Christopher Hitchens is one of the more prominent "New Atheists," and in a recent interview, here is his view on Mother Teresa:
"The woman was a fanatic and a fundamentalist and a fraud, and millions of people are much worse off because of her life, and it's a shame there is no hell for your bitch to go to."
Nice...
Two thoughts about this.
1) I don't know Mr. Hitchens at all, but I'd be willing to bet that he himself does little-to-nothing to help the poor. Not because he's an atheist, but because our condemnations of others often reflect our own insecurities.
2) The New Atheists, as a group, face a dilemma. They've already gotten lots of mileage about saying that they don't believe in religion and that God doesn't exist, but that message is getting stale. If they are to be widely featured in the media, they need a new message. This provides incentive to become more and more inflammatory. Maybe denouncing Mother Teresa is becoming the atheists' version of Godwin's law of Nazi analogies?
Thanks Jeff!
"The woman was a fanatic and a fundamentalist and a fraud, and millions of people are much worse off because of her life, and it's a shame there is no hell for your bitch to go to."
Nice...
Two thoughts about this.
1) I don't know Mr. Hitchens at all, but I'd be willing to bet that he himself does little-to-nothing to help the poor. Not because he's an atheist, but because our condemnations of others often reflect our own insecurities.
2) The New Atheists, as a group, face a dilemma. They've already gotten lots of mileage about saying that they don't believe in religion and that God doesn't exist, but that message is getting stale. If they are to be widely featured in the media, they need a new message. This provides incentive to become more and more inflammatory. Maybe denouncing Mother Teresa is becoming the atheists' version of Godwin's law of Nazi analogies?
Thanks Jeff!
18 comments:
My wife is studying physiotherapy and I was reading in one of her journals a discussion of the controversy of religion in the health sector. I was intrigued to see the description of a hypothetical patient as "fiercely" atheistic.
Maybe that is the main legacy of the New Atheism, the branding of atheism as "fierce".
You're upset about what HITCHENS wrote?
Over the years you've never read Indian newspaper articles translated into English on Mother T., nor Indian books exposing Mother T.s organization, nor articles in British papers by ex-Sisters of Charity and ex-volunteer workers for the Sisters of Charity? I've run across all those just by working in a library environment. The American press demonstrated relative gutless-ness when it came to sharing those same stories with American readers over the years. Hitchen's book was the mere tip of an iceberg of questions and discontent with Mother T.
Another Sister Leaves Mother Teresa's Community (someone who knew her) See this recent article:
http://motherteresathecaseforthecause.blogspot.com/2009/01/another-sister-leaves-mother-teresas.html
What about what native Indian charity worker, Pannalal Manik, who said, "I don't understand why you educated people in the West have made this woman into such a goddess!" Manik was born some 56 years ago in the Rambagan slum, which at about 300 years of age, is Calcutta's oldest. What Manik has achieved, can well be called a "miracle". He has built 16 apartment buildings in the midst of the slum -- living space for 4000 people. Money for the building materials -- equivalent to DM 10000 per apartment building -- was begged for by Manik from the Ramakrishna Mission [a Indian/Hindu charity], the largest assistance-organisation in India. The slum-dwellers built the buildings themselves. It has become a model for the whole of India. But what about Mother Teresa? "I went to her place 3 times," said Manik. "She did not even listen to what I had to say. Everyone on earth knows that the sisters have a lot of money. But no one knows what they do with it!"
In Calcutta there are about 200 charitable organisations helping the poor. Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity are not amongst the biggest helpers: that contradicts the image of the organisation. The name "Mother Teresa" was and is tied to the city of Calcutta. All over the world admirers and supporters of the Nobel Prize winner believe that it must be there that her organisation is particularly active in the fight against poverty. "All lies," says Aroup Chatterjee . The doctor who lives in London was born and brought up in Calcutta. Chatterjee who has been working for years on a book on the myth of Mother Teresa, speaks to the poor in the slums of Calcutta, or combs through the speeches of the Nobel Prize winner. "No matter where I search, I only find lies. For example the lies about schools. Mother T has often stated that she runs a school in Calcutta for more than 5000 children. 5000 children! -- that would have to be a huge school, one of the biggest in all of India. But where is this school? I have never found it, nor do I know anybody who has seen it!" says Chatterjee.
