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The Dark Side of Mother Teresa
25/Mar/2021
Mother Teresa, A Saint or a Fraud?
Photo Credits: Swarajya
Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, or Mother Teresa as she is now known throughout the world, was one of the most important Catholic Church figures when she was alive and even posthumously. Someone who Christians and everyone alike admired, she is best known for her work in uplifting poverty and helping the marginalized in the poorest regions of Calcutta, India. Her trophy cabinet is filled with multiple awards that ranged from the Ramon Magsaysay Peace Prize to the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, cementing her legacy as someone who worked solely for the welfare of those suffering.
Even today, if her name is mentioned, the first thought that comes to mind is of a pious woman who had the purest intentions and a smile that welcomed everyone into her grace. However, the truth might be far from this perception. Many people have questioned Mother Teresa’s actions and motives over the years, deeming them as a romanticization of people’s suffering. From her questionable practices in the Missionaries of Charity to her dubious ways of handling the money granted to her by equally shady people, this is a deep dive into the dark side of Saint Mother Teresa.
Hell’s Angel.
By Christopher Hitchens — Christopher Hitchens — Mother Teresa: Hell's Angel, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55621119
In a 1994 documentary with the name “Hell’s Angel,”
the first of many criticisms of Teresa’s work started to emerge. The documentary was spearheaded by someone who was a volunteer in Teresa’s missionary work. This meant that there was some credibility to the claims that were being made. In the documentary, the sanitation of the soup houses and hospices was critiqued heavily. It was claimed through various eyewitness testimonies that there was no regard for safety for terminally ill individuals under the watchful eyes of Mother Teresa. This disregard was seen in the form of reusing the same needles for various other patients who were receiving treatment.
There was no sterilization in the process, which meant that there was a very high chance of infection. Shockingly, these malpractices were happening at a place where there were patients of HIV/AIDS who are already immunocompromised. Another eyewitness claimed that no staff at these places of care were medically trained and had poor skills in handling patients already making peace with death. It can be concluded that Teresa was taking advantage of these people to boost her picture of being compassionate rather than actually caring for these people.
Was it just a case of no funding?
Many people would jump to the conclusion that operating in an impoverished area like India meant that there was a lack of funds that made the conditions of the hospices terrible. However, this claim is false as Mother Teresa alone brought in over $30 million in funding from various donors across the world. There was more than enough money for the operation to run smoothly. Instead, there were no attempts made even slightly to make the conditions of the people better.
Teresa’s and the other missionaries’ refusal to install water heaters at certain camps is a testament to her caring about her persona rather than the actual freezing water with which the patients used to bathe. Donald[sic] McIntyre
went undercover to one of her hospices to volunteer for Teresa and reported similar neglect and even cases of abuse. His reports claimed that children and the mentally ill were often tied up with ropes and clothes so that they could be fed or kept stationary. These clear violations of human rights were brushed off and never associated with the holier than thou personality of Mother Teresa.
Friends in High Places?
Photo Credits: Pinterest
For someone who has been canonized in Christian literature, Mother Teresa sure mingled with the wrong individuals. She was known to have made friends with people that donated to her cause regardless of their actions. Teresa accepted donations and medals from people involved in large genocides of the Christian communities around the world. This included Ronald Reagan, the President of the US, someone who is alleged to have orchestrated the mass murder of catholic nuns and archbishop of San Salvador
during the cold war.
For someone who dedicated her life to saving lives, this was very hypocritical. She was also involved with successful business tycoons like Charles Keating
, who would later be convicted for fraud and racketeering for his dirty loan practices. This showed that Teresa had an inclination towards gathering money (which, by the way, was not even used for making the lives of the ill better) rather than actual altruism.
A Saint, or a Fraud?
In 2016, Teresa was posthumously granted the title of Saint
, one of the highest ranks for preaching members, by Pope Francis I, and her life was canonized in the Roman Catholic Church. To be awarded the title of a Saint, the individual has to perform two known miracles that would then be acknowledged and approved by the Catholic Church. Teresa’s two miracles
happened in 1998 and 2008. The former was Monica Besra, a woman in Bengal who claimed that her illness, caused by a tumor, was eradicated after praying to Mother Teresa. In 2002, the Church formally acknowledged this as a miracle.
However, various reports, including one of her own husband, claimed that Monica was cured by the doctors more than Teresa, and it was the regular treatment that saved her. This was backed up by various medical reports as well, but these statements were later retracted. It seems that the Catholic Church could care less about the science behind benign tumors but more about this miracle. After Teresa’s death in 1997, there was another report of a miracle in 2008 by a Brazilian man with multiple brain tumors. In just seven days, the Catholic Church completed its investigation, and Pope Francis would later grant Mother Teresa with the title of Saint.
Mother Teresa’s Life: A Gray Area.
Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta is undoubtedly someone who spent her life trying to help out the poor and the ill. Her years of struggle are proof that she wanted to cultivate a narrative of helping other people. However, her altruism was not black and white; with all the eyewitness reports and criticism that her actions have garnered, it is safe to say that Mother Teresa’s life lies in a gray area that is far from perfect like many seem to claim.
Sources
https://archive.is/B9XQL
A Critic’s Lonely Quest: Revealing the Whole Truth About Mother Teresa
26/Aug/2016
Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, a London-based physician, published “Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict” in 2003, which cataloged evidence that the Missionaries of Charity ran inadequate facilities and often offered little comfort to those it was trying to help.
Credit: Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
KOLKATA, India — Taking on a global icon of peace, faith and charity is not a task for everyone, or, really, hardly anyone at all. But that is what Dr. Aroup Chatterjee has spent a good part of his life doing as one of the most vocal critics of Mother Teresa.
Dr. Chatterjee, a 58-year-old physician, acknowledged that it was a mostly solitary pursuit. “I’m the lone Indian,” he said in an interview recently. “I had to devote so much time to her. I would have paid to do that. Well, I did pay to do that.”
His task is about to become that much tougher, of course, when Mother Teresa is declared a saint next month.
In truth, Dr. Chatterjee’s critique is as much or more about how the West perceives Mother Teresa as it is about her actual work. As the canonization approaches, Dr. Chatterjee hopes to renew a dialogue about her legacy in Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, where she began her services with the “poorest of the poor” in 1950.
Growing up, Dr. Chatterjee, a native of Kolkata, found himself bothered by the narrative surrounding Mother Teresa, beginning with the city’s depiction as one of the most desperate places on earth, a “black hole.”
Having been raised in the middle-class Kolkata neighborhood of Ballygunge in the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. Chatterjee said the city of his experience was cosmopolitan, even moneyed. “Every airline that existed in those days, they all came.”
As the capital of the British Indian Empire for nearly 140 years, Kolkata was considered one of India’s crown jewels. When the British moved their headquarters to Delhi in 1911, Dr. Chatterjee acknowledged, the city began a slow decline in international prestige.
Dr. Chatterjee worked as a foot soldier for a leftist political party in the late 1970s and early 1980s, while he was studying at Kolkata Medical College, campaigning and sleeping in nearby slums. During a year as an intern, he also regularly saw patients from one of the city’s oldest and “most dire” red-light districts.
“We used to see very serious abuse of women and children quite often,” he said, noting that the city was still struggling to absorb an influx of refugees after the civil war in what was East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.
