Mother Teresa documentary premieres in Kolkata on her feast day
A documentary titled "Mother Teresa – Prophet of Compassion" premiered on September 5, 2026, at St Xavier’s College Auditorium in Kolkata, drawing over 200 attendees including Missionaries of Charity nuns and novices. Archbishop Elias Frank of Kolkata presided over the premiere, praising journalist Anto Akkara for his effort to highlight lesser‑known aspects of Mother Teresa’s life and work to a global audience. The film traces Mother Teresa’s journey from early work in India to the worldwide expansion of the Missionaries of Charity, covering key events and the congregation’s presence amid conflicts such as Yemen, Nicaragua, Gaza, and Ukraine. The premiere, hosted by the Archdiocese of Kolkata, coincided with Mother Teresa’s feast day, underscoring the significance of her legacy.
15 days ago
“Mother Teresa – Prophet of Compassion,” a 66-minute documentary by journalist and author Anto Akkara, premiered in Kolkata on Sept. 5, 2026, the feast day of St. Teresa of Kolkata. More than 200 people attended, including Missionaries of Charity nuns and novices, with Archbishop Elias Frank presiding. 1
The screening took place at the Auditorium of St. Xavier’s College on Park Street and was hosted by the Archdiocese of Kolkata. Archbishop Frank praised Akkara’s efforts to present lesser-known aspects of Mother Teresa’s life and the history of the Missionaries of Charity. 1
Akkara said his association with Mother Teresa began in 1995, when she granted him what he described as a comprehensive interview. He has since returned to Kolkata more than two dozen times for international reporting, including coverage following her death in 1997. 1
The documentary was proposed as the Missionaries of Charity approached their 75th anniversary, with the congregation agreeing to the project and Atmadarshan TV of Indore supporting its production. It expands on an earlier film made for the congregation’s 75th Foundation Day in October 2025, adding more than a dozen episodes and international accounts. 1
The film follows Mother Teresa’s work from her early years in India through the worldwide growth of the Missionaries of Charity. It highlights episodes in Patna in 1948, Jharkhand in 1959, and New Delhi in 1961. 1
It also portrays the congregation’s work in conflict zones, including the killings of Missionaries of Charity sisters in Yemen in 1998 and 2016, the congregation’s expulsion from Nicaragua, and the decision by sisters to remain in Gaza and Ukraine during bombardments. Photographer Raghu Rai is among those featured. 1
According to the report, Akkara said the documentary addresses allegations that Mother Teresa’s charitable work was primarily intended to promote religious conversion. The film instead emphasizes her service to people living in extreme poverty, children, orphans, people with disabilities or mental illness, and people affected by leprosy. 1
The documentary includes several lesser-known accounts of her work:
The film presents Mother Teresa as having received respect from people across religious and political lines, including former Indian President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and former Prime Ministers Inder Kumar Gujral and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. It also recalls her friendship with Jyoti Basu, the longtime Marxist chief minister of West Bengal. 1
Another example of her interreligious outreach is the naming of a Missionaries of Charity center near Ranchi as “Radharani Convent,” honoring a Hindu woman who donated land for a leprosy home in 1973. 1
Born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in 1910 in present-day North Macedonia, Mother Teresa came to India in 1929 as a Loreto Sister and founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950. The congregation later expanded internationally to serve poor and vulnerable communities. 1
The documentary depicts that expansion as an effort to “globalize compassion and care” while retaining Mother Teresa’s original focus on people living in destitution. 1
Evaluate how contemporary media shapes Catholic sainthood narratives
Contemporary media significantly shapes Catholic sainthood narratives by expanding access to holy lives, encouraging popular devotion, and making saints culturally recognizable. Yet it can also reduce holiness to celebrity, emotional appeal, miracles, or ideological symbolism. Catholic discernment therefore requires distinguishing media visibility from the enduring fama sanctitatis—the stable and widespread reputation for holiness rooted in Christian virtue.
Digital media favors stories, images, and personal testimony. The Dicastery for Communication notes that stories provide context and help people interpret an information-saturated and chaotic digital environment. They can also create community by allowing people to share experiences that have transformed them.
This makes the lives of saints especially suited to contemporary communication. A saint’s conversion, hidden fidelity, service to the poor, martyrdom, or struggle with suffering can be presented not merely as abstract doctrine but as a concrete human drama. In this sense, media can recover an important Catholic insight: sanctity is not a theory but a lived communion with Christ, visible in choices, relationships, sacrifice, and charity.
