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Post Info TOPIC: Kolkata will take a century to recover from Mother Teresa


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Kolkata will take a century to recover from Mother Teresa
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 Kolkata will take a century to recover from Mother Teresa 

 

By Aroup Chatterjee 

If Mother Teresa, to be canonised at the Vatican on September 4, is to be named a patron saint of anything it should be for "misinformation". In the last 20 years of her life, truth became an unknown entity to her. The media aided and abetted her lack of integrity and in a way she cannot be blamed for believing in her own lies. 

Intellect was not her strong point and, for someone like her, to be surrounded by hordes of sycophants who were telling her if she said black was white then that had to be true, it became intoxicating. The media did spread the mega-myth about her, but she herself was the source. She repeatedly told the world she went around the city 24x7 "picking up" destitute from its squalid "gutters" (she did not), that she fed up to 9,000 in her soup kitchens (she did not), she never refused a helpless child (she did as a rule), that the dying destitute in her so-called home for the dying Nirmal Hriday died a "beautiful death" (they were treated harshly and often died a miserable, painful death). 
Mother Teresa was an ultimate politician who worked on behalf of the Vatican. No, she was not an "agent" as that would be conspiratorial. She did not have to do much subterfuge or skulduggery in India itself, as Indians, particularly the media, were in awe of her and connived with her. 


When she said in her Nobel speech that she created 61,237 fewer children from (slum) couples abstaining from sex, no one challenged her on her bogus and fantastic figure; neither did they ask her how  at the height of the Cold War abortion could be the "greatest destroyer of peace" (said a thousand times, including in her Nobel speech). 

I do not blame world media as much as I blame Indian and particularly Kolkata media. Here she was, a jet-setting celebrity -- although appended with the epithet "of Calcutta" -- spending six to nine months in a year in Europe and the US, making strange claims about her work and about the disgusting state of the city, but never to be seen in the city's disasters -- major or minor. 

 
Why was she not asked why she re-used needles on her residents in Nirmal Hriday (it was official policy) when she herself received the finest care in the world's best hospitals? 
 
 
Even after her death, the Indian fear of blue-bordered saris continues. On August 1, 2005, UK TV showed a child tied to a cot overnight in her orphanage -- one Kolkata newspaper grudgingly reported the matter with lots of "alleged". During her lifetime, even that would be unthinkable. She was white, she hobnobbed with President Ronald Reagan (they were closest of buddies), and oh yes, she had the Nobel -- so she had to be divine. 

Did no one know that she hobnobbed with the Duvaliers of Haiti whose brutality was unsurpassed (whose opponents were often cut up and fed to dogs)? No one in India wanted to know. For the Western media, she was a metaphor, a set-piece, a stratospheric certainty of image in an uncertain and changing world. Conversely, Kolkata was the opposite metaphor of absolute degradation where "foetuses are given to dogs to eat" (as remarked by her "other self" Francis Goree). 

It was beyond the West's interest, energy or remit to robustly challenge these wrong stereotypes. But did Indian journalists not know that her main bank was the Vatican Bank, a dark cavern of corruption, intrigue and murder? Before she died, it was well known that she had accepted millions from Charles Keating, the notorious American swindler, but no one in India cared. 
 
Bengalis showed some rare guts when she was beatified through a "miracle" in 2003. Doctors, and even the then Health Minister, made statements that Monica Besra was cured by prolonged treatment, and not by an aluminium medal. Even Besra herself periodically said her cure was not a miracle. But the Vatican treated Indian opinion with the contempt it always has and proceeded with canonisation. 
 
But what is so great about Catholic saints? People should realise a Catholic saint does not have to be saintly or nice in the secular sense, but has to be pure to Catholic dogma, especially on contraception and abortion. Jose Maria Escriva, a Fascist, is a Catholic saint; another Fascist, Cardinal Stepinac, is a "blessed". "Saint" John Paul II actively shielded the prolific paedophile and criminal Marcial Maciel over many years. Mother Teresa also wrote a letter of support for a convicted paedophile priest Donald McGuire, asking people to overlook his "imprudence". 
 