Compared to other charitable organisations in Calcutta, the nuns with the 3 blue stripes are ahead in two respects: they are world famous, and, they have the most money. But how much exactly, has always been a closely guarded secret of the organisation. Indian law requires charitable organisations to publish their accounts. Mother Teresa's organisation ignores this prescription! It is not known if the Finance Ministry in Delhi who would be responsible for charities' accounts, have the actual figures. Upon STERN's inquiry, the Ministry informed us that this particular query was listed as "classified information"
For a sustainable charitable system, it would have been sensible to train the nuns to become nurses, teachers or managers. But a Missionary of Charity nun is never trained for anything further. And they are taught total obedience and never to question.
Because of the tightfistedness of the rich order, the "poorest of the poor" suffer more than they need to, because Mother T. BELIEVED "Jesus was kissing" people who suffered.
CONTINUED FROM ABOVE
Charitable organizations in India questioned her for doing less than they did, and still continuing to beg for money and received it in bucketloads from the west, including from white collar criminals, all because she was a "Christian." She even refused to give back millions in stolen white collar crime money as well.
The Sisters of Charity ran unsanitary organizations, unsanitary, reusing dirty diapers, not only for diapers but for wash rags and to baptize people on the forehead, and refused pain killers and antibiotics as well as teachiing workers any basic doctoring advice. And not because her organization could not afford such things.
She also taught that the world cannot have enough children.
And when the Bofal plant exploded her Sisters of Charity arrived on the scene... LATE, after the major charitable organizations had already arrived and were doing lots more, but Mother T got the international news coverage and the donations.
Other Indian organizations struggle to teach their people birth control, since poorer Indians normally try to have many children because they know many of them will die young, but this other Indian organization teaches poorer families to practice birth control and shows them how to raise a few healthy children rather than putting the woman through many births and letting sickness and poverty and poor health decisions decide the size of her family, with the mother dying as well from the strain. Mother T. did not support such groups.
And then to parade around speaking about a God and FOR a God she didn't even feel existed... doing so for decades?
And allowing people to take her to the finest hospital when she herself became ill, but like I said having the money to treat many people much better than her Sisters of Charity actually did, with sanitization and pain-killers and antibiotics, none of which she apparently believed in, but the Sister of Charity did believe in self-flagellation. See article by ex-nun way above. And see this article as well:
See also, "Who was Mother Teresa?" from a German magazine http://agrasen.blogspot.com/2009/08/who-was-mother-teresa.html
There's way more on the web as well. A book by an Indian woman that I found and read years ago, a series of articles by an ex-volunteer who worked with the Sisters of Charity that appeared in the Times.
Another ex-congregant of Mother Teresa's "Missionaries of Charity"
Mother Teresa's House of Illusions
How She Harmed Her Helpers As Well As Those They 'Helped'
by Susan Shields
http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/shields_18_1.html
Mother Teresa used to say, “God always provides. He provides for the flowers and the birds, for everything in the world that he has created. And those little children are his life. There can never be enough.”
“God provides?… There can never be enough?” Scientists who study birds have found that one-third of adult birds and four-fifths of their offspring die of starvation every year. (David Lack, “Of Birds and Men,” New Scientist, Jan., 1996).
____________________________
THE WISDOM OF MOTHER TERESA, QUESTIONED
Mother Teresa On Aids: “It is the retribution for ‘improper sexual misconduct.’”
(Then what were the Black Death, smallpox, influenza, measles, mumps, polio, and TB “retribution for?”)
Mother Teresa On Poverty: “It is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot. The world is much helped by the suffering of poor people.”
