'Clouded legacy' of 'Saint Teresa'

As the Vatican prepares to declare Mother Teresa a saint today, in the Indian city where she rose to fame, claims of medical negligence and financial mismanagement at her care homes threaten to cloud her legacy.

Pope Francis approved the canonisation of the widely beloved Roman Catholic nun last December, nearly two decades after she died in Kolkata, in whose teeming slums she devoted her life to helping the destitute and the sick.

Yet criticisms of the soon-to-be Saint Teresa of Kolkata abound, with doctors and former volunteers recounting grim tales of poor sanitation, medical neglect and forced conversions of the dying.

Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu to Albanian parents in what is now Macedonia, her Missionaries of Charity homes for the dying earned her a Nobel Peace Prize and the sobriquet Saint of the Gutters.

Like millions of Catholics worldwide, Gautam Lewis is excited to celebrate the canonisation of the woman he calls his "second mother", who rescued the orphan after he was struck with polio aged two.

"Mother Teresa used to carry me to church every Sunday and she personally supervised my treatment when I underwent surgeries and rehabilitation to get rid of polio," Lewis, now a pilot in London, told AFP.

But Aroup Chatterjee, a British doctor born in the city formerly known as Calcutta, said that "her whole emphasis was propagation of her faith at any cost."

"To convert a dying, unconscious person is very, very low behaviour, very disgusting," the 58-year-old author of a controversial 2003 book on the nun said. "Mother Teresa did that on an industrial basis."

Some former volunteers say her order glorifies pain and poverty and accuse it of delivering bare-bones care, despite receiving millions of dollars in donations.

Hemley Gonzalez, who started his own NGO in Kolkata as a response to the alleged deficiencies he witnessed when volunteering at Missionaries of Charity eight years ago, calls it "a modern-day cult".

Nuns washed needles with tap water before reusing them, he said, and scolded him for giving terminal patients haircuts because they were going to die anyway.

Missionaries of Charity has vastly expanded since Mother Teresa's death, and now has 758 centres in 139 countries staffed by more than 5,000 nuns.

Yet the order remains opaque, declining to publish its funding sources or accounts, a stance which has elicited suspicion over its management of allegedly vast sums.b