“I never even saw any nuns in those slums that I worked in,” he said. “I think it’s an imperialist venture of the Catholic Church against an Eastern population, an Eastern city, which has really driven horses and carriages through our prestige and our honor.
“I just thought that this myth had to be challenged,” he added.
Over hundreds of hours of research, much of it cataloged in a book he published in 2003, Dr. Chatterjee said he found a “cult of suffering” in homes run by Mother Teresa’s organization, the Missionaries of Charity, with children tied to beds and little to comfort dying patients but aspirin.
He and others said that Mother Teresa took her adherence to frugality and simplicity in her work to extremes, allowing practices like the reuse of hypodermic needles and tolerating primitive facilities that required patients to defecate in front of one another.
But it was not until he moved to the United Kingdom in 1985, eventually taking a job in a rural hospital, that he realized the reputation Kolkata had acquired in Western circles.
In 1994, Dr. Chatterjee contacted Bandung Productions, a company owned by the writer and filmmaker Tariq Ali. What started as a 12-minute phone pitch turned into an offer by Channel 4’s commissioning editor to film an exposé of Mother Teresa’s work. The social critic Christopher Hitchens was hired to present what would become “Hell’s Angel,” a highly skeptical documentary
.
Over the next year, Dr. Chatterjee traveled the world meeting with volunteers, nuns and writers who were familiar with the Missionaries of Charity. In over a hundred interviews, Dr. Chatterjee heard volunteers describe how workers with limited medical training administered 10- to 20-year-old medicines to patients, and blankets stained with feces were washed in the same sink used to clean dishes.
In the past, when similar criticisms were made, the Missionaries of Charity typically did not deny the reports but said that the nuns were working on the matter. Today, they say, speech therapists and physiotherapists are regularly consulted to look after patients with physical and mental disabilities. And nuns said they frequently take patients who require surgery and more complicated care to nearby hospitals.
“In Mother’s time, these physiotherapists, they were coming, but at that time, there weren’t as many available,” said Sunita Kumar, a spokeswoman for the Missionaries of Charity.
These days, Mrs. Kumar added, several nuns have undergone training to “spruce up their medical background,” and the general upkeep of facilities has improved.
Dr. Chatterjee agreed that after Mother Teresa’s death in 1997, homes run by the Missionaries of Charity began taking their hygiene practices more seriously. The reuse of needles, he said, was eliminated.
Over the years, as Dr. Chatterjee tried to make his case, campaigning for changes in the charity’s facilities, he said he began to feel Kolkatans turning against him.
“Like a complete nincompoop, I thought that people would absolutely fall over me with garlands and roses, people in Calcutta, if I came and told them that I’m going to settle the score and I’m going to expose this lady,” he said.
Part of this protection of Mother Teresa, Dr. Chatterjee believes, can be attributed to the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 1979. “Calcuttans have got this fascination with Nobel Prizes,” he said, adding that the city’s celebrated poet Rabindranath Tagore won Asia’s first Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Others, he said, were simply afraid to speak out.
But Dr. Chatterjee said that Mother Teresa’s place in the Western canon was enough for some Indians to lionize her as part of an ingrained colonialist mind-set. “The West is saying she’s good, so she must be good,” he said.
When Indians have challenged aspects of Mother Teresa’s career, he said, it has often been to safeguard what some see as the progressiveness of her work, playing down the miracles and myths surrounding her.
“Because Calcuttans think that Mother Teresa is Western and she’s a Western icon, she’s very progressive,” he said. “And they do not associate her with miracles and mumbo jumbo and black magic just as they do not associate her with opposition to contraception and abortion.”
Leading up to the canonization, several Hindu nationalists have spoken out against Mother Teresa to different ends, arguing that her Missionaries of Charity pushed conversion on its patients. Dr. Chatterjee said he felt safer criticizing the nun with a nationalist party like the Bharatiya Janata Party in power.
As for the reception of his work among Western audiences, Dr. Chatterjee said there was an appetite mostly for the more sensational issues he had raised.
“They don’t care about whether a third-world city’s dignity or prestige has been hampered by an Albanian nun,” he said. “So, obviously, they may be interested in the lies and the charlatans and the fraud that’s going on, but the whole story, they’re not interested in.”
Asked if Mother Teresa’s becoming a saint would deter him from his campaign, Dr. Chatterjee said he would continue his quest to right the record as long as it took.
“In my mind, the dialogue will never die, because I think the myth goes on and the issue goes on,” he said. “I will not go away. It’s as simple as that.”
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 27, 2016, Section A, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Critic’s Lonely Quest: Contesting Mother Teresa Myth.
https://archive.is/Yh4WT
Why Mother Teresa is still no saint to many of her critics
01/Sept/2016
This post has been updated. It was previously posted in December 2015.
This Sunday, Mother Teresa will become a saint. The late Roman Catholic missionary who became an international icon for her charitable work will be canonized, the Catholic Church's highest honor, on Sept. 4.
For Mother Teresa’s many fans — most of whom had viewed her canonization as inevitable and perhaps even overdue — the day will no doubt be filled with celebration. However, it will probably also bring new fuel to the difficult and sometimes bitter debate about the merits of Teresa’s charitable work and the nature of her legacy.
[The Vatican believes Mother Teresa cured this woman. But was it a miracle?
]
In India, where Teresa carried out the majority of her work, that legacy was called into question last year, when the head of the Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) sparked outrage by criticizing her intentions.
“It’s good to work for a cause with selfless intentions. But Mother Teresa’s work had ulterior motive, which was to convert the person who was being served to Christianity,” RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said at the opening of an orphanage in Rajasthan state in February 2015, the Times of India reported
. “In the name of service, religious conversions were made. This was followed by other institutes, too.”
Bhagwat’s comments caused a storm among opposition politicians, angered by the implication that a woman who won a Nobel Peace Prize for her work in India would have had ulterior motives. Congress Party official Rajiv Shukla demanded an apology
, and the newly elected Delhi chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, said Teresa was a “noble soul” and asked RSS to spare her.
The controversy surrounding Mother Teresa, who died in 1997, is far from new. Her saintly reputation was gained for aiding Kolkata's poorest of the poor, yet it was undercut by persistent allegations of misuse of funds, poor medical treatments and religious evangelism in the institutions she founded.
[Pope Francis attributes second miracle to Mother Teresa, paving the way to sainthood
]
In his critique of Teresa, the devoutly Hindu Bhagwat would find an unlikely ally in the work of devoutly atheist Christopher Hitchens. The late British writer became one of the most vocal critics of Teresa in the 1990s, tying his reputation to assailing a woman who was, at the time, an unassailable figure.
In 1994, Hitchens and British Pakistani journalist Tariq Ali wrote an extremely critical documentary on Teresa titled “Hell’s Angel.” You can see it for yourself below.
The documentary, which drew heavily from the account of Aroup Chatterjee, an Indian-born British writer who had worked briefly in one of Teresa’s charitable homes, listed a catalogue of criticisms against her. It found fault with the conditions in the facilities of her Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, which one journalist compared to the photographs she had seen of Nazi Germany’s Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and Hitchens rallied against what he called the “cult of death and suffering.”
The documentary also argued that Teresa was an “ally of the status quo,” pointing to her relationships with dubious figures all around the world, most notably Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and scandal-hit American financier Charles Keating. “She may or may not comfort the afflicted, but she has never been known to afflict the comfortable,” Hitchens said.