(The more poor people there are who “accept” their suffering, the more rich people there will be who manipulate them. The rich complain that the poor want something for nothing. But the rich often stop at nothing to get everything. Where is Mother T.’s indignation at the “rich” like Jesus displayed?)
Mother Teresa On the Intense Pains of a Man with Cancer: “You are suffering like Christ. Therefore Jesus must be kissing you.”
(Mother T. was against the use of anesthetics to deaden pain, and she repeated the above story of intense suffering as an illustration of that belief. However, she also revealed the man’s reply to her. In response to Mother T. telling him that “Jesus must be kissing you,” he replied, “Then I wish he’d stop.”)
Mother Teresa On Overpopulation: “There is no problem of overpopulation, only of God’s will.”
(So if you live in a country whose population growth is outpacing its food production and economic growth, then you ought to throw away those rubbers and birth control pills, and get down on your knees and embrace starvation and poverty, because according to Mother T. that’s “God’s will.”)
The Myth of Mother Teresa
http://www.daylightatheism.org/2008/05/mother-teresa.html
Quick summation of Hitchens' most important points concerning Mother Teresa rather than merely one sentence of name-calling which you choose to focus upon. See this one page summation:
http://www.daylightatheism.org/2008/05/mother-teresa.html
Of course even Hitchens didn't say anything as bad as some verses in the Bible when it comes to death sentences and eternal condemnation. Sheesh, the pot calling the Hitchens black.
Daniel, I that you're right about the "new" atheists. It's perhaps their style of presentation, perhaps more than substance, that defines them.
Edward, have you read a general biography of Mother Teresa? It's my distinct impression that she did amazing good in the world, and the world would be better off with many more of her and her sisters.
Brad,
Mother Teresa ran an organization of untrained people that were KEPT untrained (programs of even basic health care education were not encouraged). Her organization had very low respect for health care, obedience was the rule, along with praise of pain and suffering (and even self-flaggelation by nuns working for her), or didn't you read the articles by the former workers with links in my previous posts?
"I first learned of the plight of the Kolkata children (at a Sisters of Mercy orphanage) from two international aid workers, both qualified nurses and committed Catholics. They came to me after working as volunteers for the Missionaries of Charity last Christmas. Both made the comparison with images that emerged from Romanian orphanages in the early 1990s after television news teams first gained access." The squalid truth behind the legacy of Mother Teresa
Donal MacIntyre, 22 August 2005
http://www.newstatesman.com/200508220019
Have you studied HINDU charities? Maybe the world needs more of THEM.
Shastri Athavale, whose spiritual and social activism was inspired by the The Bhagavad Gita, inspired hundreds of thousands to spend two weeks or more visiting India's poorest villages where they seek to advance the self-respect and economic condition of those they visit. For more than four decades Athavale has taught that service to God is incomplete without service to humanity.
There are also Indian organizations that go into villages and teach women birth control and ways to better care for the children they have rather than to simply have kid after kid that dies. The results have been excellent, in that women raise fewer children and healthier ones as well, and the women themselves remain healthier too. But Mother Teresa would have NONE of that.
Pannalal Manik was born in the Rambagan slum in Calcutta, who built 16 apartment buildings in the midst of the slum -- living space for 4000 people. Money for the building materials was begged for by Manik from the Ramakrishna Mission [a Indian/Hindu charity], the largest assistance-organisation in India. The slum-dwellers built the buildings themselves. It has become a model for the whole of India. But what about Mother Teresa? "I went to her place 3 times," said Manik. "She did not even listen to what I had to say. Everyone on earth knows that the sisters have a lot of money. But no one knows what they do with it!"
Have you read about Malcolm Muggeridge promoting a "halo" around Mother T's head as seen only on film? But photographers later demonstrated that that was due to a totally natural effect produced by that camera lens with the light at a certain angle, yet Muggeridge promoted his astonishment of it as a "miracle" and people bought Muggeridge documentarian prose which began the myth of Mother T. and the FUNDS KEPT ROLLING IN?
