This, Mother Teresa believed, ‘was an order. To fail it would have been to break the faith.’7
Even when she became world famous, and was aware that her words were likely to be scrutinized by her friends and foes alike, Mother Teresa would not hesitate to express in public her belief that she was somehow in direct contact with God and the Ancient Fathers of the Church. One of her preferred parables involving herself was the ‘encounter’ with Saint Peter at heaven’s door. Peter had tried to keep her from going in, saying ‘I’m sorry. We have no shacks in heaven.’ Upset by the doorman saint’s ‘irreverence’, the saint-to-be had responded: ‘Very well! I will fill heaven with the people from the slums of the city, and then you will have no other choice than to let me in.’8
Mother Teresa accepts that the holy ‘encounter’ took place when she was delirious and suffering from a very high fever. One does not have to be a psychoanalyst or an atheist to conclude that, like the second call in 1946, her ‘audience’ with Peter could have been triggered by her poor health and agitated state of mind. Unfortunately, we do not know much about the exact state of Mother Teresa’s health when she received the first call. Like most of her first eighteen years in Skopje, even this life-changing incident remains something of a mystery. What is widely known, though, is that throughout her childhood Mother Teresa was frequently ill and confined to her bed. She suffered from malaria and whooping cough and also had a club foot.9 Her parents were constantly concerned because of her illnesses, especially her mother who thought ‘she would lose her because of her fragile health’.10 Mother Teresa’s health did not get any better in India. She was often sick, especially in 1946. This is what Sister Marie Thérèse recalls about that year: ‘We were careful of her. I don’t know whether she realized it, but we were.… When it came to the work and the running around, our Superiors took extra care with her.’11 She was apparently so sick that her friends feared she would be stricken with tuberculosis. As a precaution, she was asked to stay in bed for three hours every afternoon. Seeing no improvement, she was directed to go to the hill station of Darjeeling to recuperate. On the way there the sick and tired Mother Teresa had her second ‘encounter’ with God.
Seen in the context of the Holy Scriptures, Mother Teresa’s paranormal experiences are similar to what many prophets, apostles, disciples and saints before her have apparently gone through. Mental anguish and poor health frequently seem to have paved the way to ‘revelations’. Jews and Muslims, for instance, maintain that prophets such as Moses and Mohammed suffered from depression when God communicated with them directly.
Different people approach and interpret ‘holiness’ in different ways. In the case of devout believers, a person’s sanctity is measured not so much by their ability to perform miracles as by their absolute faith in the strange ways God works through some chosen individuals. This is one of the key themes in Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians:
Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed.… Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.… And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.12
Those who are not very religious, on the other hand, are eager to find some more down-to-earth explanations about Mother Teresa’s ‘audiences’ with God or the Old Fathers of the Church. Failure to provide some rational accounts has shrouded the nun’s figure in mysticism and mystery in the eyes of many secular beholders who respect her. While Mother Teresa’s religious admirers consider her skill in ‘paranormal’ communication as an undeniable proof of her ‘divine’ nature, others who are not religious and who do not necessarily object to her work and legacy could well perceive it as evidence of mental disturbance.
My intention here is not to approve or disapprove of the opposing interpretations of Mother Teresa’s ‘paranormal’ abilities. Instead, I intend to offer a middle way which will hopefully be useful in approaching her figure and legacy without preconceptions and eventually in helping to clear away the supernatural fog her figure, intentions, work and legacy seem to have been shrouded in for quite some time. It is my belief that the more details we know about the personal lives of influential people, especially if they are invested with ‘supernatural’ powers, the easier it will be to answer some of the puzzling questions about them in particular and human nature in general.
Considering how much Mother Teresa was immersed in literature (secular and religious) from a young age, 13 her strong ambition to become a writer, and the obvious creative flair she displayed in the poems she wrote in Skopje,14 and in numerous letters she sent from India to her family and friends in the Balkans from 1929 onwards,15 it is not difficult to see how the educated, enthusiastic and imaginative young woman, who turned into a devout nun, could have occasionally blurred reality with fantasy, especially when she was suffering from recurring bouts of ill health.
A string of coincidences also seems to have strengthened Mother Teresa’s conviction that God intervened to help her in fulfilling her vocation as Jesus’s special ‘envoy’ to alleviate the suffering of the poor. In her speeches, press conferences and books penned by her, or by her admirers on her behalf, she would often mention moments of crisis when things had finally, out of the blue, turned out to be all right. Food, money, clothes and shelter were apparently made available to Mother Teresa and her sisters and brothers when most needed and least expected. Mother Teresa never saw such occurrences as mere coincidences.16 Neither did her supporters and admirers, whose numbers grew as a result of witnessing her ‘divine’ ability to seek and always secure God’s help.
As the news about Mother Teresa’s extraordinary ability to secure God’s intervention for the sake of the poor at the eleventh hour began to spread, she came to be seen as the modern personification of a shamanic figure par excellence. Likewise, her determination to care for the sick was gradually but steadily perceived and interpreted as a miraculous power to cure them. In the Roman Catholic Church, anything belonging to or that has been touched by a saint or a person about to be proclaimed a saint – bones, strands of hair, the remains, vials of blood, burial site, possessions, clothes, books, letters, pictures and statues – is called a ‘relic’ and is venerated and cherished dearly by their brethren after their death.17 In Mother Teresa’s case, however, her sanctity took root and flourished during her lifetime. Rich and poor, intellectuals and uneducated people, believers and non-believers, Catholics and followers of other faiths who had been in contact with her or had only heard about her were gradually falling under her spell. Mother Teresa’s letters and gifts to her admirers were treated by them as ‘relics’ even while she was alive.
Following her 1968 BBC interview with the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, the nun’s reputation also began to spread across ‘secular’ and ‘rational’ Western Europe. Many people who met her in the late 1960s and early 1970s did not know what to make of her. There were some, however, who felt spell-bound in her presence, and their numbers grew throughout the 1980s and 1990s.18 Stories about Mother Teresa’s positive impact on people’s lives mushroomed not only among Catholics but also among non-Catholics and the secular-minded.19 The Mother Teresa ‘fan-club’, it appears, was and remains a very broad church.
Mother Teresa’s opponents, on the other hand, find stories about her ‘supernatural’ abilities ridiculous and bizarre. They are particularly keen to make fun of the incident involving the controversial BBC journalist Malcolm Muggeridge who in 1969 went to Calcutta to prepare a documentary about Mother Teresa. Referring to the incident in his 1971 book Something Beautiful for God: Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Muggeridge explains that filming insi...