“Hell’s Angel” sparked an international debate, and Hitchens soon followed it up with a pamphlet, unfortunately titled “The Missionary Position,” which repeated and expanded upon his criticisms. As Bruno Maddox put it in a review for the New York Times
, Hitchens concluded that Mother Teresa was “less interested in helping the poor than in using them as an indefatigable source of wretchedness on which to fuel the expansion of her fundamentalist Roman Catholic beliefs.”
Hitchens’s critiques of Mother Teresa may come across as polemical, but they were far from the only criticism. British medical journal the Lancet published
a critical account of the care in Teresa’s facilities in 1994, and an academic Canadian study
from a couple of years ago found fault with “her rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce.” Multiple accounts say that Teresa’s nuns
would baptize the dying and that she had a reputation for proselytizing. Chatterjee also published his own extremely critical book on Teresa in 2003.
Many who support Teresa dispute these accounts
, of course, but the accounts exist and are frequently debated. They do not appear to have delayed or otherwise impeded her path to sainthood, however.
“She built an empire of charity,” the Rev. Bernardo Cervellera, editor of the Vatican-affiliated missionary news agency AsiaNews, told the Associated Press
after news of the upcoming canonization broke. “She didn’t have a plan to conquer the world. Her idea was to be obedient to God.”
https://archive.is/JT7VG
As Mother Teresa Becomes a Saint, Controversies Linger
02/Nov/2016
Mother Teresa was greeted by the public at one of her missions in Assam, India, in 1989.
Photograph by Raghu Rai, Magnum Photos
The late nun and charity worker will be honored by the Vatican Sunday, after a relatively quick canonization process.
On September 4, Mother Teresa will be elevated to sainthood when Pope Francis canonizes her at the Vatican. The late nun, already called Saint of the Gutters and who won the Nobel Prize in 1979, is widely known for her decades spent caring for the poor and sick in Kolkata, India.
Many Catholics and non-Catholics alike admire her, but her canonization is not without controversy.
Millions, if not billions, of people around the world have long loved the woman who has become a symbol for service to the least fortunate. World leaders received and honored her, including Ronald Reagan, Indira Gandhi, Princess Diana, and the Dalai Lama. Mother Teresa received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge.
President Bill Clinton made Mother Teresa an honorary American citizen in 1996, saying she had demonstrated "how we can make real our dreams for a just and good society.
"
Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in 1910, in what is now Macedonia, Mother Teresa joined the Loreto order of nuns in 1928. It was on a 1946 train trip through India when she was inspired to leave the Loreto order and found the Missionaries of Charity. The order was established four years later and has since opened more than 130 houses around the world to provide care for the sick and dying.
Missionaries of Charity nuns must adhere to the traditional vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, as well as a fourth vow, to give "wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor." Mother Teresa worked as head of Missionaries of Charity until six months before her death in 1997 at 86.
The late Christopher Hitchens was one of Mother Teresa’s most outspoken critics. In his 2012 book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Hitchens wrote that some doctors who visited her missions alleged that patients experienced a shortage of care in unhygienic conditions, with inadequate food and no painkillers. Mother Teresa, on the other hand, went to costly American facilities when she needed her own medical treatment.
Hitchens writes that Mother Teresa accepted a donation of more than a million dollars from financier Charles Keating, who later went to prison for defrauding investors. Mother Teresa wrote to the court asking clemency for Keating without explaining their relationship. She took money from and praised right-wing dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, who later was accused of allowing the torture and murder of thousands of Haitians during his regime.
Hitchens quotes from an unpublished book by Susan Shields, a former nun from the Missionaries of Charity, who claims Mother Teresa taught nuns to secretly baptize the dying. After asking the person if they wanted a “ticket to heaven” the nun would then “[P]retend she was just cooling the person’s forehead with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptizing him, saying quietly the necessary words.” (Read about the 12 men who shaped Christianity
.)
The Canonization Process
The canonization process has changed through the centuries. The first people honored as saints were martyrs who died for their faith. The pope wasn’t even always involved in making saints in the early days of the church. In 1234, the right to canonize was officially reserved for the papacy. Until Pope John Paul II, about 300 saints were made.
Around 300,000 people crowded St. Peter's Square when Pope John Paul II led a beatification of Mother Teresa in 2003, just 18 months after her death.
Photograph by Roberto Caccuri, Contrasto, Redux
Under Pope John Paul II, the process to canonize was simplified and the number of saints increased dramatically. He canonized 482 saints during his 26-year reign from 1978 to 2005. He beatified 1,327 people, including Mother Teresa.
It is usually a slow process. Since 1588, when the Catholic Church created an office called the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the average time between the death of an eventual saint and canonization is 181 years.
Not so for Mother Teresa. Within 18 months of her death, John Paul II waived the usual five-year waiting period and allowed the opening of the process to declare her sainthood.
“By Roman standards, it's lightning speed," said Lawrence Cunningham, a retired religion professor from Notre Dame.
The Congregation for the Causes of Saints oversees the canonization process. Once a cause has begun, the individual can be called a Servant of God. A postulator, the person assigned to present the cause, is assigned and collects public and private writings, interviews people who knew the candidate, and researches the person's life. The postulator then produces a paper, called a positio, which can run for thousands of pages.
“They tend to read like biographies,” Cunningham said.
When the positio is finished, it’s presented to a theological commission put together by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints that will vote on whether or not the cause can proceed. The commission then appeals to the pope to offer a Decree of Heroic Virtues for the person. The sainthood candidate is then known as a Venerable Servant of God.
To be beatified and then canonized, two miracles, almost always medical in nature, need to be confirmed. The consulta medica, a group of doctors paid a nominal fee by the church, investigate to determine if there is a scientific explanation for a miracle.
For Mother Teresa, her first miracle involved an Indian woman who claimed that her abdomen tumors healed in 1998 after she touched herself with a locket containing the nun's picture. For her second miracle, a Brazilian man was said to have been cured of brain tumors in 2008 after he prayed to Mother Teresa.
A statue of Mother Teresa stands at the Shishu Bhawan children's home in Kolkata, a reminder of her years of service there.
Photograph by Raghu Rai, Magnum Photos
But at least one of those miracles has been called into question. Researchers at the University of Montreal and the University of Ottawa concluded in a 2013 paper
that her first miracle had a medical explanation. Published in Religieuses, a French-language journal of studies in religion and sciences, the researchers found that the doctors and husband of the woman believed that she was healed by a drug treatment.
“It’s more about faith and image than real science," said Genevieve Chenard, one of the paper’s authors, from the University of Montreal. (Read about the campaign to eliminate hell.)
Mother Teresa’s Canonization
After confirming the miracles, canonization can go forth. Churches around where the saint is from will often have special masses, but for the Vatican the pope simply offers a public statement that the person is on the official list maintained by the Catholic Church of those that could be venerated publicly.
The public statement is still a big deal to many. High-ranking members of the Missionaries of Charity will go to Rome for the canonization, which falls one day before the 19th anniversary of her death, bringing a relic of Mother Teresa's blood. According to the Times of India
, the two people said to be healed through the miracles that confirmed her sainthood are expected to attend. Thousands of people from around the world will also be there. For her beatification in 2003, more than 300,000 pilgrims went to Rome.
Her canonization falls during the Catholic Church’s Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy. Pope Francis called for this jubilee, or holy year, out of the ordinary cycle of jubilees, which typically happen every 25 years. The pope said the world is particularly in need of mercy at this time.
