mfaber

Well, good evening from Florida, Sabine!

I don't have anything against MT because she was a Christian and in fact admired her until I studied her story in depth. My problems with her stem from the fact that she raked in millions of dollars, but didn't spend it on even the simpliest things like food, pain killer, antibiotics that would really have helped the poor she was supposed to be helping. Now when it came to her own health care, she didn't hesitate to spend thousands on herself and get the very best medical care.

She was also used to prestige to front for some of the despicable doctrines of the Catholic Church in her opposition to birth control which again would have been of immense help to the poor who had too many children to care for, not to mention the fact that numerous pregnancies are extremely debilitating to a woman. Again both she and the Church hierarchy were very dedicated to the seeing that the statement " the poor you will always have with you" was a self-fullfilling, self-perpetuating prophecy. They just love suffering, not because it's really "good for the soul", but because it's so good for the 'religion business". In other words, it's a lot easier to sell the pie-in-the-sky promise of Heaven and salavation to a hungry man than it is to a content one. No one suffers like a poor person forced to watch loved ones sicken and /or starve to death. Not only that, she was also against the distribution of condoms to prevent AIDS and against the distribution of information that would help people avoid pregnancy and STDs (after all, those miserable fornicators must be made to suffer for having "non-approved" sex!).

If she had been an atheist with this agenda, I would despise her just the same..............

Infinity Lover

let's get a couple of things straight

- whatever suffering MT didn't end, she didn't cause it.
- whatever she failed to do, she still ended up doing way more than any of us will ever do in our lifetime.

There are many people who have the money to do worlds of good, but end up spending it on luxeries. So what makes MT this focal point of frustration? The pedestal she's being placed on?

Over time every saint has the potential to become a holiday; that much I do now. How about we make coming monday MT day? I could use a long weekend.

Bree

Great point.

Take away the name "Mother Teresa" and then present this situation to anyone. They'll most likely tell you that whomever you're talking about was obviously a selfish person who mis-managed the money entrusted in her care. Add the name back to the story and automatically you are the bad guy.

Interesting.

hinduwoman

Dear Sabine,m this same argument can be eqiually applied to the tired chestnut of Hitler.
I never had any personal relationship with Hitler.
I do NOT have the ability to know what was on his mind. My only information comes from what others have said about him.
I will not therefore demean him by calling him any names. OK?

Rhea

Well, good point. And there are others who operate just like her. Take Charles Keating for example. David Koresh. Let's see. Jim Bakker. See? See how many wonderful people there are who do "WAY MORE" than you or I for the poor. How can we lower ourselves by vilifying them?

Although I take GREAT EXCEPTION to your claim that she "didn't cause" any suffering. I disagree vehemently.

Yup. Exactly so. How many times do people say, "Yeah well, what do you want, Mother Theresa?" or some such. The PERFECT SELFLESS PERSON is her rep. And it smells really stinky to me. To many people. Makes us speak up.

It would horrify me if someone took her "example" and tried to duplicate it.

What _did_ happen to all those hundreds of millions of dollars that were given "to help the poor". That doesn't bother you in a fraudulent-icky kind of way?


Much like Columbus Day, I suppose. Hardly a thing to celebrate if you ask me.


...

Atheist bitches? Madelyn Ohair comes to mind. Not that I know a ton about her. But her record strikes me as rather unpersonable.

Sabine Grant

Hitler has already been mentionned previously in this thread and I have already replied to the post mentionning his name etc etc etc... my reply to you will be the same as what I previously wrote. Comparing the historical facts as well as the reports from survivors of the Shoah illustrating the crimes of the Third Reich with any heresay about MT seems irrational to me. For the rest of my reply, please read my previous posts.
You all have a good night not as humid as here I hope.

hinduwoman

What exactly did she do? That is what the book asks and the answer is in the negative.
What she did do was to transfer enormous sums of money to Vatican and spend the money people sent to her for feeding the poor on feeding nuns and brothers instead. Again she spent her money on her medical expenses --- is that not a luxury that she denied to the poor under her care?
Yes, it is the worshipful attitude to her that irritates many. The author couldnot get his book published at first byt international publishers --- such is the hold her image has on the public.

hinduwoman

Yguy, you are not getting the point or is uneasy about criticising an idol.