If one looks around Mother Teresa's homes in Kolkata today, one would find many of them acceptable. But one must not forget that this comes after 25 years of campaigning by me, and also persistent global criticism from Hemley Gonzalez, the American former volunteer who in 2008 was so utterly disgusted by what he saw that he founded the Stop the Missionaries of Charity movement and founded his own Responsible Charity. Moreover, in the last six months the order has spruced up a great deal, preparing for the canonisation on Sunday. 
 
And yet, like obliging picaninnies, the Indian government is dutifully sending a delegation to the black-magic ceremony in Rome. (Hindus please note: the Pope is not allowed to wish Hindus personally even on Diwali.) 
 
Be that as it may, my own wish would be to reclaim Kolkata/Calcutta from Teresa -- to sever the automatic connection of the two names as the whole wide world sees it. Kolkata's image under the yoke of Mother Teresa will take a century to recover. In the last 50 years, the city has lost an unimaginable amount from the loss of international business and tourism and will continue to do so. But let us at least loudly, proudly proclaim that we have nothing to do with a medieval creature of of darkness -- not any more. 

(Aroup Chatterjee, who describes himself as a "militant atheist", is the Britain-based author of "Mother Teresa - The untold Story", an updated version of which was released in Kolkata in June. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at aroupchatterjee@yahoo.co.uk) 

 
 


-- Edited by Admin on Sunday 4th of September 2016 07:18:33 PM

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Mother Teresa: The Eichmann of Calcutta

In The Missionary Position – Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Christopher Hitchens advises one to judge “Mother Teresa’s reputation by her actions and words rather than her actions and words by her reputation.” The RSS leader Mohan Bhagwat followed that advice to conclude that proselytism to Christianity was the motive behind Teresa’s work. He was effectively echoing Hitchens’ statement, “Mother Teresa has never pretended that her work is anything but a fundamentalist religious campaign.”

hitchens

Teresa’s indignant admirers have responded to Bhagwat’s statement with vitriol. Has Bhagwat unreasonably cast aspersion on an altruistic saint or could he have reasonably arrived at an even more damning conclusion? Let us turn to Teresa’s own words and deeds for an answer.

Mary Loudon volunteered at Teresa’s much hyped Home for the Dying. She testifies that terminally ill cancer patients were only given aspirin to cope with their pain. She also points out that the nuns used unsterilized syringes on the defenceless patients. It must be remarked thatTeresa’s order never used unsterilized syringes on any white patient anywhere in the world. It was as if the Indian poor did not count as humans. This is way beyond racism. Loudon also recounts the case of a fifteen year-old boy who was suffering from a simple kidney infection. Teresa’s order refused to give him antibiotics. As a result, his condition worsened resulting in renal failure. The boy could still have been taken to a hospital to save his life. However, Teresa’s order refused to do so because “if they do it for one, they have to do it for everybody.” But why not do it for everybody?

Here, one must understand that alleviating suffering never was Teresa’s motive; prolonging the suffering was. Teresa derived pleasure from the unnecessary agony and suffering of the defenceless. She once perversely told an interviewer, “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot…I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.”

True to her words, she did everything within her capacity to usher in and prolong the suffering of the defenceless poor. Robin Fox, editor of the prestigious medical journal Lancet, visited her so-called medical facility in Calcutta in 1994. He was shocked to see that patients with malaria were callously given paracetamol even though a diagnosing physician had prescribed chloroquine. Teresa preferred to repose faith in providence to administering necessary medical treatment.

Teresa ran her order like an autocrat. Even if the nuns had been empathetic, they couldn’t have taken a stance against Teresa’s inhuman insistence.

