Contrasts Coexist With Key Parallels
The day before “the people’s princess” was buried, the woman the world called “the living saint” had died.
Their lives provided such contrast that the temptation would be to paint one as merely a shallow dilettante, the other the humble partner of God.
But both Princess Diana and Mother Teresa were complex women. One glittered at endless balls and charity events; the other flourished while surrounded by the destitute and dying. Both were media creations.
The Rev. Edward le Joly, a priest who worked with Mother Teresa, said in a 1990 interview that “Mother has been made by the media. Without the media she would still be a little nun working with a few other nuns.”
It wasn’t until the British Broadcasting Corp. made a television documentary about Mother Teresa’s work in 1969 that she became a worldwide celebrity. Volunteers tracked her all the way to India; donations flew in. She became the CEO of a huge network of missions throughout the world. By 1996, she ran 517 of them in more than 100 countries.
Both of these clever women learned to use the media, both later came to regret the intrusion. The primary difference between them was that Mother Teresa found a calling early in life and clung to it with fierce determination. Diana did not. Mother Teresa searched for answers within a relationship with her God. Diana looked to an emotionally repressed prince for completion.
All of that was clear from the media’s coverage of these two women. The storytellers in our culture faithfully represented the women behind the images. One made intensely principled choices and sacrifices; the other, despite her compassion and warmth, did not.
In the week since Diana’s death, the media have come under intense criticism for their invasion of her privacy, the unethical paparazzi for their role in her death. But this is also a week for considering the message of the nun from Calcutta, which has been disseminated around the world for nearly 30 years to influence the lives of people everywhere.
Mother Teresa dedicated her life to loving the rejected and the abandoned. She opened doors that seemed nailed shut; she provided a vision of hope and faith in a world taken with irony and style. The poor, Mother Teresa told the United Nations in 1975, “don’t need pity, they need love and compassion. … If you don’t know them, you don’t love them and don’t serve them.”
Two lives are gone. The media enlarged them both. The results, for Princess Diana, were tragically mixed. For Mother Teresa, the consequences were life-affirming and good.
Perhaps that was the result of the individual choices these two women made. Now, it’s up to the world to decide how to respond to their life lessons.
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jamie Tobias Neely For the editorial board