Teresa encouraged people to have more and more children even if they could not feed them. Nowhere did she say that once the children were born she or Catholic church would take care of the children. So the families would become poorer and poorer and children would die of malnutrition, but at least abortion would have been prevented.

since the Orders do not pick up the dying and destitute from the streets, as Teresa pretended she did --- as the example show they were actually turned away --- where is the conception of dignity?
she did Not make the dying feel better about it. when she told one man that Jesus was kissing him, his response was to tell Jesus to stop kissing him. The poor died in filthy surroundings. If that is dignity, then why so muc h fuss about the squalor of slums?
Above all, she Took painkillers for herself.
She also lied. For example she said in a press conference that she operated 109 malcutrition centres in India. there is only one 'feeding' centre in Calcutta.


I will be posting more from the book.
Watch out for the next Installments!

hinduwoman

Unfortunately Chatterjee's work is based exactly on the same evidence as the Holocaust is: personal experience by the author, eyewitness testimonies by those who had worked for Teresa, interviews with beggars, looking at accountsheets presented by the organizations, comparing what Teresa said with what she actually did (eg, no painkillers for dying but plenty for herself)and travelling to the various houses run by the sisters. He had got video films also.

If you still think of this as heresy why don't you come to India and actually see hoiw many care centres she actually have and what their conditions are?

hinduwoman

Chatterjee has a website with excerpts from his book:

http://www.fmh-child.org/AroupChatterjee.htm
Mother Teresa had been habitually economical with the truth over the last half a century when talking about her operations. Journalists and authors with or without a vested interest have often taken cues from her when creating fantastic tales of charity. But I think when it came to fairy tales, it was Mother who took the wafer. And, fictions of glory others manufactured on her behalf had her blessings -- "Journalists can do the work of God" was one of her favourite sayings. Audrey Constant's book on her life written for children is perhaps the only manuscript she personally corrected and annotated -- the author herself said so in a personal communication: "Sadly I have not yet met her [Mother Teresa]. ........... When I wrote the story (which I did with the help of the Sisters of Charity) Mother Teresa herself amended the manuscript and she wrote in a copy of the book and sent it to me. I will always treasure it."19 This book makes some bizarre claims about the charitable functions of the Missionaries of Charity including that they have "122 leprosy clinics".20 In Calcutta they have a single leprosy clinic, an open air one, which runs weekly on Convent Road -- average attendance is about 60. The book also describes Calcutta as a city so overwhelmed by lepers that a special church has to earmarked for them: "They have their own church."21 There is no such church. Mother Teresa was immensely proud of her work in the field of leprosy and she certainly showed some sincerity in this area. But her claim "We care for more than 53000 leprosy patients. With the help of the Indian government we are creating rehabilitating centres for them"22 was a wild one. In the whole of India, her leprosaria have about 3000 residents and they look after another 3000 as outpatients. The estimated total number of lepers in Calcutta was 20000 at its peak in the early 1970s. Currently the estimated total is about 10000. When it comes to incredible and impossible claims made by Mother Teresa or by others on her behalf, the one that I find most bemusing appears in a letter written by her to Morarji Desai in 1979, when Mr Desai was (briefly) the Prime Minister of India. In her letter, Mother severely upbraids Mr Desai for not outlawing abortion and then she goes on to say, "In Calcutta alone we have 102 centres where families are taught self control out of love"23 -- meaning of course, natural family planning. Now, whatever could she mean by "102 centres"? -- I have thought very long and very hard but could not fathom the basis of the claim, especially as she does not have a single such centre. Could she mean she had natural family planning advisers in her homes? -- At one time she did have such advisers, .... but centres? The outlandishness of this claim is mind-boggling -- after all, she was writing to the Prime Minister, although, admittedly, he was far less of a celebrity than she was. It does not come as a surprise to me, when Mother Teresa's friend, the Calcutta based Father Edward Le Joly, 13 years later, gives the global total of her family planning centres as "69"24. None is mentioned in Calcutta. I may have been bewildered or even amused by Mother Teresa's figure of "102 centres" of natural family planning, but I was disturbed by what she said to an assembly of her "co-workers" (a very large and powerful body of people from all over the world, who do a lot of the fund raising) in London on 13 July, 1977. She said, "We spend Rs 20000 a week just on food for the 59 centres we have in Calcutta."25 This was not just a slip of the tongue, as the "59 centres" recurred, such as in this way: "They [the Sisters] go all over the city (in Calcutta alone we have 59 centres, the home for the dying is only one of them). The Sisters travel everywhere with a rosary in their hands."26 In 1977 Mother Teresa had 4 centres in Calcutta, and presently her order has 5 -- not counting her 3 large nunneries in the city. So what should we make of her "59 centres"? To a sinner like me, it seems to be a large measure of saintly license. Alternatively, it could be described as a symptom of psychosis, or, to use a 19th century term to describe fantastic story telling, pseudologica fantastica. Some would of course, sum it up as a plain whopper. These gross travesties of truth have been treated as pearls of veracity by the world -- understandably so, as they were pronounced by the holiest person of our time. An (almost) saint cannot of course, lie; perhaps we ought to treat these as parables with hidden and symbolic meaning, or, as apocryphal truths. As the whole world knows, Mother Teresa was the ultimate champion of the poor, especially so in Calcutta. She could therefore make some claims on behalf of the poor of Calcutta, such as this one: "We deal with thousands and thousands of very poor people in Calcutta. As you may know, there are over 10 million people in that city, but up now I am not aware of one woman among the very poor who has had an abortion."27 In other words, Mother was harking back to her old theme, "We have always space for another child. Bring me all your unwanted children."