While the church has not said the canonization is specifically linked to the Extraordinary Jubilee, Mother Teresa’s record of working with the “poorest of the poor” fits into the theme of mercy. Despite her flaws, Cunningham, the retired religion professor, said she inspired millions and did work few are willing to do.
“To do it for 30, 40 years, day in and day out, requires a certain heroism in one’s life," Cunningham said. “The canonization underscores the teaching about mercy."
https://archive.is/XtwHW
Mommie Dearest
20/Oct/2003
The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.
By Christopher Hitchens
Mother Teresa of Calcutta in December 1991.
Raveendran/AFP/Getty Images
In 2003, Pope John Paul II approved the beatification of Mother Teresa. At the time, Christopher Hitchens called Mother Teresa “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud,” arguing that “even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed.” On Sept. 4, 2016, Pope Francis will canonize Mother Teresa. Hitchens’ original essay is republished below.
I think it was Macaulay who said that the Roman Catholic Church deserved great credit for, and owed its longevity to, its ability to handle and contain fanaticism. This rather oblique compliment belongs to a more serious age. What is so striking about the “beatification” of the woman who styled herself “Mother” Teresa is the abject surrender, on the part of the church, to the forces of showbiz, superstition, and populism.
It’s the sheer tawdriness that strikes the eye first of all. It used to be that a person could not even be nominated for “beatification,” the first step to “sainthood,” until five years after his or her death. This was to guard against local or popular enthusiasm in the promotion of dubious characters. The pope nominated MT a year after her death in 1997. It also used to be that an apparatus of inquiry was set in train, including the scrutiny of an advocatus diaboli
or “devil’s advocate,” to test any extraordinary claims. The pope has abolished this office and has created more instant saints than all his predecessors combined as far back as the 16th century.
As for the “miracle” that had to be attested, what can one say? Surely any respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the obviousness of the fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of MT, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor. Her physician, Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn’t have a cancerous tumor in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican’s investigators? No. (As it happens, I myself was interviewed by them but only in the most perfunctory way. The procedure still does demand a show of consultation with doubters, and a show of consultation was what, in this case, it got.)
According to an uncontradicted report in the Italian paper L’Eco di Bergamo, the Vatican’s secretary of state sent a letter to senior cardinals in June, asking on behalf of the pope whether they favored making MT a saint right away. The pope’s clear intention has been to speed the process up in order to perform the ceremony in his own lifetime. The response was in the negative, according to Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who has acted as postulator or advocate for the “canonization.” But the damage, to such integrity as the process possesses, has already been done.
During the deliberations over the Second Vatican Council, under the stewardship of Pope John XXIII, MT was to the fore in opposing all suggestions of reform. What was needed, she maintained, was more work and more faith, not doctrinal revision. Her position was ultra-reactionary and fundamentalist even in orthodox Catholic terms. Believers are indeed enjoined to abhor and eschew abortion, but they are not required to affirm that abortion is “the greatest destroyer of peace,” as MT fantastically asserted to a dumbfounded audience when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.* Believers are likewise enjoined to abhor and eschew divorce, but they are not required to insist that a ban on divorce and remarriage be a part of the state constitution, as MT demanded in a referendum in Ireland (which her side narrowly lost) in 1996. Later in that same year, she told Ladies Home Journal that she was pleased by the divorce of her friend Princess Diana, because the marriage had so obviously been an unhappy one...
This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?
The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for “the poorest of the poor.” People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the “Missionaries of Charity,” but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell’s admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.
Correction, Oct. 21, 2003: This piece originally claimed that in her Nobel Peace Prize lecture, Mother Teresa called abortion and contraception the greatest threats to world peace. In that speech Mother Teresa did call abortion “the greatest destroyer of peace.” But she did not much discuss contraception, except to praise “natural” family planning.
https://archive.is/73vhL
Mother Teresa Was Actually A Horrible Person, What They Don’t Tell You
08/Jan/2017
For many years now Mother Teresa has been characterized as one of the most caring and generous human beings of all times. She is known for founding Missionaries of Charity and for her work with the poor. On September 4, 2016 she was officially declared a saint
, but Mother Teresa was nowhere close.
Mother Teresa had a twisted view of the world in which she glorified suffering.
Multiple volunteers at her hospices attest
to the inadequate care provided to the sick. Patients were often misdiagnosed, no modern medical equipment was available, needles weren’t properly sterilized, the strongest pain killer available was aspirin, and even when a patient clearly needed surgery, they were refused hospital treatment.
Christopher Hitchens’ recalls another moment when Mother Teresa told a suffering patient,
Yet when Mother Teresa needed hospital care herself, she received it in a modern American hospital.
Why didn’t Mother Teresa set up the proper facilities for these people? She certainly had the means to. The Missions of Charity organization received millions in donations. That is more then[sic] enough to build fully equipped hospitals and clinics.
Not to mention, she was adamantly and unsurprisingly against abortion. In her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech she declared that abortion was the greatest threat to peace in the world.
She once told many US officials that, “By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems . . . Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.”
How could she possibly believe that the “greatest destroyer of love and peace” is a woman utilizing her reproductive rights?
This woman’s hypocrisy is often overlooked due to her humanitarian efforts and the way that the media has crafted her image. The majority of people think of Mother Teresa as loving saint who helped millions of lives when in reality, millions suffered because of her beliefs.
https://archive.is/wmQQn
Hell's Angel - Mother Teresa of Calcutta; Christopher Hitchens Documentary (1994)
https://www.bitchute.com/video/fP3kvhUGUGJ3
Titles of/information about links above -
File:Hell's Angel – Mother Teresa of Calcutta.png
Hell's Angel (TV programme)
Donal MacIntyre
The killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero was one of the most notorious crimes of the cold war. Was the CIA to blame?
Charles Keating
Mother Teresa declared saint by Pope Francis at Vatican
Questioning the 'miracles' of Mother Teresa
A Critic’s Lonely Quest: Revealing the Whole Truth About Mother Teresa [article above]
Why Mother Teresa is still no saint to many of her critics [article above]
As Mother Teresa Becomes a Saint, Controversies Linger
Mother Teresa of Calcutta (film)
Mommie Dearest
The Dark Side of Mother Teresa [article above]
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; A Skeptical Look at Mother Teresa
The Vatican believes Mother Teresa cured this woman. But was it a miracle?
Conversion was Mother Teresa’s real aim, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat says
Mother Teresa a noble soul: Kejriwal's reaction to Mohan Bhagwat's 'conversion' remarks
Pope attributes 2nd miracle to Mother Teresa, paving way to sainthood
Books in Brief: NONFICTION
Mother Teresa's care for the dying
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Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Personal Portrait - Result 1 of 1 in this book for mother teresa baptism dying
Mother Teresa and Her Critics
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Nobel-Winner Aided the Poorest
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Mother Teresa: Anything but a saint...
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Mother Teresa sainthood date to be announced on Tuesday
As Mother Teresa Becomes a Saint, Controversies Linger [article above]
Mommie Dearest [article above]
Mother Teresa declared a saint before huge crowds in the Vatican
Mother Teresa-She can't put us out of our misery any more
The curse of Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa on Abortion
Mother Teresa Was Actually A Horrible Person, What They Don’t Tell You [article above]
Hell's Angel - Mother Teresa, Christopher Hitchens Documentary (1994) [video above]
Notice the blue and white colours. Not jewish at all. It also looks like we found the origins of the happy merchant meme.