The prescription to repose faith in providence by shunning proper medical care was only applicable so long as the patient was someone else. However, when Teresa was diagnosed with malaria, she opted to receive a modern medical treatment from New Delhi’s acclaimed All India Institute of Medical Sciences instead of reposing her faith in providence to heal her. She also received an expensive treatment from a hospital abroad when she fell ill with pneumonia.

Teresa was once asked how people without money or power can make the world a better place. She callously replied, “They should smile more.” In 1984, wilful negligence on the part of the management of Union Carbide resulted in the death of 2,500 residents of Bhopal. Thousands more were maimed for life. Teresa flew into Bhopal in the aftermath of the tragedy. She didn’t utter a word censuring Union Carbide or expressing solidarity with the victims. She did not offer a rupee to victim relief. Instead, she grotesquely urged the victims, “Forgive, forgive, forgive.”

bhopal

Elgy Gillespie points out that at a hospice supposedly to care for AIDS patients which Teresa ran in San Francisco, terminally ill patients with chronic pain were denied morphine. Desperate patients would try to escape the hospice and seek refuge elsewhere. Susan Shields, who worked for Teresa for nearly a decade, also testifies to the appalling treatment of the defenceless at Teresa’s facilities. Shields was disturbed that the “poor were the ones who suffered” as a result of Teresa’s “self-righteous adherence to poverty.”

There was no dearth of money in the order though. Teresa received hundreds of millions of dollars in donation. Her unsuspecting donors thought she was using it to alleviate pain and suffering among the poor. However, Teresa saw it differently. She considered the flood of donations to be a sign of god’s approval of her efforts and of her congregation. So, the money was never used for the advertised purpose of helping the poor. It simply accumulated in the bank accounts of the Catholic Church. Shields points out that $ 50 million had collected in a single checking account in the Bronx.

Teresa’s utter lack of empathy for the suffering of the destitute people manifests in her strenuous appeal to the victims of the 1971 Bangladesh war and genocide of Hindus. In that unfortunate war, thousands of women were raped and impregnated. Teresa appealed to the victims not to abort the seed of the rapist; either raise them or give them up for adoption. Teresa didn’t utilize the millions of dollars her organization had amassed to help those women but she grotesquely lectured those victims of rape without any regard for their dilemma.

Teresa’s worldview too was warped by the morbid ideology of Christianity which convinced her that Jesus manifests himself in the suffering of the defenceless. As a result, she did not see the pitiable, mentally-ill, child victim of rape or a terminally ill cancer patient as a human being. Instead, they were merely instruments to advertise the presence of Jesus through grotesque suffering.

A house surgeon in a Calcutta medical college recounts (vide Facebook on 23 February, 2015) that the nuns of Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity would bring “pregnant girls aged 12-16 for deliveries in our labour room…when asked why not get the girls aborted the nuns would tell they’re just helping the destitute and the children will go to orphanage and that abortion is not allowed in their faith. And this was a regular feature in our hospital.”

If a girl aged 12-16 is pregnant and if she is destitute, one can be almost certain that she was raped. She could’ve contracted diseases which she could pass on to the fetus. She may even be mentally ill. One must be entirely lacking in empathy to insist that such a girl go through with her pregnancy and deliver the child. However, Teresa ran her order like an autocrat. Even if the nuns had been empathetic, they couldn’t have taken a stance against Teresa’s inhuman insistence. Shields points out that “total obedience to (Teresa’s) dictates is enforced at every level…questioning of authority is not an option.” As a result, many a child victim of rape was forced to go through a painful pregnancy and to give birth to another child.