I am bewildered by Mother Teresa's claim that not a single woman amongst "the very poor" in Calcutta had an abortion. In Calcutta, one and half million people live below the poverty line. Even considering that among the poor, a low female: male ratio obtains because of the migrant nature of the population, there would be about half a million women in Calcutta living below the poverty line, and most of these women would be of child bearing age. Did Mother Teresa want us to believe that she catered for four hundred thousand pregnant or potentially pregnant women and their children in Calcutta, when her order does not have a single maternity home or mother and baby unit? I am told that many years back she used to have a small mother and baby facility but certainly none exists currently.

A handful of poor women in Calcutta who are contemplating abortion, are persuaded by the Missionaries of Charity not to have an abortion and to continue with their pregnancy. These women are looked after, sometimes as in-patients, by the Association of Medical Women in India (AMWI) Hospital, a government run maternity hospital, which happens to be situated very near Mother House. Historically, the management of the AMWI Hospital and the Missionaries of Charity have enjoyed a close relationship. The hospital has thirty beds, and many of them are occupied by "Mother Teresa's women". These women are taken care of until delivery by the hospital, and their new-born babies are taken care of by the Missionaries of Charity -- all of them are adopted. Needless to say, the Missionaries of Charity do not fork out a paisa towards the upkeep of "Mother Teresa's women", although they have been known to send in food from time to time.

When Mother Teresa said that she was not aware of "one woman among the very poor" in Calcutta who has had an abortion, was she deliberately misleading or was she genuinely misinformed? Who can tell, but she had quoted the population of Calcutta correctly, which is surprising, as she was endearingly famous for not having a clue about these matters. I can therefore assume that she would have some idea about the number of "very poor" women in the city, especially as she had always been solely preoccupied with the city's poverty.

I may be wrong, but I feel Mother had knowingly made a misleading statement -- maybe she was too embarrassed to tell the truth that women in Calcutta, including the city's "very poor" women who are supposed by the world at large to be beholden to her, are uniquely nonchalant about abortion. Having made many thousands of women around the world give up abortion, may be she considered it a personal failure that she had been singularly unsuccessful in Calcutta -- but is this the way to deal with perceived failures?

Mother Teresa would have been horrified to know that during my two years as a junior and senior house officer at the Calcutta Medical College Hospitals, I had personally assisted in numerous abortions, and a number of these were on "very poor women". In case I am seen by a section of readers as some kind an unusual demon in the city of Mother Teresa, let me point out that every one of us did it -- including the Muslims -- except the lone Roman Catholic girl.
****

"And in Calcutta alone in six years -- it is all in Calcutta -- we have had 61,273 babies less from the families who would have had, but because they practise this natural way of abstaining, of self-control, out of love for each other. We teach them the temperature metre which is very beautiful, very simple, and our poor people understand. And do you know what they have told me? Our family is healthy, our family is united, and we can have a baby whenever we want. So clear -- those people in the street, those beggars -- .."

Well, beautiful it may be, but natural contraception is anything but simple. Just imagine the scene -- a beggar woman lying on a pavement in Calcutta in her shack ("walls" made of gunny drapings) getting up in the morning -- with 16 wheeler trucks thundering by, filling her "room" with diesel smoke -- then coyly checking if her cervical mucus has turned "slippery mucoid", then picking up the fertility thermometer from the pavement to check her BBT (basal body temperature), and finally neatly recording the temperature on a beautiful chart pinned on to a gunny "wall".

I do not think it would an exaggeration to say that a good few middle class women would find natural contraception techniques a bit trying. But of course, Mother Teresa's "beautiful poor" would anything for her. No matter, less than 2% of female beggars and less than 25% of female slum dwellers have any reading skills at all -- but I doubt if any would able to read small thermometer calibrations in English and chart them on a graph. No matter, fevers, especially malaria, are rife in this population and would make BBT somewhat untenable.

