I have been all across the world these past two years, filming for my documentary on Catholicism. With my team, I’ve travelled to Jerusalem, Rome, Madrid, Mexico City, Warsaw, Krakow, Auschwitz, Koln, New York, Philadelphia, Istanbul, Corinth, and Athens. But none of these places had a visceral impact to match that of the city I’ve just visited: Calcutta, India. We had gone there to film in locales associated with the work of Mother Teresa and her sisters, and therefore, we didn’t spend much time in the relatively presentable parts of the city. We went to the slums where, in Mother’s famous phrase, “the poorest of the poor” lived. Here are just some of the images that I trust will stay branded in my mind for the rest of my life: a child of about ten gathering horse manure with his bare hands in order to sell it; people bathing in the river filled with raw sewage; a mentally disturbed woman just outside of the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity emitting a blood-curdling and other-worldly scream; garbage absolutely everywhere, as though the entire city were a trash heap; people whose only dwelling was the street or sidewalk; beggar children surrounding me and gesturing desperately to their mouths; a man at one of Mother’s hospitals with a goiter on his neck the size of a pumpkin; a Missionary of Charity sister, having just tended to a man bleeding from one of his ears, saying to me, “maggots again.”