- The Dark Side of Mother Teresa
- A Critic’s Lonely Quest: Revealing the Whole Truth About Mother Teresa
- Why Mother Teresa is still no saint to many of her critics
- As Mother Teresa Becomes a Saint, Controversies Linger
- Mommie Dearest
- Mother Teresa Was Actually A Horrible Person, What They Don’t Tell You
- Hell's Angel - Mother Teresa of Calcutta; Christopher Hitchens Documentary (1994)
The Dark Side of Mother Teresa
25/Mar/2021
Mother Teresa, A Saint or a Fraud?
Photo Credits: Swarajya
Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, or Mother Teresa as she is now known throughout the world, was one of the most important Catholic Church figures when she was alive and even posthumously. Someone who Christians and everyone alike admired, she is best known for her work in uplifting poverty and helping the marginalized in the poorest regions of Calcutta, India. Her trophy cabinet is filled with multiple awards that ranged from the Ramon Magsaysay Peace Prize to the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, cementing her legacy as someone who worked solely for the welfare of those suffering.
Even today, if her name is mentioned, the first thought that comes to mind is of a pious woman who had the purest intentions and a smile that welcomed everyone into her grace. However, the truth might be far from this perception. Many people have questioned Mother Teresa’s actions and motives over the years, deeming them as a romanticization of people’s suffering. From her questionable practices in the Missionaries of Charity to her dubious ways of handling the money granted to her by equally shady people, this is a deep dive into the dark side of Saint Mother Teresa.
Hell’s Angel.
By Christopher Hitchens — Christopher Hitchens — Mother Teresa: Hell's Angel, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55621119
In a 1994 documentary with the name “Hell’s Angel,”
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell%27s_Angel_(TV_programme)There was no sterilization in the process, which meant that there was a very high chance of infection. Shockingly, these malpractices were happening at a place where there were patients of HIV/AIDS who are already immunocompromised. Another eyewitness claimed that no staff at these places of care were medically trained and had poor skills in handling patients already making peace with death. It can be concluded that Teresa was taking advantage of these people to boost her picture of being compassionate rather than actually caring for these people.
Was it just a case of no funding?
Many people would jump to the conclusion that operating in an impoverished area like India meant that there was a lack of funds that made the conditions of the hospices terrible. However, this claim is false as Mother Teresa alone brought in over $30 million in funding from various donors across the world. There was more than enough money for the operation to run smoothly. Instead, there were no attempts made even slightly to make the conditions of the people better.
Teresa’s and the other missionaries’ refusal to install water heaters at certain camps is a testament to her caring about her persona rather than the actual freezing water with which the patients used to bathe. Donald[sic] McIntyre
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donal_MacIntyreFriends in High Places?
Photo Credits: Pinterest
For someone who has been canonized in Christian literature, Mother Teresa sure mingled with the wrong individuals. She was known to have made friends with people that donated to her cause regardless of their actions. Teresa accepted donations and medals from people involved in large genocides of the Christian communities around the world. This included Ronald Reagan, the President of the US, someone who is alleged to have orchestrated the mass murder of catholic nuns and archbishop of San Salvador
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https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2000/mar/23/features11.g21For someone who dedicated her life to saving lives, this was very hypocritical. She was also involved with successful business tycoons like Charles Keating
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_KeatingA Saint, or a Fraud?
In 2016, Teresa was posthumously granted the title of Saint
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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37269512
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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-03/questioning-the-miracles-of-saint-teresa/7809818However, various reports, including one of her own husband, claimed that Monica was cured by the doctors more than Teresa, and it was the regular treatment that saved her. This was backed up by various medical reports as well, but these statements were later retracted. It seems that the Catholic Church could care less about the science behind benign tumors but more about this miracle. After Teresa’s death in 1997, there was another report of a miracle in 2008 by a Brazilian man with multiple brain tumors. In just seven days, the Catholic Church completed its investigation, and Pope Francis would later grant Mother Teresa with the title of Saint.
Mother Teresa’s Life: A Gray Area.
Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta is undoubtedly someone who spent her life trying to help out the poor and the ill. Her years of struggle are proof that she wanted to cultivate a narrative of helping other people. However, her altruism was not black and white; with all the eyewitness reports and criticism that her actions have garnered, it is safe to say that Mother Teresa’s life lies in a gray area that is far from perfect like many seem to claim.
Sources
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“https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/world/asia/mother-teresa-critic.html”
“https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/02/25/why-to-many-critics-mother-teresa-is-still-no-saint/”
“https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/mother-teresa-sainthood-canonized”
“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa_of_Calcutta_(film)”
“https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/10/the-fanatic-fraudulent-mother-teresa.html”A Critic’s Lonely Quest: Revealing the Whole Truth About Mother Teresa
26/Aug/2016
Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, a London-based physician, published “Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict” in 2003, which cataloged evidence that the Missionaries of Charity ran inadequate facilities and often offered little comfort to those it was trying to help.
Credit: Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
KOLKATA, India — Taking on a global icon of peace, faith and charity is not a task for everyone, or, really, hardly anyone at all. But that is what Dr. Aroup Chatterjee has spent a good part of his life doing as one of the most vocal critics of Mother Teresa.
Dr. Chatterjee, a 58-year-old physician, acknowledged that it was a mostly solitary pursuit. “I’m the lone Indian,” he said in an interview recently. “I had to devote so much time to her. I would have paid to do that. Well, I did pay to do that.”
His task is about to become that much tougher, of course, when Mother Teresa is declared a saint next month.
In truth, Dr. Chatterjee’s critique is as much or more about how the West perceives Mother Teresa as it is about her actual work. As the canonization approaches, Dr. Chatterjee hopes to renew a dialogue about her legacy in Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, where she began her services with the “poorest of the poor” in 1950.
Growing up, Dr. Chatterjee, a native of Kolkata, found himself bothered by the narrative surrounding Mother Teresa, beginning with the city’s depiction as one of the most desperate places on earth, a “black hole.”
Having been raised in the middle-class Kolkata neighborhood of Ballygunge in the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. Chatterjee said the city of his experience was cosmopolitan, even moneyed. “Every airline that existed in those days, they all came.”
As the capital of the British Indian Empire for nearly 140 years, Kolkata was considered one of India’s crown jewels. When the British moved their headquarters to Delhi in 1911, Dr. Chatterjee acknowledged, the city began a slow decline in international prestige.
Dr. Chatterjee worked as a foot soldier for a leftist political party in the late 1970s and early 1980s, while he was studying at Kolkata Medical College, campaigning and sleeping in nearby slums. During a year as an intern, he also regularly saw patients from one of the city’s oldest and “most dire” red-light districts.
“We used to see very serious abuse of women and children quite often,” he said, noting that the city was still struggling to absorb an influx of refugees after the civil war in what was East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.
“I never even saw any nuns in those slums that I worked in,” he said. “I think it’s an imperialist venture of the Catholic Church against an Eastern population, an Eastern city, which has really driven horses and carriages through our prestige and our honor.
“I just thought that this myth had to be challenged,” he added.
Over hundreds of hours of research, much of it cataloged in a book he published in 2003, Dr. Chatterjee said he found a “cult of suffering” in homes run by Mother Teresa’s organization, the Missionaries of Charity, with children tied to beds and little to comfort dying patients but aspirin.
