Mother Teresa of Calcutta is to be formally declared a saint by Pope Francis in a ceremony at the Vatican on Sunday, an event keenly anticipated by millions of Catholics around the world.
However, in India, where she ministered for most of her life and founded the Missionaries of Charity order to take forward her work, her beatification is not universally welcomed. Right-wing Hindu nationalists object to the honouring of a Christian whose work highlighted the desperate poverty of parts of their country and the failure of the government and civil society to deal with it, and fear a new surge of interest in Catholicism because of it.
According to the international joint general secretary of one such organisation, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi should not be sending a delegation to the Vatican for the occasion.
Reported by The Indian Express, Surendra Jain said: "The canonisation of Mother Teresa is an alarm bell that now there would be more conversions in India and more funds [for conversions] would be routed to India."
Jain cast doubt on the miracles associated with Mother Teresa, asking: "Do you expect miracles to happen in this age?"
He said: "The issue of Mother Teresa's services vis-a-vis religious conversions is not new. We have been raising it for years. I think the Prime Minister should have thought over it before he decided to send an official delegation to the Vatican."
Modi paid tribute to Mother Teresa in his radio address on Sunday, saying Indians should be proud she is being declared a saint.
It is not the first time the Church has been accused of using Mother Teresa as a pretext for proselytism. In June, Gorakhpur Yogi Adityanath, a member of India's parliament, accused her of "a conspiracy to Christianize India", a charge rebutted by Catholic Archbishop Thomas Menamparampil.
According to Crux, Menamparampil said that although Mother Teresa's work "had an eloquence of its own and projected the image of an ideal Christian in the noblest possible way," he "strongly disagrees" with the suggestion that she engaged in proselytism.
