Church agrees, Hitchens film out of Mother fest

Produced by ITV Channel 4, the documentary Hell’s Angel had created worldwide controversy because of its depiction of the ‘‘fallibilities’’ of the Mother, like her mingling with Haitian dictator Duvalier and her unquestioning acceptance of funds from alleged swindlers like Charles Keating of Lincoln Savings and Loans. ‘‘But it wasn’t the Mother’s business to know how one donated funds and from which source,’’ says Kumar, an old associate of the Mother. The MC’s objection to In the Name of God’s Poor has been that its script had not been approved by the Mother. When the Mother was alive, she had joined issue with Lapierre on the matter in a series of statements and counter-statements. ‘‘The Mother raised objection because Lapierre didn’t show the manuscript to her,’’ says Kumar.

Interestingly, Fr Gaston Roberge, a Jesuit priest and founder of the order’s Mass Communication Centre Chitrabani here, says the Mother had cleared the manuscript. The festival is the first such event in the history of the Roman Catholic Church dedicated to a beatified candidate for sainthood.

In a letter dated July 20, Bishop Salvadore Lobo, the Episcopal delegate at the Diocesan inquiry team for the cause of Mother Teresa’s sainthood, had requested Archbishop of Calcutta Lucas Sircar to have In the Name of God’s Poor and Hell’s Angel excluded from the festival. ‘‘Both films have been controversial,’’ Bishop Lobo wrote. ‘‘Both depict the Mother and her works in a distorted way.’’ Following the letter from Bishop Lobo and a similar letter from MC Superior-General Sr Nirmala, the Archbishop saw the two films and said he did not find anything objectionable in them.