He and others said that Mother Teresa took her adherence to frugality and simplicity in her work to extremes, allowing practices like the reuse of hypodermic needles and tolerating primitive facilities that required patients to defecate in front of one another.
But it was not until he moved to the United Kingdom in 1985, eventually taking a job in a rural hospital, that he realized the reputation Kolkata had acquired in Western circles.
In 1994, Dr. Chatterjee contacted Bandung Productions, a company owned by the writer and filmmaker Tariq Ali. What started as a 12-minute phone pitch turned into an offer by Channel 4’s commissioning editor to film an exposé of Mother Teresa’s work. The social critic Christopher Hitchens was hired to present what would become “Hell’s Angel,” a highly skeptical documentary
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https://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/08/movies/critic-s-notebook-a-skeptical-look-at-mother-teresa.htmlOver the next year, Dr. Chatterjee traveled the world meeting with volunteers, nuns and writers who were familiar with the Missionaries of Charity. In over a hundred interviews, Dr. Chatterjee heard volunteers describe how workers with limited medical training administered 10- to 20-year-old medicines to patients, and blankets stained with feces were washed in the same sink used to clean dishes.
In the past, when similar criticisms were made, the Missionaries of Charity typically did not deny the reports but said that the nuns were working on the matter. Today, they say, speech therapists and physiotherapists are regularly consulted to look after patients with physical and mental disabilities. And nuns said they frequently take patients who require surgery and more complicated care to nearby hospitals.
“In Mother’s time, these physiotherapists, they were coming, but at that time, there weren’t as many available,” said Sunita Kumar, a spokeswoman for the Missionaries of Charity.
These days, Mrs. Kumar added, several nuns have undergone training to “spruce up their medical background,” and the general upkeep of facilities has improved.
Dr. Chatterjee agreed that after Mother Teresa’s death in 1997, homes run by the Missionaries of Charity began taking their hygiene practices more seriously. The reuse of needles, he said, was eliminated.
Over the years, as Dr. Chatterjee tried to make his case, campaigning for changes in the charity’s facilities, he said he began to feel Kolkatans turning against him.
“Like a complete nincompoop, I thought that people would absolutely fall over me with garlands and roses, people in Calcutta, if I came and told them that I’m going to settle the score and I’m going to expose this lady,” he said.
Part of this protection of Mother Teresa, Dr. Chatterjee believes, can be attributed to the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 1979. “Calcuttans have got this fascination with Nobel Prizes,” he said, adding that the city’s celebrated poet Rabindranath Tagore won Asia’s first Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Others, he said, were simply afraid to speak out.
But Dr. Chatterjee said that Mother Teresa’s place in the Western canon was enough for some Indians to lionize her as part of an ingrained colonialist mind-set. “The West is saying she’s good, so she must be good,” he said.
When Indians have challenged aspects of Mother Teresa’s career, he said, it has often been to safeguard what some see as the progressiveness of her work, playing down the miracles and myths surrounding her.
“Because Calcuttans think that Mother Teresa is Western and she’s a Western icon, she’s very progressive,” he said. “And they do not associate her with miracles and mumbo jumbo and black magic just as they do not associate her with opposition to contraception and abortion.”
Leading up to the canonization, several Hindu nationalists have spoken out against Mother Teresa to different ends, arguing that her Missionaries of Charity pushed conversion on its patients. Dr. Chatterjee said he felt safer criticizing the nun with a nationalist party like the Bharatiya Janata Party in power.
As for the reception of his work among Western audiences, Dr. Chatterjee said there was an appetite mostly for the more sensational issues he had raised.
“They don’t care about whether a third-world city’s dignity or prestige has been hampered by an Albanian nun,” he said. “So, obviously, they may be interested in the lies and the charlatans and the fraud that’s going on, but the whole story, they’re not interested in.”
Asked if Mother Teresa’s becoming a saint would deter him from his campaign, Dr. Chatterjee said he would continue his quest to right the record as long as it took.
“In my mind, the dialogue will never die, because I think the myth goes on and the issue goes on,” he said. “I will not go away. It’s as simple as that.”
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 27, 2016, Section A, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Critic’s Lonely Quest: Contesting Mother Teresa Myth.
https://archive.is/Yh4WT
Why Mother Teresa is still no saint to many of her critics
01/Sept/2016
This post has been updated. It was previously posted in December 2015.
This Sunday, Mother Teresa will become a saint. The late Roman Catholic missionary who became an international icon for her charitable work will be canonized, the Catholic Church's highest honor, on Sept. 4.
For Mother Teresa’s many fans — most of whom had viewed her canonization as inevitable and perhaps even overdue — the day will no doubt be filled with celebration. However, it will probably also bring new fuel to the difficult and sometimes bitter debate about the merits of Teresa’s charitable work and the nature of her legacy.
[The Vatican believes Mother Teresa cured this woman. But was it a miracle?
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/the-vatican-believes-mother-teresa-cured-this-woman-but-was-it-a-miracle/2016/09/01/83664464-6e12-11e6-993f-73c693a89820_story.html?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_6In India, where Teresa carried out the majority of her work, that legacy was called into question last year, when the head of the Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) sparked outrage by criticizing her intentions.
“It’s good to work for a cause with selfless intentions. But Mother Teresa’s work had ulterior motive, which was to convert the person who was being served to Christianity,” RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said at the opening of an orphanage in Rajasthan state in February 2015, the Times of India reported
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http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Conversion-was-Mother-Teresas-real-aim-RSS-chief-Mohan-Bhagwat-says/articleshow/46348555.cmsBhagwat’s comments caused a storm among opposition politicians, angered by the implication that a woman who won a Nobel Peace Prize for her work in India would have had ulterior motives. Congress Party official Rajiv Shukla demanded an apology
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http://zeenews.india.com/news/india/mother-teresa-a-noble-soul-kejriwals-reaction-to-mohan-bhagwats-conversion-remarks_1551559.htmlThe controversy surrounding Mother Teresa, who died in 1997, is far from new. Her saintly reputation was gained for aiding Kolkata's poorest of the poor, yet it was undercut by persistent allegations of misuse of funds, poor medical treatments and religious evangelism in the institutions she founded.
[Pope Francis attributes second miracle to Mother Teresa, paving the way to sainthood
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/pope-francis-attributes-second-miracle-to-mother-teresa-paving-the-way-to-sainthood/2015/12/18/463937b4-a567-11e5-9c4e-be37f66848bb_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_motheteresa-435am:homepage/story&itid=lk_interstitial_manual_15In his critique of Teresa, the devoutly Hindu Bhagwat would find an unlikely ally in the work of devoutly atheist Christopher Hitchens. The late British writer became one of the most vocal critics of Teresa in the 1990s, tying his reputation to assailing a woman who was, at the time, an unassailable figure.
In 1994, Hitchens and British Pakistani journalist Tariq Ali wrote an extremely critical documentary on Teresa titled “Hell’s Angel.” You can see it for yourself below.
The documentary, which drew heavily from the account of Aroup Chatterjee, an Indian-born British writer who had worked briefly in one of Teresa’s charitable homes, listed a catalogue of criticisms against her. It found fault with the conditions in the facilities of her Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, which one journalist compared to the photographs she had seen of Nazi Germany’s Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and Hitchens rallied against what he called the “cult of death and suffering.”
