RELIGION : TV Film Shows No Mercy for Mother Teresa : The one-sided documentary claims the 84-year-old nun spends more time jet-setting than caring for India’s poor. Catholic officials denounce the program as ‘slanted.’

LONDON —  To most of the world, Mother Teresa has become a larger-than-life symbol of faith, hope and charity for her labors on behalf of the poor and starving of India.

But to Christopher Hitchens, a left-wing writer and a Washington-based contributing editor of Vanity Fair, and Tarik Ali, a radical Muslim, the 84-year-old nun is “a demagogue and obscurantist, and a servant of earthly powers,” who lends spiritual solace “to dictators and wealthy exploiters.”

That view--presented in “Hell’s Angel,” an independently produced, highly critical, one-sided TV documentary that aired this week--has stirred a bitter controversy here.

Cardinal Basil Hume, the senior British Catholic cleric, has called the Hitchens-Ali production for Independent Television’s offbeat Channel 4 a “grotesque caricature” of Mother Teresa. Hume praised Mother Teresa’s efforts “to plead with the rich and powerful on behalf of the poor.”

But Hitchens, in the program, asserted that Mother Teresa has “a penchant for the rich and famous, no matter how corrupt or brutal.” He said she has accepted support from dictators like Haiti’s Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier and criminals like Charles Keating, who figured in one of California’s messiest savings and loan scandals and is currently serving a 12-year federal prison term. Keating received a personalized crucifix from the elderly Roman Catholic nun.

Hitchens pulled no punches in the 30-minute program, which made no pretense of being balanced and provided no case for the defense of Mother Teresa, who first came to public consciousness 25 years ago in “Something Beautiful for God,” a British Broadcasting Corp. film by Malcolm Muggeridge.

Hitchens scorned her saintly reputation, calling her work a “profane marriage between media hype and medieval superstition.”

The program asserted that Mother Teresa represents only the Catholic right wing, which opposes contraception. It noted that, when she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, she insisted that abortion was the greatest threat to world peace.

Hitchens and Ali also took aim at Mother Teresa’s hospices for the dying poor in Calcutta and elsewhere, asking whether they provide sufficient medical care.

The British medical journal Lancet, in a recent issue, claimed that patients in the Calcutta hospices receive little more than a bed, food and sympathy--while being denied proper painkillers or other medication.

Mother Teresa was born Agnes Goxhu Bojaxhiu in 1910 to Albanian parents in Skopje, now in Macedonia. A merchant’s daughter, she trained as a nun in Ireland and arrived in India in 1928. In 1948, she set up her mission in the slums of Calcutta, among the poor, sick and dying. Her Missionaries of Charity now have 500 centers in about 100 countries, feeding half a million families a year.

A tiny, stooped, bird-like figure, she has traveled widely, raising money and being honored by presidents, princes and private personages.

In Calcutta, Mother Teresa, though a Catholic missionary in a Hindu area, is rarely criticized. As Biplab Dasgupta, a Communist member of the British Parliament, says: “She’s part of Calcutta now. Of course we have differences on the philosophical plane. I don’t share her religious feelings. But I appreciate what she’s doing for the poor.”

But Hitchens claims that Mother Teresa, in her distinctive blue-and-white cowl, is rarely in Calcutta--instead flying around the world and being feted by the rich and famous.

In reply, the Catholic Media Office accused Hitchens and Ali of factual inaccuracies. “The choice of images and their juxtaposition are all slanted toward a nasty attack,” said a spokeswoman. “The program causes upset and disquiet among many Catholics who hold Mother Teresa in very high regard.”

But Waldemar Januszczak, a Channel 4 executive, said he was speaking as a Polish Catholic when he explained that the Hitchens-Ali program sought to raise the questions: “What can the good, overcrowded people of Calcutta learn from Mother Teresa’s fierce opposition to birth control? To what extent is she a mouthpiece of reactionary Catholicism? Did her much-publicized visits to Baby Doc Duvalier in Haiti or Enver Hoxha of Albania give succor to their repugnant regimes?”