Now, see these facts in light of how Teresa viewed herself. She once claimed, “If I ever become a saint, I will surely be one of darkness. I will continually be absent from heaven to light the light of those in darkness on earth.” She further wrote that poverty was the means by which to be united with Jesus. She had three prescriptions, “absolute poverty,” “angelic chastity,” and “cheerful obedience in the face of suffering” by which one would be united with Jesus. This is why she was attracted to poverty. This is why she was motivated to usher in suffering and exacerbate it – especially in others. This is what induced her to say that the suffering people should display a cheerful countenance. The thought of alleviating suffering and poverty didn’t even cross her mind. Without exacerbating poverty and suffering – in others, how could she be united with Jesus and become a saint? (See Kolodiejchuk, Brian: Mother Teresa – Come be My Light – The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta”)

As much as Teresa was attracted to suffering – to exacerbate it and not to alleviate it, she was also attracted to ruthless dictators and frauds that made the poor suffer. She showered lavish praise on them and attempted to legitimize them in the eyes of their citizenry. One may invoke the example of the lavish praise she showered on the ruthless, plundering dictator of Haiti,Duvalier by brazenly announcing that the dictator is “a person who knows, who wants to prove his love not only by words but also by concrete and tangible actions.” She also appealed on behalf of the scam-artist Charles Keating, who had looted the life savings of thousands of individuals. She wrote the judge a letter urging that he show Keating leniency. Both Duvalier and Keating had donated large sums to Teresa’s order.

duvalier  keating

The academics Serge Larivée and Carole Sénéchal carried out meticulous research on Teresa. They point out that millions of dollars were transferred to the various bank accounts of Teresa’s order but most of the accounts were kept secret. Larivée wonders where the millions of dollars for the poorest of the poor have gone. The possibility that her order maintained secret bank accounts to launder the ill-gotten wealth of the crooks is yet to be investigated. At the minimum, to amass wealth in the name of alleviating the suffering of the poor and to stash it away in secret bank accounts is a crime in itself. It is also a highly immoral act when one considers the fact that the resources of this planet are finite and that there is only so much one could spend on alleviating suffering. When the money donated for such purpose is stashed away, the poor are denied medical care and other life-sustaining necessities.

Bhagwat can only be faulted for conceding the possibility that Teresa did charitable works albeit with the motive to proselytize. In Mother Teresa – The Final Verdict, Aroup Chatterjee has meticulously demolished the myths of Teresa’s charitable works. The hype and propaganda surrounding her charitable deeds doesn’t match the ground reality. While Bhagwat correctly concludes that Teresa’s motive was to proselytize he unwarrantedly assumes that she did any good work to alleviate suffering. She did not. She ushered in suffering whenever she could. She took precious money in the name of the suffering people and stashed it away in the secret accounts of the Vatican. She exacerbated suffering whenever she found it, e.g., by denying medication to the terminally ill cancer patients, forcing child victims of rape to give birth to children. Those were not charitable deeds. Those were horrific crimes against humanity.

The reader may be wondering why the title of this article equates Teresa with Eichmann. Adolf Eichmann managed the deportation and the holocaust of six million Jews under the Third Reich. After the fall of the Third Reich, he escaped, with the help of the infamous Ratline run by the Vatican, to Argentina, where he lived in disguise. However, by 1960, Eichmann had run out of his luck. The Israeli secret service tracked him down and captured him in a daring raid immortalized in the 1979 movie, The House on Garibaldi Street.

In his deposition, Eichmann showed no remorse. Instead, he claimed that he was being merciful to the exterminated Jews by sending them to the gas chambers. He even insisted that he was doing his best to comfort them by having the band play music and by distributing chocolates to the children while they awaited their turn at the gas chambers. He was entirely apathetic to their suffering and to the fact that he had brought it upon them. Eichmann did not see his Jewish victims as human beings at all. They were merely dispensable instruments in his journey to fame. The Nazi ideology which Eichmann had internalized had warped his view of reality. In his warped worldview, he was working toward a higher cause; he was serving a noble purpose by sending the Jews to the gas chambers. He single-mindedly aspired for glory. His only disappointment was that he was only made a lieutenant colonel and not something higher for the services he had rendered.