The documentary also argued that Teresa was an “ally of the status quo,” pointing to her relationships with dubious figures all around the world, most notably Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and scandal-hit American financier Charles Keating. “She may or may not comfort the afflicted, but she has never been known to afflict the comfortable,” Hitchens said.
“Hell’s Angel” sparked an international debate, and Hitchens soon followed it up with a pamphlet, unfortunately titled “The Missionary Position,” which repeated and expanded upon his criticisms. As Bruno Maddox put it in a review for the New York Times
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http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/14/books/books-in-brief-nonfiction-068195.htmlHitchens’s critiques of Mother Teresa may come across as polemical, but they were far from the only criticism. British medical journal the Lancet published
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http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2894%2991759-0/fulltext
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http://www.nouvelles.umontreal.ca/udem-news/news/20130301-mother-teresa-anything-but-a-saint.html
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https://books.google.com/books?id=N4UxVZNER5EC&pg=PA135&lpg=PA135&dq=mother+teresa+baptism+dying&source=bl&ots=Z0uGNIRpQw&sig=jtnmcDt3YClUsGrf6K79K_LZ9UE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=EwXtVOH8Aci7ggSChIKoAg&ved=0CHMQ6AEwDg#v=onepage&q=mother%20teresa%20baptism%20dying&f=falseMany who support Teresa dispute these accounts
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http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2013/04/mother-teresa-and-her-critics“She built an empire of charity,” the Rev. Bernardo Cervellera, editor of the Vatican-affiliated missionary news agency AsiaNews, told the Associated Press
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/mother-teresa-to-be-made-a-saint-on-sept-4/2016/03/15/3f95f57c-ea96-11e5-a9ce-681055c7a05f_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_30https://archive.is/JT7VG
As Mother Teresa Becomes a Saint, Controversies Linger
02/Nov/2016
Mother Teresa was greeted by the public at one of her missions in Assam, India, in 1989.
Photograph by Raghu Rai, Magnum Photos
The late nun and charity worker will be honored by the Vatican Sunday, after a relatively quick canonization process.
On September 4, Mother Teresa will be elevated to sainthood when Pope Francis canonizes her at the Vatican. The late nun, already called Saint of the Gutters and who won the Nobel Prize in 1979, is widely known for her decades spent caring for the poor and sick in Kolkata, India.
Many Catholics and non-Catholics alike admire her, but her canonization is not without controversy.
Millions, if not billions, of people around the world have long loved the woman who has become a symbol for service to the least fortunate. World leaders received and honored her, including Ronald Reagan, Indira Gandhi, Princess Diana, and the Dalai Lama. Mother Teresa received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge.
President Bill Clinton made Mother Teresa an honorary American citizen in 1996, saying she had demonstrated "how we can make real our dreams for a just and good society.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/teresa/stories/obit090697.htmBorn Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in 1910, in what is now Macedonia, Mother Teresa joined the Loreto order of nuns in 1928. It was on a 1946 train trip through India when she was inspired to leave the Loreto order and found the Missionaries of Charity. The order was established four years later and has since opened more than 130 houses around the world to provide care for the sick and dying.
Missionaries of Charity nuns must adhere to the traditional vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, as well as a fourth vow, to give "wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor." Mother Teresa worked as head of Missionaries of Charity until six months before her death in 1997 at 86.
The late Christopher Hitchens was one of Mother Teresa’s most outspoken critics. In his 2012 book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Hitchens wrote that some doctors who visited her missions alleged that patients experienced a shortage of care in unhygienic conditions, with inadequate food and no painkillers. Mother Teresa, on the other hand, went to costly American facilities when she needed her own medical treatment.
Hitchens writes that Mother Teresa accepted a donation of more than a million dollars from financier Charles Keating, who later went to prison for defrauding investors. Mother Teresa wrote to the court asking clemency for Keating without explaining their relationship. She took money from and praised right-wing dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, who later was accused of allowing the torture and murder of thousands of Haitians during his regime.
Hitchens quotes from an unpublished book by Susan Shields, a former nun from the Missionaries of Charity, who claims Mother Teresa taught nuns to secretly baptize the dying. After asking the person if they wanted a “ticket to heaven” the nun would then “[P]retend she was just cooling the person’s forehead with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptizing him, saying quietly the necessary words.” (Read about the 12 men who shaped Christianity
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http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/03/160306-bible-apostle-jesus-christian-religion-ngbooktalkThe Canonization Process
The canonization process has changed through the centuries. The first people honored as saints were martyrs who died for their faith. The pope wasn’t even always involved in making saints in the early days of the church. In 1234, the right to canonize was officially reserved for the papacy. Until Pope John Paul II, about 300 saints were made.
Around 300,000 people crowded St. Peter's Square when Pope John Paul II led a beatification of Mother Teresa in 2003, just 18 months after her death.
Photograph by Roberto Caccuri, Contrasto, Redux
Under Pope John Paul II, the process to canonize was simplified and the number of saints increased dramatically. He canonized 482 saints during his 26-year reign from 1978 to 2005. He beatified 1,327 people, including Mother Teresa.
It is usually a slow process. Since 1588, when the Catholic Church created an office called the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the average time between the death of an eventual saint and canonization is 181 years.
Not so for Mother Teresa. Within 18 months of her death, John Paul II waived the usual five-year waiting period and allowed the opening of the process to declare her sainthood.
“By Roman standards, it's lightning speed," said Lawrence Cunningham, a retired religion professor from Notre Dame.
The Congregation for the Causes of Saints oversees the canonization process. Once a cause has begun, the individual can be called a Servant of God. A postulator, the person assigned to present the cause, is assigned and collects public and private writings, interviews people who knew the candidate, and researches the person's life. The postulator then produces a paper, called a positio, which can run for thousands of pages.
“They tend to read like biographies,” Cunningham said.
When the positio is finished, it’s presented to a theological commission put together by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints that will vote on whether or not the cause can proceed. The commission then appeals to the pope to offer a Decree of Heroic Virtues for the person. The sainthood candidate is then known as a Venerable Servant of God.
To be beatified and then canonized, two miracles, almost always medical in nature, need to be confirmed. The consulta medica, a group of doctors paid a nominal fee by the church, investigate to determine if there is a scientific explanation for a miracle.
For Mother Teresa, her first miracle involved an Indian woman who claimed that her abdomen tumors healed in 1998 after she touched herself with a locket containing the nun's picture. For her second miracle, a Brazilian man was said to have been cured of brain tumors in 2008 after he prayed to Mother Teresa.
A statue of Mother Teresa stands at the Shishu Bhawan children's home in Kolkata, a reminder of her years of service there.
Photograph by Raghu Rai, Magnum Photos
But at least one of those miracles has been called into question. Researchers at the University of Montreal and the University of Ottawa concluded in a 2013 paper
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http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/uom-mta022813.php“It’s more about faith and image than real science," said Genevieve Chenard, one of the paper’s authors, from the University of Montreal. (Read about the campaign to eliminate hell.)
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http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/05/160513-theology-hell-history-christianityMother Teresa’s Canonization
After confirming the miracles, canonization can go forth. Churches around where the saint is from will often have special masses, but for the Vatican the pope simply offers a public statement that the person is on the official list maintained by the Catholic Church of those that could be venerated publicly.
