The comments of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat that Mother Teresa’s works of charity had a hidden agenda of converting the affected people to Christianity has received the severest condemnation from all quarters and rightly so for her works were dedicated towards service to humanity and at no time any shade of conversion was ascribed to it.
In this backdrop it is worth referring to a statement made by the Mother during an interview, which is being raked by the Sangh Parivar, including Meenakshi Lekhi, the MP from New Delhi constituency and the BJP spokesperson. Mother Teresa had said, “I am not a social worker. I am in the service of Jesus and my job is to spread the word of Christianity and bring people to its fold.” How do you interpret these words?
Mother Teresa means that she is not just a social worker for name sake but has a specific mission of spreading the message of Christianity propounded by Jesus, which is to have compassion on the suffering person as if he is you and render service to him. By doing so the Mother tried to send a clear message to the world around so that others too can walk in her footsteps and continue with the works of compassion, bringing sunshine to the underprivileged. That is what she meant in saying ‘bring people to its fold’.
Whereas we do not absolutely deny that conversion has been the silent tool in some of the missions in our country and as one party has just said that in India people have been converted under the guise of allurement or coercion, no one can impute the same with the unassailable works of charity promulgated by Mother Teresa through her missionary zeal of just being the messenger of peace and goodwill to the doomed and discarded lot in Kolkata.
We would like to promote that we can be Christ-like without being Christians. The tragedy is sometimes we are Christians unlike Christ. Conversion of heart and mind is more important that converting to a faith and truly the Mother tried to propagate this message in her selfless life.