Mother Teresa, John Paul II, and the Fast-Track Saints
(revised and documented, 27 October 2007)
Mother Teresa’s “hospitals” for the indigent in India and elsewhere turned out to be hardly more than human warehouses in which seriously ill persons lay on mats, sometimes fifty to sixty in a room without benefit of adequate medical attention. Their ailments usually went undiagnosed. The food was nutritionally lacking and sanitary conditions were deplorable. There were few medical personnel on the premises, mostly untrained nuns and brothers.2
When tending to her own ailments, however, Teresa checked into some of the costliest hospitals and recovery care units in the world for state-of-the-art treatment.3
Teresa journeyed the globe to wage campaigns against divorce, abortion, and birth control. At her Nobel award ceremony, she announced that “the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion.” And she once suggested that AIDS might be a just retribution for improper sexual conduct.4
Teresa emitted a continual flow of promotional misinformation about herself. She claimed that her mission in Calcutta fed over a thousand people daily. On other occasions she jumped the number to 4000, 7000, and 9000. Actually her soup kitchens fed not more than 150 people (six days a week), and this included her retinue of nuns, novices, and brothers. She claimed that her school in the Calcutta slum contained five thousand children when it actually enrolled less than one hundred.
Teresa claimed to have 102 family assistance centers in Calcutta, but longtime Calcutta resident, Aroup Chatterjee, who did an extensive on-the-scene investigation of her mission, could not find a single such center.5
As one of her devotees explained, “Mother Teresa is among those who least worry about statistics. She has repeatedly expressed that what matters is not how much work is accomplished but how much love is put into the work.”6 Was Teresa really unconcerned about statistics? Quite the contrary, her numerical inaccuracies went consistently and self-servingly in only one direction, greatly exaggerating her accomplishments.
Over the many years that her mission was in Calcutta, there were about a dozen floods and numerous cholera epidemics in or near the city, with thousands perishing. Various relief agencies responded to each disaster, but Teresa and her crew were nowhere in sight, except briefly on one occasion.7
When someone asked Teresa how people without money or power can make the world a better place, she replied, “They should smile more,” a response that charmed some listeners. During a press conference in Washington DC, when asked “Do you teach the poor to endure their lot?” she said “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.”8
But she herself lived lavishly well, enjoying luxurious accommodations in her travels abroad. It seems to have gone unnoticed that as a world celebrity she spent most of her time away from Calcutta, with protracted stays at opulent residences in Europe and the United States, jetting from Rome to London to New York in private planes.9
Mother Teresa is a paramount example of the kind of acceptably conservative icon propagated by an elite-dominated culture, a “saint” who uttered not a critical word against social injustice, and maintained cozy relations with the rich, corrupt, and powerful.
She claimed to be above politics when in fact she was pronouncedly hostile toward any kind of progressive reform. Teresa was a friend of Ronald Reagan, and an admiring guest of the Haitian dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier. She also had the support and admiration of a number of Central and South American dictators.
http://www.michaelparenti.org/motherteresa.html
"Many years ago, before she was famous, I interviewed her [Mother Teresa] when she was visiting her London convent and we argued about contraception. Couldn’t she see the effects of her teaching on the Calcutta streets where babies were born to starve and die in misery? She said that every baby that takes a breath is another soul to the glory of God and that was all that mattered, the creation of souls. Suffering? We are all born to suffer."--Mullah in the Vatican by Polly Toynbee October 25
"Was Monica Besra’s ovarian tumor really cured by the supernatural powers of Mother Teresa’s picture placed on her abdomen? The Missionaries of Charity insist it was. The Vatican has approved the story officially as a first-class miracle."
http://devapriyaji.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/sister-thresa-making-saint-and-frauds/
Deng Pufang (1944–): Chinese handicap people's rights activist, first son of China's former Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping: "Mother Teresa of Calcutta told the handicapped son of China's leader, Deng Xiaoping, yesterday that his efforts for the disabled showed he loved God. 'But I am an atheist,' said Deng Pufang, whose legs were paralysed when fellow students forced him out of a window during the Cultural Revolution."--John Gittings, 'How a Maoist mob hunted down descendants of Peng Pai, Communist Party's first peasant organiser', The Guardian (London), January 23, 1985.
