British movie on Mother Teresa dropped from festival

Sydney
24 August 2003

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British movie on Mother Teresa dropped from festival

Organisers of a film festival planned to celebrate the beatification of Mother Teresa have withdrawn a film critical of the Nobel-laureate nun.

The film, Hell’s Angel: Mother Teresa of Calcutta, produced by the British television company Channel 4 and directed by US-based British author Christopher Hitchens, criticised Mother Teresa for accepting donations from people who gained the money illegally or unethically.

The film festival is among events the Calcutta archdiocese is organising around the scheduled beatification on October 19 of Mother Teresa, founder of the Missionaries of Charity.

Bishop Salvadore Lobo of Baruipur, episcopal delegate for the cause of Mother Teresa, objected to Hell’s Angel and another film, In The Name of God’s Poor, by Dominique Lapierre (co-author of Is Paris Burning?, O Jerusalem! and Freedom at Midnight (about India’s independence and partition) and author of City of Joy (about Calcutta).

“As of now, only Hitchens’ (film) is deleted,” says Salesian Fr CM Paul, co-ordinator of the film festival.

Hell’s Angel stirred controversy with its criticism of Mother Teresa for accepting money from and lending respectability to people such as Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and Charles Keating, a US financier convicted of embezzlement and fraud.

The film was based on Hitchens’ book, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.

Bishop Lobo has told Archbishop Lucas Sirkar of Calcutta that the Hitchens and Lapierre films are controversial because they distort Mother Teresa’s life and work.

“We from the Church side cannot patronise these films and screen them,” he said.

Bishop Lobo said he knew “how Mother had felt about these films when they had come out”. If the two films are screened, “we would be dishonouring her”, he said, asking Archbishop Sirkar not to allow the films at the festival.

The films would “mislead many of our simple people for whom any book and film is a Gospel truth,” he said.

Fr Paul said the festival committee invited all films made on Mother Teresa, “even though we knew right from the start that (the Missionaries of Charity) and their supporters had a problem” with the Lapierre and Hitchens films.

The priest, president of the India unit of Signis, the international Catholic organisation for radio, television and film, said “people who have not seen the films should not criticise them from hearsay.” Rather, “the criticised party should have a fair chance to be seen and heard, and then to be judged”.

Fr Paul said retired Archbishop Henry D’Souza of Calcutta had commended In the Name of God’s Poor, lauding Lapierre for working “to preserve the rich heritage of an extraordinary individual who lived in our midst”. It would “certainly touch the hearts of many and enrich all by the sublime sacrifice of our dearly beloved Mother Teresa”.

Missionaries of Charity superior general, Sr Nirmala Joshi, said the inclusion of Hell’s Angel would be “entirely inappropriate for the celebration of Mother’s beatification”.

She did not mention the Lapierre film, though she objected to it in August 1997 as not authorised by Mother Teresa or the congregation.

Mother Teresa died less than a month later.