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 a 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 seems 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."
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.
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