Abusing Children Teresa Style
4 AUGUST 2005 29 COMMENTS
On Aug 1st British television carried an investigative piece by Donal McIntyre about the treatment of children in an orphanage run by Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. He quotes Dr Aroup Chatterjee, a medical doctor in London and the author of Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict, as saying that “the Indian government is “terrified” of her reputation but if similar practices were found in any other home, it would have been shut down.”
In brief, the report said that handicapped children were maltreated in the orphanage. No surprise there for anyone who has cared to read what the true story is behind the façade that Mother Teresa carefully built around her mission. She used the misery that is all too evident in Calcutta (and in India in general) to demand charity from all and sundry around the world. What she did with the donations is not clear and is unlikely to ever become clear because she refused to have her books audited. Untold millions of dollars flowed into her coffers. The money was not used to build even one small hospital anywhere. In her homes, it was even forbidden to hand out simple painkillers. She, in the meanwhile, got jetted around to hospitals in the US whenever she was suffering some illness.
I have been a severe critic of Mother Teresa ever since I came to know of what her mission was all about. Christopher Hitchens was one of the first to provide a devastating critique of her. The Ghoul of Calcutta, as he called his piece on her, is as honest an appraisal of her as anyone has ever done. His book The Missionary Position was a welcome counterbalance to the hagiography that was built around her myth. I started a small collection of critical pieces about M. Teresa some years ago. Through my interest in her, around 1997 I came to meet Hitchens when he was visiting Berkeley for a conversation with Gore Vidal. Last year I met Chatterjee in London, again in connection with a review of his book that I had written on my blog.
What exactly is my main grouse with M. Teresa? I think that she was evil. She manipulated others and cheated them, and she did so on the backs of Kolkata’s miserable. She was the most famous “beggar lord” – a person who makes a living by taking the money that people give to beggars and using that money for some other purpose. In her case, it is suspected that the money is funneled to the Vatican so that she would get on the fast tract to being canonized.
But siphoning money to the Vatican does not immediately brand her as evil, in my book. Hitler also supported the Vatican and that was not his most egregious fault. No, M. Teresa did far worse than just steal from the poor to enrich the fabulously wealthy. She compounded the problem that is the root cause of many of the world’s miseries. She cynically campaigned against birth control and contraceptives and did everything that she could to make the population problem more acute.
Update: (Oct 26th, 2005) I debated all this with Mr John Donahue of the Catholic Defence League. “She built hospitals.” No, sir, you wait a minute. Mother Teresa was given, to our certain knowledge, many tens of millions of pounds. But she never built any hospitals. She claimed to have built almost 150 convents, for nuns joining her own order, in several countries. Was this where ordinary donors thought their money was going?
Furthermore, she received some of this money from the Duvaliers, and from Mr Charles Keating of the notorious Lincoln Savings and Loan of California, and both these sources had acquired the money by – how shall I put it? – borrowing money from the poor and failing to give it back.
How could this possibly be true? Doesn’t everyone know that she spent her time kissing the sores of lepers and healing the sick? Ah, but what everyone knows isn’t always true. You were more likely to run into Mother Teresa being photographed with Nancy Reagan, or posing with Princess Diana, or in the first-class cabin of Air India (where she had a permanent reservation).
Former Catholic Sister Says Even Mother Teresa Is a Fraud
According to Susan Shields, Mother Teresa ‘harmed her helpers as well as those they helped.’
By Greg Szymanski
June 6, 2007
For nine years Susan Shields worked as a devoted Catholic Sister, working for Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. When finally becoming fed-up in 1989, she left Mother Teresa in disgust over the misuse of millions in charitable donations that never got to their destination — the poor and afflicted.
