Was it Justifiable For Mother Teresa to Accept Money From Shady People?

Just few days back two prominent figures were extremely harsh on Mother Teresa. I did not expect such adjectives from Justice Katju and Arindam Chaudhari. Part of the problem, I think, is that they did not try to understand things from the other side. She was accused of accepting donations from people of shady characters, and also that her use of money was not transparent. When I try to put myself in her shoes, this is way I see things.

Take a government employee whose office hour is 9am - 5pm. This person is wasting his time shouting at the clients, gossiping, loitering, sleeping, arriving late, leaving early and doing things he should not be doing during office hour. But at the end of the month, he gets full salary. When he goes to the shop to purchase potato and hands over the Rs. 100 note, he does not say this 90% is from my hardwork and 10% is for arriving late, leaving early and all the useless thing I do but should not be paid for. The rich businessman does not say this 85% is through fair earning, and 15% is through making the 100 employees work additional one hour each week for which I am getting the money. I believe our politicians' earning would be mostly contaminated money!

If a politician had donated to a Temple or a Gurudwara saying this money on my right hand is from bribery and cheating and the money on my left hand is through honest earning, it would be unreasonable not to reject the money given by the right hand. But the politicians do not come like that, and they donate contaminated money, and how could the priest separate which percentage is pure and which is impure.

Mother Teresa had the hungry and the diseased to feed. It is the government and God who must examine how the donors earned the money. Investigating what percentage is white money and what percentage is black money is not her job. If she would not accept any contaminated money, she would have to close down her institution. Because there is no one whose entire earning is entirely pure. Our efforts and earnings are contaminated by greed, anger, jealousy, malice etc. though there is love, grace, compassion, friendship etc.

But even if it was justifiable for her to accept donations from people of shady character, she must be honest in the use of the money. And as a registered NGO, her institution must be accountable to the government. There was no RTI ( Right To Information) during her time, and her critics would have no way of getting the audited statement if she had refused to share. But she had no reason to show the audited statement to any of her critics. She was not accountable to her critics. If she was unfaithful, it was for the government to take action on the institution. Let the government bring forth accusation if there were financial irregularities. 

Her critics accusing her of refusing to share the financial detail is not a reasonable charge nor is it reasonable to criticise her specially using very strong adjective for accepting donation from people who had gone to jail or involved in cheating and so on.