December 30, 2021. Updated 12.31.2021

Last week, on Christmas day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government blocked the Missionaries of Charity in India from receiving foreign donations. The announcement was “a cruel Christmas gift” to the poor, said Father Dominic Gomes, vicar general of the Archdiocese of Kolkata, where the mission is based.

This week, the government stated that it found “adverse inputs” in the mission’s application, seeking renewal of its license to accept foreign donations. Hindu nationalist groups allege that the mission is converting Hindus to Christianity. “I’ve worked here for 45 years, and nothing like that has ever happened,” Sunita Kumar, a spokeswoman for the mission told the New York Times.

Roughly 5,000 nuns, who are part of the mission in India, run homes for abandoned children, schools, clinics, hospices and other projects that help the needy. A leading Roman Catholic charity, which now operates around the world, the mission was founded in Kolkata in 1950 by the late Mother Teresa. Foreign donations are a key source of funding for the mission in India. In the fiscal year that ended March 2021, the mission received over $13 million in foreign donations. .

In 1979, while accepting the Nobel Peace prize in Oslo, Norway, Mother Teresa said, “I personally am most unworthy…I choose the poverty of our people. But I am grateful and I am very happy to receive it in the name of the hungry, of the naked, of the homeless, of the crippled, of the blind, of the leprous, of all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared, thrown away.” Declining to accept the $190,000 cash award that came with the prize, she asked that it be given to a charity in India.

“Unbelievable that the Indian government would ban foreign donations to an organization founded by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Mother Teresa,” tweeted Sam Brownback, who was the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, from 2018 to 2020, under President Donald Trump. “This misguided action only hurts the people of India. Charities should be allowed to help people in need.”

The decision to cut funding for the mission “comes at a time of rising intolerance of religious minorities” in India, Canada’s Globe and Mail as well as Australia’s News.com.au reported. Christian leaders say there is “an increasingly hostile environment for their religion” in a country governed by Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, which has deep Hindu nationalist roots, The Wall Street Journal noted. 

“Hindu vigilante groups disrupted Christmas celebrations in parts of the country this year, protesting outside religious gatherings, and vandalising a church in northern India,” according to the BBC.

This is part of a rising number of attacks on Christians in India. Christians were the targets of 305 violent incidents in 2021 alone, according to a report by Indian civil liberties groups. The country is home to around 20 million Christians, the second-largest in Asia, after the Philippines.

“Anti-Christian vigilantes are sweeping through villages, storming churches, burning Christian literature, attacking schools and assaulting worshipers,” The New York Times reported. “In many cases, the police and members of India’s governing party are helping them, government documents and dozens of interviews revealed…Many Christians have become so frightened that they try to pass as Hindu to protect themselves.”

Earlier this month, speakers at events organized by some Hindu nationalist leaders called for the establishment of a Hindu nation, “if necessary” by killing Muslims. according to numerous media reports. Such calls for hate and violence, and recent attacks on Christians, lower castes and Sikhs, alarmed several retired chiefs of India’s armed forces, police officials and senior civil servants. In a letter to Prime Minister Modi, Chief Justice of India and other officials, they demanded action to ensure “both National and Human Security.”

“WHY IS THIS NOT BEING STOPPED?,” tweeted Arun Prakash, former chief of India’s navy. “With our Jawans (soldiers) facing enemies on 2 fronts (China and Pakistan), do we want a communal blood-bath, domestic turmoil…Is it difficult to understand that anything which damages national cohesion & unity endangers India’s national security?”

“Agreed,” tweeted Ved Prakash Malik, former chief of the Indian Army, in response. “Such speeches disturb public harmony and affect national security. Action required by Civil Admin.”

India is a “country of particular concern” for religious freedom, noted the 2020 report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. “Conditions in India are taking a drastic turn downward, with national and various state governments tolerating widespread harassment and violence against religious minorities,” the report stated. The commission is an independent, bipartisan U.S. federal government agency.

Mother Teresa was born in Skopje, Macedonia in 1910, in an Albanian family. Her birth name was Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. At 18 she joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India. After a few months of training in Dublin, she was sent to India, where in 1931, she took her vows as a nun. She taught at St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta, now Kolkata.

In 1948, moved by the suffering and poverty she saw outside the convent walls, she received permission to leave the school and devote herself to working among the poor in the slums of Kolkata. With no funds, she started an open-air school for slum children. Soon she was joined by volunteers and also found financial support.

While selfless in her commitment to help the poor, Mother Teresa had her flaws. She opposed abortion and contraception, an unequivocal stand made clear in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. In a 2003 article in Slate, an American magazine, Christopher Hitchens wrote that Mother Theresa was a friend of poverty and not of the poor. “She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women…And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return).”

Many people in the rich Western countries “liked to alleviate their own unease (and poor conscience) by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for ‘the poorest of the poor,’” Hitchens added. He and others have also criticized the Missionaries of Charity for not publicly disclosing its finances.

The mission has expanded all over the world, including houses in North America, Europe and Australia, where the nuns and priests take care of the alcoholics, homeless, drug addicts, AIDS sufferers and others in need. Mother Teresa, who passed away in 1997, was declared a saint by Pope Francis in 2016.  

While accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, Mother Theresa, recited a prayer: “that where there is hatred, I may bring love; that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness; that where there is discord, I may bring harmony; that where there is error, I may bring truth; that where there is doubt, I may bring faith; that where there is despair, I may bring hope; that where there are shadows, I may bring light; that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.”

One evening a man came to the mission in Kolkata and said there is a Hindu family, with eight children, who have not eaten for several days. Mother Teresa told the audience that she took some rice and gave it to the mother of the family. She was puzzled when the mother walked out of her hut with half the rice. “When she came back, I asked her, where did you go?” The mother said she gave the rice to a neighbor, a Muslim family, who were also hungry. “What surprised me most,” Mother Teresa said, is “that in her suffering, in her hunger, she knew that somebody else was hungry, and she had the courage to share, share the love.” 

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