Shields story was recently sent to the Arctic Beacon, as printed in the Free Inquiry Magazine, revealing how Mother Teresa really turned a blind eye to the poor while millions of dollars in donations are still sitting in Vatican bank accounts.
Here is her story entitled “Mother Teresa’s House of Illusions:
How She Harmed Her Helpers As Well As Those They `Helped’
“Some years after I became a Catholic, I joined Mother Teresa’s
congregation, the Missionaries of Charity. I was one of her sisters for nine and a half years, living in the Bronx, Rome, and San Francisco, until I became disillusioned and left in May 1989. As I re-entered the world, I slowly began to unravel the tangle of lies in which I had lived. I
wondered how I could have believed them for so long.
“Three of Mother Teresa’s teachings that are fundamental to her religious congregation are all the more dangerous because they are believed so sincerely by her sisters. Most basic is the belief that as long as a sister obeys she is doing God’s will. Another is the belief that the sisters have leverage over God by choosing to suffer. Their suffering
makes God very happy. He then dispenses more graces to humanity. The third is the belief that any attachment to human beings, even the poor being served, supposedly interferes with love of God and must be vigilantly avoided or immediately uprooted. The efforts to prevent any attachments cause continual chaos and confusion, movement and change in the congregation. Mother Teresa did not invent these beliefs – they were prevalent in religious congregations before Vatican II – but she did everything in her power (which was great) to enforce them.
“Once a sister has accepted these fallacies she will do almost anything. She can allow her health to be destroyed, neglect those she vowed to serve, and switch off her feelings and independent thought. She can turn a blind eye to suffering, inform on her fellow sisters, tell lies with ease, and ignore public laws and regulations.
Women from many nations joined Mother Teresa in the expectation that they would help the poor and come closer to God themselves. When I left, there were more than 3,000 sisters in approximately 400 houses scattered throughout the world. Many of these sisters who trusted Mother Teresa to guide them have become broken people. In the face of overwhelming evidence, some of them have finally admitted that their trust has been betrayed, that God could not possibly be giving the orders they hear. It is difficult for them to decide to leave – their self-confidence has been destroyed, and they have no education beyond what they brought with them when they joined. I was one of the lucky ones who mustered enough courage to walk away.
“It is in the hope that others may see the fallacy of this purported way to holiness that I tell a little of what I know. Although there are relatively few tempted to join Mother Teresa’s congregation of sisters, there are many who generously have supported her work because they do not realize how her twisted premises strangle efforts to alleviate misery. Unaware that most of the donations sit unused in her bank accounts, they too are deceived into thinking they are helping the poor.
CONTINUED FROM ABOVE
“As a Missionary of Charity, I was assigned to record donations and write the thank-you letters. The money arrived at a frantic rate. The mail carrier often delivered the letters in sacks. We wrote receipts for checks of $50,000 and more on a regular basis. Sometimes a donor would call up and ask if we had received his check, expecting us to remember it readily because it was so large. How could we say that we could not
recall it because we had received so many that were even larger?
“When Mother spoke publicly, she never asked for money, but she did
encourage people to make sacrifices for the poor, to “give until it hurts.” Many people did – and they gave it to her. We received touching letters from people, sometimes apparently poor themselves, who were making sacrifices to send us a little money for the starving people in Africa, the flood victims in Bangladesh, or the poor children in India. Most of the money sat in our bank accounts.
“The flood of donations was considered to be a sign of God’s approval of Mother Teresa’s congregation. We were told by our superiors that we received more gifts than other religious congregations because God was pleased with Mother, and because the Missionaries of Charity were the sisters who were faithful to the true spirit of religious life.
