Revealed: Mother Teresa's actual views on conversion

On conversion:

In the course of writing my book, I asked Mother Teresa whether she converted people to her faith. Without a moment's hesitation she replied, "I do convert. I convert you to a better Hindu, a better Muslim, a better Protestant, a better Sikh. Once you have found God it is up to you to do with him as you wish". She believed that conversion was not her work, it was God's work.

On politicisation of religion:

I once asked the late Jyoti Basu, chief minister of West Bengal, who was a towering politician and a great supporter of Mother Teresa, what he as a Communist, and atheist could possibly have in common with Mother Teresa. He replied that they both shared a love for the poor. That he supported her all his life speaks volumes. It is not possible to politicise Mother Teresa's mission of compassion.

On being a social worker:

This is an important question. She always said that she was not a social worker but a religious. What she meant was that her difficult work looking after destitute not just in India but all over the world became possible only because the child she found abandoned or the leper whom she treated with her own hands, and the dying destitute whom she picked up from the streets of the whole world, were for her, the manifestation of God. She felt no need to convert them because this was not her mission. In my last meeting with her before she died, I asked her, "Which is the saddest case you remember?" She replied, "So many". I asked her to give me one example. She said, "One day, one of my sister's and I were walking on the streets of Calcutta. I heard the voice of a woman crying behind the rubbish dump. There was an old woman who lay dying there. I brought her to my Home in Kalighat. I washed and cleaned her, I put fresh clothes on her and she lay in my lap."

Excerpts from Mother Teresa: The Authorized Biography

"I do convert," she once said to me when she was accused of converting Hindus to Catholicism. "I convert you to become a better Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist or Protestant. When you have found God, it is up to you to do with him what you wish."

I confronted her with the stinging accusation that she accepted money for her work from some rather dubious characters. Her answer was concise: "I have never asked anybody for money. I take no salary, no government grant, no church assistance, nothing. But everyone has a right to give. I have no right to judge anybody. God alone has that right." Hers remains the only charitable organisation that explicitly forbids fund-raising.

On the subject of her frugality, I had once teasingly said to her that she switched off lights faster then anyone could switch them on! Her face became serious. She replied that when a little child could give her one rupee saved by his not eating any sugar for three days, in conscience she could not waste "sacrifice" money on unnecessary expenditure. I never referred to her frugality again.

I have been so many times to this hospice at Kalighat, that I did not need to ask Mother Teresa why she had not set up a hospital instead, because I knew that a hospital would tie down all her Sisters to a single establishment, and then who their would care for those who fell by the wayside?

Reprinted with the publisher’s permission.