The public statement is still a big deal to many. High-ranking members of the Missionaries of Charity will go to Rome for the canonization, which falls one day before the 19th anniversary of her death, bringing a relic of Mother Teresa's blood. According to the Times of India
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http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Mother-Teresa-sainthood-date-to-be-announced-on-Tuesday/articleshow/51401935.cmsHer canonization falls during the Catholic Church’s Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy. Pope Francis called for this jubilee, or holy year, out of the ordinary cycle of jubilees, which typically happen every 25 years. The pope said the world is particularly in need of mercy at this time.
While the church has not said the canonization is specifically linked to the Extraordinary Jubilee, Mother Teresa’s record of working with the “poorest of the poor” fits into the theme of mercy. Despite her flaws, Cunningham, the retired religion professor, said she inspired millions and did work few are willing to do.
“To do it for 30, 40 years, day in and day out, requires a certain heroism in one’s life," Cunningham said. “The canonization underscores the teaching about mercy."
https://archive.is/XtwHW
Mommie Dearest
20/Oct/2003
The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.
By Christopher Hitchens
Mother Teresa of Calcutta in December 1991.
Raveendran/AFP/Getty Images
In 2003, Pope John Paul II approved the beatification of Mother Teresa. At the time, Christopher Hitchens called Mother Teresa “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud,” arguing that “even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed.” On Sept. 4, 2016, Pope Francis will canonize Mother Teresa. Hitchens’ original essay is republished below.
I think it was Macaulay who said that the Roman Catholic Church deserved great credit for, and owed its longevity to, its ability to handle and contain fanaticism. This rather oblique compliment belongs to a more serious age. What is so striking about the “beatification” of the woman who styled herself “Mother” Teresa is the abject surrender, on the part of the church, to the forces of showbiz, superstition, and populism.
It’s the sheer tawdriness that strikes the eye first of all. It used to be that a person could not even be nominated for “beatification,” the first step to “sainthood,” until five years after his or her death. This was to guard against local or popular enthusiasm in the promotion of dubious characters. The pope nominated MT a year after her death in 1997. It also used to be that an apparatus of inquiry was set in train, including the scrutiny of an advocatus diaboli
or “devil’s advocate,” to test any extraordinary claims. The pope has abolished this office and has created more instant saints than all his predecessors combined as far back as the 16th century.
As for the “miracle” that had to be attested, what can one say? Surely any respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the obviousness of the fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of MT, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor. Her physician, Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn’t have a cancerous tumor in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican’s investigators? No. (As it happens, I myself was interviewed by them but only in the most perfunctory way. The procedure still does demand a show of consultation with doubters, and a show of consultation was what, in this case, it got.)
According to an uncontradicted report in the Italian paper L’Eco di Bergamo, the Vatican’s secretary of state sent a letter to senior cardinals in June, asking on behalf of the pope whether they favored making MT a saint right away. The pope’s clear intention has been to speed the process up in order to perform the ceremony in his own lifetime. The response was in the negative, according to Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who has acted as postulator or advocate for the “canonization.” But the damage, to such integrity as the process possesses, has already been done.
During the deliberations over the Second Vatican Council, under the stewardship of Pope John XXIII, MT was to the fore in opposing all suggestions of reform. What was needed, she maintained, was more work and more faith, not doctrinal revision. Her position was ultra-reactionary and fundamentalist even in orthodox Catholic terms. Believers are indeed enjoined to abhor and eschew abortion, but they are not required to affirm that abortion is “the greatest destroyer of peace,” as MT fantastically asserted to a dumbfounded audience when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.* Believers are likewise enjoined to abhor and eschew divorce, but they are not required to insist that a ban on divorce and remarriage be a part of the state constitution, as MT demanded in a referendum in Ireland (which her side narrowly lost) in 1996. Later in that same year, she told Ladies Home Journal that she was pleased by the divorce of her friend Princess Diana, because the marriage had so obviously been an unhappy one...
This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?
The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for “the poorest of the poor.” People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the “Missionaries of Charity,” but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell’s admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.
Correction, Oct. 21, 2003: This piece originally claimed that in her Nobel Peace Prize lecture, Mother Teresa called abortion and contraception the greatest threats to world peace. In that speech Mother Teresa did call abortion “the greatest destroyer of peace.” But she did not much discuss contraception, except to praise “natural” family planning.
https://archive.is/73vhL
Mother Teresa Was Actually A Horrible Person, What They Don’t Tell You
08/Jan/2017
For many years now Mother Teresa has been characterized as one of the most caring and generous human beings of all times. She is known for founding Missionaries of Charity and for her work with the poor. On September 4, 2016 she was officially declared a saint
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http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/04/europe/mother-teresa-canonizationMother Teresa had a twisted view of the world in which she glorified suffering.
Multiple volunteers at her hospices attest
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https://futiledemocracy.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/the-curse-of-mother-theresaChristopher Hitchens’ recalls another moment when Mother Teresa told a suffering patient,
Yet when Mother Teresa needed hospital care herself, she received it in a modern American hospital.
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http://nouvelles.umontreal.ca/en/article/2013/03/01/mother-teresa-anything-but-a-saintWhy didn’t Mother Teresa set up the proper facilities for these people? She certainly had the means to. The Missions of Charity organization received millions in donations. That is more then[sic] enough to build fully equipped hospitals and clinics.
Not to mention, she was adamantly and unsurprisingly against abortion. In her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech she declared that abortion was the greatest threat to peace in the world.
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https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/media/articles/mother-teresa-abortionShe once told many US officials that, “By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems . . . Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.”
How could she possibly believe that the “greatest destroyer of love and peace” is a woman utilizing her reproductive rights?
This woman’s hypocrisy is often overlooked due to her humanitarian efforts and the way that the media has crafted her image. The majority of people think of Mother Teresa as loving saint who helped millions of lives when in reality, millions suffered because of her beliefs.
https://archive.is/wmQQn
Hell's Angel - Mother Teresa of Calcutta; Christopher Hitchens Documentary (1994)
https://www.bitchute.com/video/fP3kvhUGUGJ3
Titles of/information about links above -
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Hell's Angel (TV programme)
Donal MacIntyre
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A Critic’s Lonely Quest: Revealing the Whole Truth About Mother Teresa [article above]
Why Mother Teresa is still no saint to many of her critics [article above]
As Mother Teresa Becomes a Saint, Controversies Linger
Mother Teresa of Calcutta (film)
Mommie Dearest
The Dark Side of Mother Teresa [article above]
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; A Skeptical Look at Mother Teresa
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Books in Brief: NONFICTION
Mother Teresa's care for the dying
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Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Personal Portrait - Result 1 of 1 in this book for mother teresa baptism dying
Mother Teresa and Her Critics
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Nobel-Winner Aided the Poorest
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Mother Teresa: Anything but a saint...
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Mother Teresa sainthood date to be announced on Tuesday
As Mother Teresa Becomes a Saint, Controversies Linger [article above]
Mommie Dearest [article above]
Mother Teresa declared a saint before huge crowds in the Vatican
Mother Teresa-She can't put us out of our misery any more
The curse of Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa on Abortion
Mother Teresa Was Actually A Horrible Person, What They Don’t Tell You [article above]
Hell's Angel - Mother Teresa, Christopher Hitchens Documentary (1994) [video above]
Notice the blue and white colours. Not jewish at all. It also looks like we found the origins of the happy merchant meme.