“Most of the sisters had no idea how much money the congregation was
amassing. After all, we were taught not to collect anything. One summer the sisters living on the outskirts of Rome were given more crates of tomatoes than they could distribute. None of their neighbors wanted them because the crop had been so prolific that year. The sisters decided to can the tomatoes rather than let them spoil, but when Mother found out what they had done she was very displeased. Storing things showed lack of trust in Divine Providence.
“The donations rolled in and were deposited in the bank, but they had no effect on our ascetic lives and very little effect on the lives of the poor we were trying to help. We lived a simple life, bare of all superfluities. We had three sets of clothes, which we mended until the material was too rotten to patch anymore. We washed our own clothes by hand. The never-ending piles of sheets and towels from our night shelter for the homeless we washed by hand, too. Our bathing was accomplished with only one bucket of water. Dental and medical checkups were seen as an unnecessary luxury.
CONTINUE FROM ABOVE
“Mother was very concerned that we preserve our spirit of poverty.
Spending money would destroy that poverty. She seemed obsessed with using only the simplest of means for our work. Was this in the best interests of the people we were trying to help, or were we in fact using them as a tool to advance our own “sanctity?” In Haiti, to keep the spirit of poverty, the sisters reused needles until they became blunt. Seeing the pain caused by the blunt needles, some of the volunteers offered to
procure more needles, but the sisters refused.
“We begged for food and supplies from local merchants as though we had no resources. On one of the rare occasions when we ran out of donated bread, we went begging at the local store. When our request was turned down, our superior decreed that the soup kitchen could do without bread for the day.
“It was not only merchants who were offered a chance to be generous. Airlines were requested to fly sisters and air cargo free of charge.
Hospitals and doctors were expected to absorb the costs of medical treatment for the sisters or to draw on funds designated for the religious. Workmen were encouraged to labor without payment or at reduced rates. We relied heavily on volunteers who worked long hours in our soup kitchens, shelters, and day camps.
“A hard-working farmer devoted many of his waking hours to collecting and delivering food for our soup kitchens and shelters. “If I didn’t come, what would you eat?” he asked.
“Our Constitution forbade us to beg for more than we needed, but, when it came to begging, the millions of dollars accumulating in the bank were treated as if they did not exist. “For years I had to write thousands of letters to donors, telling them that their entire gift would be used to bring God’s loving compassion to the poorest of the poor. I was able to keep my complaining conscience in check because we had been taught that the Holy Spirit was guiding Mother.
To doubt her was a sign that we were lacking in trust and, even worse, guilty of the sin of pride. I shelved my objections and hoped that one day I would understand why Mother wanted to gather so much money, when she herself had taught us that even storing tomato sauce showed lack of trust in Divine Providence.”
Aroup Chatterjee's book on Mother Teresa, ONLINE
Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict
http://www.meteorbooks.com/index.html
The author documents that Mother Teresa used spurious statistics and made exaggerated and unfounded claims throughout her life, including in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
14 CHAPTERS
http://www.meteorbooks.com/introduction.html
This is one of the things that Mother Teresa did:
"In December 1984, three and a half thousand people died in Bhopal from inhaling toxic gas, leaked by the multinational giant Union Carbide, in the worst industrial accident the world has ever seen. The number of people actually affected cannot be logged as the effects are long-standing and future generations would probably continue to suffer.
Mother Teresa, whose post-Nobel reputation within India was then very high indeed, rushed in to Bhopal like an international dignitary. Her contribution in Bhopal has become a legend: she looked at the carnage, nodded gravely three times and said, 'I say, forgive.' There was a stunned silence in the audience. She took in the incredulity, nodded again, and repeated, 'I say, forgive.' Then she quickly wafted away, like visiting royalty. Her comments would have been somewhat justified if she had sent in her Missionaries of Charity to help in any way. But to come in unannounced, and make an insensitive comment like that so early on, was nothing short of an insult to the dead and suffering. In the wider world however, her image became even more enhanced, as she was seen even more like Jesus Christ, who would turn the other cheek, although in this instance the cheek was not hers. People in Bhopal were not amused; it is said that the only reason Mother escaped being seriously heckled was by dint of being an elderly woman."