And yet, when Mother Teresa -- who washed hypodermic needles in cold water before re-using them for the umpteenth time and who supplied one bottle for twenty babies in her homes -- told her "beautiful" tale of natural contraception to the world, everybody believed her. A saint does not tell lies -- if she says she supplies thousands of fertility thermometers to Calcutta's slum women, then supply them she must! It is scientifically impossible to calculate exactly how many less children were born to certain number of couples practising a certain method of birth control -- one only hazard a very rough guess. In that context Mother's Nobel Prize figure of "61,273" is particularly disingenuous, and was quoted to mislead the world -- yes, deliberately.

Empowered women, who have everything going for them, who are in an equal relationship, who are able to say no to their partners -- natural contraception is for them (maybe). It is bizarre to propose such a method to slum women -- perhaps this is another example of how out of touch Mother Teresa was with Indian slum women.

***

In India's vibrant democratic history the darkest period was between 1975 and 1977, when Mrs Gandhi imposed a "State of Emergency" on the country after being judicially indicted of election malpractices. The period of Emergency in India is one difficult to describe to an outsider -- from a politically open society, India overnight became a country of midnight (and midday) knocks on the door. Political censorship was imposed on newspapers, television, radio and even commercial producers of films and entertainment -- when Kishore Kumar, India's most popular singer refused to sing at a fund raising party for Congress, Mrs Gandhi's son Sanjay issued terse notes to all the record companies (including HMV India) to scrap all his contracts -- as a result he was banned from all broadcasting systems, public or private, and shops had to take his records off their shelves.

A draconian new law called the Maintenance of Internal Security Act was passed, under which anybody could be imprisoned (without a reason being given) and detained indefinitely. The jails were at bursting point with political prisoners, among them Mahatma Gandhi's one time associate Jayaprakash Narayan, a leader of the masses and considered above party politics -- it was later revealed that he had been slow poisoned in prison by arsenic, causing his kidneys to fail.

The real ruler of India during Emergency was Mrs Gandhi's late younger son Sanjay, who did not hold any office of the state, but issued all the orders. Sanjay had a passion for population control and issued monthly "sterilisation targets". As a consequence, slum dwellers (mostly men) were rounded up and forcibly sterilised -- among them many young men who had never been married.

Sanjay also cared deeply for Delhi's beautification, and one fateful night bulldozers arrived at the Turkman Gate slums, where the "poorest of the poor" among Delhi's Muslims had lived for generations. By morning, Turkman Gate became a clean expanse.

The people deployed to keep order during Emergency were mainly black shirt criminals from Sanjay's "Youth Wing", assisted by uniformed officers from the cryptically named Research and Analysis Wing. A group of ten people milling at a street corner was considered a "political assembly" and arrested. Disappearances became common.

It was moving to see that Mother Teresa considered her friendship with Mrs Gandhi precious enough to overlook the small incident at the Turkman slums, and the ongoing programmes of forced sterilisation. Issuing an approval certificate for the state of Emergency, she said, "People are happier. There are more jobs. There are no strikes."18

I do not think it is good enough to say that Mother was not aware of the goings on during Emergency because of censorship -- the Catholic establishment was well aware of the forced sterilisation activities. She was actually criticised by the Catholic press for her comments, even in the United States, where a long leader in American Catholic Church criticised her for ignoring human rights abuses.

***

From Stern magaizen's article:
"You should visit the House in New York, then you'll understand what happens to donations," sayssays Eva Kolodziej. The Polish lady was a Missionary of Charity for 5 years. "In the cellar of the homeless shelter there are valuable books, jewellery and gold. What happens to them? -- The sisters receive them with smiles, and keep them. Most of these lie around uselessly forever."
(Was that why you sent her money? I am presuming you did)
By the accounts of former sisters, the finances are a one way street. "We were always told, the fact that we receive more than other orders, shows that God loves Mother Teresa more. ," says Susan Shields. Donations and hefty bank balances are a measure of God's love. Taking is holier than giving.

"On my September vist I had to witness 2 or 3 children lying in the same cot, in totally overcrowded rooms with not a square inch of playing space. The behavioural problems arising as a result cannot be overlooked." Mrs Wiedeking appeals to the generosity of supporters in view of her powerlessness in the face of the children's great needs. Powerlessness?! In an organisation with a billion-fortune, which has 3 times as much money available to it as UNICEF is able to spend in all of India? The Missionaries of Charity has have the means to buy cots and build orphanages, -- with playgrounds. And they have enoungh money not only for a handful orphans in Delhi but for many thousand orphans who struggle for survival in the streets of Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta.


If this is all dismissed as envy and heresy, then you might junk whole history altogether, except of course the Bible which not being big on facts has to be correct.