SEEKER OF SOULS

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Miracle worker or not, Mother Teresa was now a media star. A decade after the documentary, she received the Nobel Peace Prize because "poverty and distress also constitute a threat to peace." At her request, the traditional banquet was canceled so the $7,000 cost could go to the poor. "We need to tell the poor that they are somebody to us," she told the audience of rich and honored guests, "that they too have been created by the same loving hand of God, to love and be loved."

Today some 4,000 sisters of the Missionaries of Charity, clad in white saris with blue borders, pursue her rigorous path, along with 450 brothers in a separate men's order. Mother Teresa created a network of 569 missions spread across 120 nations that operate workshops for the unemployed, food centers, orphanages, leprosariums, and refuges for the insane, retarded and aged. She won access to global leaders; she counted Princess Diana a personal friend; Pope John Paul II valued her as a revered colleague.

As her work earned fame around the world, money poured in from individual and corporate benefactors. Mother Teresa never worried about funding the many expanding activities of her order. "The Lord sends it," she once said. "We do his work; he provides the means." The order is reportedly flush with cash, though no outsider knows the exact wealth in its coffers. In India alone, revenue officials say, the group's assets exceed $41 million, which is largely in real estate.

Mother Teresa had a more controversial side: she was never afraid to speak and act with impunity on matters of the secular world. She repeatedly decried abortion. "If a mother can kill her own child, then what is left of the West to be destroyed?" she once said. At Harvard University's commencement in 1982 she called it "the greatest evil."

There have been charges that her sisters not only give succor to the dying but also ask if they want "tickets to heaven," surreptitiously baptizing lifelong Hindus and Muslims for Jesus. The sisters deny these accusations; in India such conversions would be met with outrage, and the charge is widely disbelieved. But such acts would be in keeping with Teresa's fervent devotion to the cause of Christ.

Recently she came under attack from those who believe, as George Orwell once wrote about Mahatma Gandhi, that all saints should be judged guilty until proved innocent. In 1994 Britain's Channel 4 broadcast a revisionist look at Teresa that was harshly titled Hell's Angel. Written by Pakistani-born leftist Tariq Ali and British columnist Christopher Hitchens, the program claimed that the Missionaries of Charity accepted donations from some unsavory individuals, including Haiti's former autocrat Jean-Claude Duvalier. In return, Mother Teresa and her sisters delivered effusive encomiums in favor of the rich and infamous eager to buy international respectability. Teresa replied that she had no moral right to refuse donations given for the poor and miserable. Hitchens followed up with a scathing, book-length critique called The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, which noted that Mother Teresa once wrote to Judge Lance Ito requesting leniency for Charles Keating, whom he was about to sentence in the late-1980s savings-and-loan scandal. Keating had once contributed $1.25 million to the Missionaries of Charity.