http://www.network54.com/Forum/186926/thread/1029150580/last-1116763551/Is+Mother+Teresa,+the+biggest+fraud+of+our+times-
Indians ignore their own to promote Mo. Teresa. October 20 2002, 3:20 PM
India has produced many selfless dedicated social workers in all fields. There are so many unsung non-Christian native divine souls in India that are working or have worked for leprosy victims. Baba Ampte is even alive today with his large Ashram for leprosy victims. There is one Ma Jaya who tends to dying aid victims and nobody knows about her.
But foreign born social workers like Mo. Teresa get high visibility and get donations even from many native Indians.
In India, nobody seem to know or care about many native divine souls working continuously for unfortunate people. The native Indians give Bharat Ratna medals, provide jet planes to, raise funds and spend thousands of Rupees in funeral, for Teresa in India, but they all remain unaware of their own Babas of native blood.
I wish to add names of Vinoba Bhave, Maharshi Karve, Ravi Shankar Maharaj, Jay Prakash Narayana, Baba Ampte and many many Gandhians who worked tirelessly for humanity. All these were contemporary of Teresa.
The most recent example of saintly human services by Indians is the Gujarat earthquake. Just think about this enormous human calamity. A day after the earthquake, the Indians had already started well organized relief effort without the help from government. A BBC reporter in Kutch ran away back to London after earthquake and went on line to chat with the people about his eye witness account. I was reading the chat. Most people were deeply concerned about the relief work in such a poor country and repeatedly asking for more information. The reporter kept repeating that he had seen many NGOs already helping survivors and saving the lives of those who are buried alive. Many people were asking for names of the NGOs, but he did not declare the names of Swaminarayana Sanstha, RSS and VHP who were the only NGOs on site then and he had seen them. All three had gained great experience in Orissa Cyclone calamity. This is how foreigners treat Indian saintly people. We have people like Shri Negi who either want to keep foreigners’ fraud hidden or like others who become mouthpiece of missionaries under fraudulent disguise of human services.
It was shame that during eartquake relief work, the English media news papers in India were full of propaganda attacks on these NGOs earthquake relief work with fabricated reports about stealing the relief supplies, asking people to say Ram before they can be helped, helping Hindus only and discriminating the people of other faiths etc. etc. all this without putting a foot in the disaster area. (Later on, while watching a relief work progress report video, I found out that the relief workers were removing the bodies and while carrying them to cremation fire, they were chanting among themselves: "Ram Bolo Bhai Ram". This is an age old tradition to chant God’s name for peace of the departed soul. May be, this was the information that Indian English Media news papers were distorting and publicizing.)
http://www.network54.com/Forum/186926/thread/1029150580/last-1116763551/Is+Mother+Teresa,+the+biggest+fraud+of+our+times-
Peace of Christ be with all the posters in this blog.
Well, I believe to have all the right to say somethings about Mother Teresa. Unfortunately I didn´t know her personally, but I garantee to know her better than all those who likes to atack the saints. Mother did what so many people and catholics don´t have the courage to do: to love the unloved, to care for the unwanted. She was atacked during her life, her mission, and she proved to the world that Jesus´s thirst is among us through the suffering poor. I was an MC for seven years. I got sick and had to leave the order. But nobody can take away from me all that I learned with the sisters, with the poor. The truth is that true catholics bothers those who are ignorants and keep trying to prove that true Love doens´t exist. To all those who uses this blog to atack Mother, a saint who spoke the truth and lived it, I just pray for you, for you don´t know what you say. Why all these people don´t spend their time practicing charity but saying nonsenses? All the co-workers, benefactors are witness about what their money is used for. We can close all the houses around the world, if those who are against Mother and her Society take care of all those people. If you find it easy, please take the sisters place and do something greater than what they´ve been doing. God Bless all of you. And be sure, that Mother is looking for you all from heaven.
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