Eichmann

Let us now turn to Teresa. Just as Eichmann had brought about the holocaust, she too, wilfully brought about the death and untold suffering of many a poor by siphoning off funds meant for the alleviation of suffering and by cruelly denying them necessary medication. She never saw them as human beings and extended them no empathy whatsoever. She taught the nuns of her order to secretly baptize them as they lay dying. The nun was to pretend “she was just cooling the person’s forehead with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptizing him, saying quietly the necessary words. Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa’s sisters were baptizing Hindus and Moslems.” Those dying persons were only fit for one thing: to be baptized by a single-minded aspirant for saintly fame.

Teresa’s worldview too was warped by the morbid ideology of Christianity which convinced her that Jesus manifests himself in the suffering of the defenceless. As a result, she did not see the pitiable, mentally-ill, child victim of rape or a terminally ill cancer patient as a human being. Instead, they were merely instruments to advertise the presence of Jesus through grotesque suffering. She would do everything to make them suffer. Just as Eichmann awaited glory for his deeds, Teresa too longed to become a saint for having brought terrible suffering upon the voiceless. Like Eichmann, she too never expressed the slightest remorse for what she had done to her victims. Like him, she too was convinced that she helped improve their plight.

Her success, as Hitchens aptly wrote, “is not, therefore, a triumph of humility and simplicity. It is another chapter in a millennial story which stretches back to the superstitious childhood of our species, and which depends on the exploitation of the simple and the humble by the cunning and the single-minded.”



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Death Bed Baptisms

In January 1992 after heart surgery at Scripps clinic, CA Mother Teresa made a lengthy speech to an enraptured audience of doctors and nurses and gloated about secretive conversions of her patients in India. She told a predominantly Christian captive audience that she had ‘cheated’ Heaven as no one had died without receiving the special Baptism ticket for St. Peter as she called it. She stated that ‘We ask them, the dying person if they want a blessing by which their sins will be forgiven and they can receive God. They have never refused’. She boasted that 29,000 had died in Kalighat from the time it began in 1952. Mother Teresa surreptitiously taught the sisters to baptize those who were dying. The sisters were to ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a ‘ticket to Heaven’ An affirmative reply was to mean consent to Baptism. The sister was then to pretend that she was just cooling the person’s forehead with a wet cloth while in fact she was baptizing him quietly saying the necessary words. Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that the sisters were baptizing Hindus. Susan Shields who wrote about this issue and who was known as Sister Virgin left the order in 1989 as she grew more uncomfortable with the deceit, pretense and hypocrisy. (This issue of death bed conversions and Catholic baptisms is also covered in Wikipedia under Mother Teresa criticisms and controversies). Dead bodies were not treated with respect by the Missionaries of Charity. There was no refrigeration. As per Hemley Gonzalez he witnessed dead bodies in the morgue be given Catholic last rites. In February 1992 when Princess Diana visited Kalighat her personal protection officer Ken Wharfe had to do a security check of the morgue. He wrote ‘The mortuary attached to the hospice run by Missionaries of Charity is the most appalling place I have visited in my life. Indeed the hospice itself was effectively a mortuary. Tracy Leonard describes the morgue as a place ‘where the line between the living and the dead was sometimes blurred. She recounts an experience where she found a living (albeit just) person in the morgue and then in surreal drama bringing him out of it to the room. He had been wrongly diagnosed by a Brother! (Chaterjee / Hitchens)

