Former Time magazine journalist and his hard-sought interview with Mother Teresa

Tuesday, September 13th, 2016

I did not expect that arranging an interview with Mother Teresa would be difficult. As Time magazine’s bureau chief in New Delhi in the late 1980s and ’90s, I frequently interviewed prime ministers, generals, political leaders and just about anyone in the news in south Asia. But repeated phone calls to the motherhouse of the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) got me nowhere. The sisters were polite but not at all interested.

I sought advice from Church figures and journalists, including my wife, Joan Frawley Desmond, who in those days was occasionally writing for the Register. What I heard was that Mother Teresa disliked journalists who portrayed her as a social worker.

It took a few phone calls from mutual Church friends to get the message through that I could do better. Finally, I received a typed letter from Mother Teresa asking me to be at the motherhouse, 54a A.J.C. Bose Road, on Dec. 16, 1988, for the interview. Her letter switched from the administrative to the evangelical in a few words. “Love to pray,” she wrote at the end of her note, “feel often during the day the need for prayer and take the trouble to pray so that you do the work entrusted to you for his greater glory. Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift of himself.” With that, she signed off.

Kolkata is even more noisy, crowded and chaotic than you might imagine. But it’s also an intensely friendly and warm city, once you get past the shock of arrival. I felt a little guilty staying in the comforts of the Oberoi Hotel, which was an oasis behind huge iron gates on Jawaharlal Nehru Road, a virtual river of life streaming through the city. My first stop was to see Father Edward Le Joly, who was an aged Jesuit from Belgium and longtime Kolkata resident. He had worked with the sisters for many years and had served as Mother Teresa’s confessor. He lived in a simple residence, with no more than a bed, a desk, a mosquito net and fan — to beat back the city’s dripping, relentless heat. Continue reading