Media can also introduce saints to audiences who would not encounter them through parish teaching or devotional literature. Pope Francis acknowledged that appropriate access to media can promote knowledge of candidates for beatification and canonization. Public communication may therefore help forgotten or geographically distant figures become known, particularly saints whose witness speaks to contemporary questions of justice, migration, poverty, disability, youth, or persecution.
Social media also changes the implicit model of authority. Influencers gain influence through visibility, attention, and the size of their following. The Dicastery observes that people increasingly look to such figures for moral and spiritual direction when traditional institutions seem distant.
This creates a danger: sainthood may be narrated according to the logic of popularity. A candidate can appear “saintly” because the person is photogenic, relatable, controversial, or widely shared. The audience may admire a personality without encountering the deeper realities of prayer, sacramental life, obedience, self-denial, and charity.
Catholic sainthood, however, is not equivalent to public appeal. The Church recognizes holiness principally as heroic Christian virtue and conformity to Christ, not as fame. Pope Paul VI stressed that the essence of holiness is charity—God’s grace received and human love returned to God through virtuous action. The media may reveal a witness, but it cannot create holiness merely by producing a large audience.
Catholic tradition does give genuine importance to the faithful’s recognition of holiness. Pope Francis explains that fama sanctitatis—the reputation for holiness—arises primarily among the People of God. But it must be spontaneous, stable, enduring, and sufficiently widespread; it must survive changing fashions and continue to produce spiritual good.
Social media can accelerate this process, but acceleration is not the same as authenticity. Viral attention is often brief and driven by novelty, outrage, emotional intensity, or coordinated promotion. Francis therefore warns that digital networks can produce exaggeration and misrepresentation motivated by less noble interests. He calls for wise discernment when evaluating a candidate’s reputation for holiness.
The distinction is particularly important when online devotion focuses on alleged miracles, private revelations, dramatic anecdotes, or extraordinary signs. Catholic teaching does not identify miracles with the essence of sanctity. Paul VI noted that miracles are signs of holiness, but not its substance; historical evidence, reliable documentation, and the examination of the person’s virtues remain essential.
Media narratives necessarily select. A short video or devotional post may highlight a saint’s courage while omitting ambiguity, historical context, intellectual development, conflict, or ordinary perseverance. This can produce an idealized figure who seems either flawless from childhood or perfectly aligned with contemporary political expectations.
Such simplification distorts the Catholic meaning of sanctity. Saints are not manufactured heroes whose lives confirm every preference of a particular audience. They are witnesses to Christ, and their holiness may challenge both secular culture and internal Church habits. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints describes saints as concrete witnesses who make Christian teaching credible and “livable,” rather than merely presenting a moral ideology.
At the same time, media can recover dimensions previously neglected. It can draw attention to women, laypeople, young people, indigenous Christians, migrants, married couples, and those whose holiness was expressed through social service or ordinary fidelity. Earlier accounts of canonizations already showed how saints could strengthen the identity and dignity of particular peoples and communities. The challenge is to broaden the Church’s memory without reducing saints to representatives of demographic or political categories.
Media also enables the Church to respond to hostile or reductive portrayals. The Dicastery for Communication recommends that stories can provide a constructive counter-narrative more effectively than argumentative replies. Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan is offered as an example: the story changes the listener’s position and invites personal identification rather than merely winning a debate.
This is valuable when saints are presented either as oppressive figures or as sanitized humanitarian icons detached from faith. A responsible Catholic narrative should show how prayer, grace, doctrine, moral conversion, and love of neighbor belong together. It should neither conceal historical difficulties nor allow those difficulties to eclipse the saint’s actual witness.
A sound media presentation of a saint should therefore ask:
The final criterion is whether media attention produces the fruits associated with authentic holiness: deeper faith, hope, charity, communion, and concrete service. The Dicastery describes Christian witness as pointing away from the witness’s own self and toward Christ: “He must increase; I must decrease.”
Contemporary media is neither simply a threat nor a neutral tool. It can democratize access to the saints, revive neglected witnesses, form communities, and communicate the Gospel through compelling human stories. But its attention economy can also turn saints into influencers, devotion into fandom, and holiness into a marketable image.
The Catholic response is not to reject media but to purify its use through historical responsibility, theological depth, and ecclesial discernment. Media serves sainthood narratives best when it makes the saint’s life more intelligible while allowing Christ—not fame, controversy, or cultural preference—to remain the true center.