Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity seek swift fix after Indian government blocks foreign donations
Supporters of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity reacted with surprise and concern to the Indian government’s ruling that the organization is now ineligible for foreign donations, but a spokeswoman for the Calcutta-based branch of the organization believes the situation will be remedied without much effect on the missionaries’ work.
India’s Ministry of Home Affairs made a determination on Christmas Day that the Missionaries of Charity no longer met eligibility requirements under the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act, the Wall Street Journal reports. In a Dec. 27 announcement, the ministry said that during the renewal of the organization’s application, they found “adverse inputs.” The authorities did not specify what this meant.
Sister Prema, superior general of the Missionaries of Charity, said Dec. 27 that the community’s renewal application under Indian law had not been approved. The organization has asked its centers not to use any foreign contribution accounts “until the matter is resolved.”
Sunita Kumar, a spokeswoman for the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, told the New York Times she was confident the problem could be resolved. She indicated that funding for the missionaries’ work would not be affected immediately due to local support.
“There’s enough locally also that’s given, so we can handle that,” she said.
Some media reports erroneously indicated that the Missionaries of Charity financial accounts had been frozen.
Foreign donations to the Missionaries of Charity made up more than $13 million for the financial year ending in March 2021, its filings said. The organization does not publicly report its total income, according to the New York Times.
Father Dominic Gomes, vicar general of the Archdiocese of Calcutta, called the announcement “a cruel Christmas gift to the poorest of the poor.”
He said there are 22,000 direct dependents and beneficiaries at Missionaries of Charity centers across India, UCA News reports. Missionaries of Charity sisters and brothers “reach out to uplift thousands and are often the only friends of the lepers and social outcast no one will even venture near.”
The Albanian-born Mother Teresa of Calcutta was a Sister of Loretto and a high school teacher who left the Sisters to work in the slums of India. She taught poor children and treated the sick in their homes. Some of her former high school students joined her, and together they took in men, women, and children who were dying in the gutters along the streets.
She founded her first community of women religious called the Missionaries of Charity in 1950, under the Archdiocese of Calcutta. The government granted the missionaries a house to serve Calcutta’s poor in 1952. The organization now has hundreds of houses worldwide and its membership includes religious sisters and brothers and priests, plus a lay organization.
Mother Teresa became world famous for her work. She died in September 1997 and Pope Francis canonized her in 2016 as St. Teresa of Calcutta.
Sam Brownback, who served as U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom from 2018 to 2020, criticized the refusal to renew the missionaries’ application.