Someone recently responded interestingly to a minor
rant about the Church's dogmatism and man made decisions regarding what is and what
ain't scripture. My point is that a
bunch of old guys decided 300 plus years after the alleged events what did and
didn't happen. The response included a reference stating, in essence, that "Any
woman, including Mother Theresa who speaks up is put in her place"
Would that it were so. Of the many Catholic women
who have served the Church over the centuries, Mother Theresa was absolutely the last one to speak up or take a
stand. Her stance was conservative almost to the point of Mel Gibson's. She is lionized in the west due largely to
ignorance of what she did (and more importantly didn't) do. While Mother Theresa was becoming world renowned
figure, nameless nuns (and priests) in
El Salvador were preaching liberation theology and truly helping their charges
at the cost, sometimes of their lives. When
whichever Gandhi who was in charge at the time declared suspension of Indian civil
liberties at one time, Mother Theresa immediately fell in line and declared
that the people were "happy and content now."
The message seemed to me to be the same as was
presented to slaves in the ante-bellum South before the Civil War. That message
was that "Of course we are all equal in the eyes of God, just don't try to
improve your lot on earth because we'll crush you" In the same way, mother
Theresa seemed to glorify poverty and its cause, ignorance, as if somehow the
poor were really better off and just didn't know it. There are some serious
criticisms to be laid at the (fast track) "sainted" feet of mother Theresa of Calcutta. Among them are:
Christopher
Hitchens:
"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.
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.
One
of the curses of India, as of other poor countries, is the quack medicine man,
who fleeces the sufferer by promises of miraculous healing. Sunday was a great
day for these parasites, who saw their crummy methods endorsed by his holiness
and given a more or less free ride in the international press. Many more people
are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if
her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and
a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us
another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions."
“Everything everyone thinks they know about [Mother
Teresa] is false. It must be the single most successful emotional con job of
the twentieth century. It is often said, inside the Church and out of it, that
there is something grotesque about lectures on the sexual life when delivered
by those who have shunned it. Given the way that the Church forbids women to
preach, this point is usually made about men. But given how much this Church
allows the fanatical Mother Teresa to preach, it might be added that the call
to go forth and multiply, and to take no thought for the morrow, sounds grotesque
when uttered by an elderly virgin whose chief claim to reverence is that she
ministers to the inevitable losers in this very lottery.”
Sanal Edamaruku:
When Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize, she used
the opportunity of her worldwide telecast speech in Oslo to declare abortion
the greatest evil in the world and to launch a fiery call against population
control. Her charitable work, she admitted, was only part of her big fight
against abortion and population control. This fundamentalist position is a slap
in the face of India and other Third World Countries, where population control
is one of the main keys for development and progress and social transformation.
Do we have to be grateful to Mother Teresa for leading this worldwide
propagandist fight against us with the money she collected in our name?
Mother Teresa did not serve the poor in
Calcutta, she served the rich in the West. She helped them to overcome their
bad conscience by taking billions of Dollars from them. Some of her donors were
dictators and criminals, who tried to white wash their dirty vests. Mother Teresa
revered them for a price. Most of her supporters, however, were honest people
with good intentions and a warm heart, who fall for the illusion that the
"Saint of the Gutter" was there to wipe away all tears and end all
misery and undo all injustice in the world. Those in love with an illusion
often refuse to see reality.
Sarmila
Bose:
"Perhaps the
greatest harm she did to the very poor she said she served was her total
opposition to both abortion and contraception, in accordance with her orthodox
Catholic faith. She worked in a sea of poverty that is India, yet opposed one
of India’s most important anti-poverty policies — its population control
programme. When I visited her orphanage I was grateful to her for taking in
babies abandoned in the streets of Calcutta, but there would be fewer abandoned
and unwanted babies all around if India’s family planning programme were more
successful. She had the right to her own faith, but her public work based on
that faith collided with what was better for society.
For someone about to become a saint, Mother Teresa was cosy with nasty dictators like the Duvaliers of Haiti and notorious swindlers like Charles Keating of the USA. She did not hesitate to declare that the Duvaliers loved the poor, and did not care that Keating had stolen a lot of money from people who weren’t rich, just because he gave her some. In fact, she received lots of money from lots of people and it is worrying that none of it is accounted for through any public audit. It is also true that her institutions offer only simple, rudimentary service, so the vast funds do not seem to have been used to upgrade and modernise the care provided."
For someone about to become a saint, Mother Teresa was cosy with nasty dictators like the Duvaliers of Haiti and notorious swindlers like Charles Keating of the USA. She did not hesitate to declare that the Duvaliers loved the poor, and did not care that Keating had stolen a lot of money from people who weren’t rich, just because he gave her some. In fact, she received lots of money from lots of people and it is worrying that none of it is accounted for through any public audit. It is also true that her institutions offer only simple, rudimentary service, so the vast funds do not seem to have been used to upgrade and modernise the care provided."
Michael Hakeem, PhD:
Mother Teresa is thoroughly saturated with a primitive
fundamentalist religious worldview that sees pain, hardship, and suffering as
ennobling experiences and a beautiful expression of affiliation with Jesus
Christ and his ordeal on the cross. Hitchens reports that in a filmed interview
Mother Teresa herself tells of a patient suffering unbearable pain from
terminal cancer: "With a smile, Mother Teresa told the camera what she
told the patient: 'You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be
kissing you.'" Apparently unaware that the response of the sufferer was a
put-down, she freely related it: "Then please tell him to stop kissing
me." .
In short, it seems the
west was sold a con job with regards to Mother Theresa, while the Church studiously
avoided dealing with the real brutality visited on Nuns and priests by Latin American nations in
their own self interest at retaining power. The USA openly funded the Contras
in Nicaragua, know killers of clergy, until forced to stop, at which point Ronald
Reagan found another way. Seems to me the church stands strong while in possession
of the upper hand (Crusades, Inquisition) and goes along to get along when it
doesn't (Pius XII during the Nazi era, El Salvador, Nicaragua, India) But in no case does mother theresa get a pass for popularizing crushing poverty.
