Mother Teresa’s Charity in India Regains Access to Foreign Funding After Ban

Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950.

Photo: Sankhadeep Banerjee/Zuma Press

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Jan. 8, 2022 10:02 am ET

NEW DELHI—India’s government has restored approval for a Christian missionary group founded by the late Mother Teresa to receive foreign funding, two weeks after refusing that permission on Christmas Day.

India’s Ministry of Home Affairs didn’t say what prompted the reversal. It had previously said that it found unspecified “adverse inputs” when renewing the Missionaries of Charity’s application and that the group no longer met eligibility requirements under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act.

Registration details on the ministry’s website showed the charity’s approval under the Act was renewed on Thursday and would remain valid for five years. The ministry didn’t immediately respond to queries on Saturday.

A spokeswoman for the Missionaries of Charity, Sunita Kumar, said she didn’t know what prompted the initial rejection or the subsequent reversal but said she was thrilled the issue had been resolved swiftly.

Some Christian leaders have recently expressed concerns about what they describe as a hostile environment for their religion in Hindu-majority India, now governed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, which has deep Hindu nationalist roots.

The Foreign Contribution Regulation Act became law in 2011 and was designed to regulate foreign donations to organizations operating in India. The aim was to prevent foreign-funded groups from engaging in activities detrimental to what India’s government deems its national interests.

Amnesty International shut its India operations last year after it said the government froze the nongovernmental organization’s bank accounts. Greenpeace shut two of its offices in 2019 for the same reason.

Mother Teresa, who died in 1997, was born in Macedonia but became an Indian citizen and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her work in the slums of Kolkata in eastern India. She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950. It has branches running hospices and orphanages world-wide.

Write to Philip Wen at [email protected] and Krishna Pokharel at [email protected]