Better Charities Got Less Recognition

Aroup Chatterjee in his formidable treatise on Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict goes into great detail explaining how the Ramakrishna Mission a Hindu based charity does phenomenal rescue and outreach work with a fraction of the resources man and media power and publicity. He goes onto explain and educate readers that there are around two hundred charities operating in Calcutta alone and that Missionaries of Charity is one of the most insignificant in terms of relief work despite its international fame, acclaim and fabulous resources. The quality of care and the array of structures in place that the majority of these alternative charities have for the most part is outstanding and their track record during the many floods, famines and bouts of starvation resulting from natural calamities is simply astounding and astonishingly impressive. Disastrous floods struck West Bengal in August 1996. Many of the suburbs of Calcutta were also submerged bringing immense difficulties to the poor there. Yet again the Missionaries of Charity were utterly inactive. Relief work as brought to the victims by other organizations, primarily the Rama Krishna mission and Bharat Sevashram. The Rama Krishna Mission issued a statement asking for children orphaned by the floods to be referred to the center’s orphanage in Barrackpur, a Calcutta suburb. Although Mother Teresa never lifted a finger during the 1995 nor 1996 floods she mentioned working flat out during the Calcutta floods. This may have been true on a single, solitary occasion but this is definitely not the usual nature of the work of the Missionaries of Charity, these were gross exaggerations. During the fifty years that Mother Teresa was doing charity worked in Calcutta there were about a dozen very major floods in Calcutta with hundreds to thousands dying on each occasion and countless millions homeless. The city itself was flooded quite a few times, paralyzing urban life and badly affecting the poor of the city. Only during one of those floods did Mother Teresa offer some kind of help. It is typical image making and media and self-projection that one occasion should be symbolic of her work when truthfully and in all fairness her lack of inaction during the other floods and tragedies should receive emphasis given the grandiosity of her worldwide image as a towering repository of humanity and boundlessness and compassion. It should not be oversighted that Mother Teresa when describing her operations in India never told the world of the less than basic nature of the standard of care. She disguised this sordid reality in the lingo of ‘love’ and ‘beautiful’. (Chaterjee / Hitchens)

Where Was Mother Teresa?

In Uttarkashi at the foothills of the Himalayas where an earthquake had killed 1500 people in October 1991 the government of India came in for some sturdy criticism for being tardy in spending the $ 246 million dollars it had received from the World Bank for the rebuilding of Latur, but nobody commented on the inaction on the part of the Missionaries of Charity whose fabulous assets were not bought to help in any way. During the earthquake on September 30, 1993 in the western state of Maharashtra in one of the biggest natural disasters in the history of India, 8000 people died and five million lost their homes and all their possessions. Over two hundred NGOs rushed to help and many are working to this day as the rebuilding of a large district both physically and emotionally can take decades. The Indian government put in a special grant of 8 Billion rupees. Missionaries of Charities contribution?? You guessed it! When the plague struck India in 1994, Mother Teresa again had no involvement whatsoever during or after the plague with treatment or prevention. In December 1984 when three and half thousand mainly poor people and families died and more than two hundred thousand maimed and injured in the Bhopal from inhaling toxic gas leaked (gross negligence) by the Multi National giant Union Carbide, Mother flew in and was surrounded by angry and grieving relatives of the many victims. The audience was incredulous when she uttered the insensitive and most inappropriate and callous words ‘Forgive, I say forgive’ at the climax of such an immeasurable tragedy and promptly left. Bhopal Gas leak was the single largest industrial disaster evet to have occurred. I believe she merely gave out Catholic religious medallions to the survivors! There was no dearth of horrendous death, suffering, injury and misery and many families and individuals suffered the effects and symptoms of the chemical fallout for decades. Her long list of absenteeism from very real and tangible tragedies, epidemics and natural calamities and disasters on a colossal scale is notable and considerable. (Chaterjee / Hitchens)

Money From Dictators And Thieves

Missionaries of Charity have never been held accountable for and rarely demonstrated clear transparency for the literally hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars they have received over the past four decades ostensibly for the “poorest for the poor”. Teresa unhesitatingly and most willingly accepted huge amounts of money from convicted felons such as Charles Keating of the “Savings and Loans Scandal” to the tune of at least, 1.25-1.4 million dollars. Judge Lance Ito who conducted Keating’s trial, concluding with the inevitable sentence was simply astonished and dumfounded when the “saintly” nun wrote to him requesting leniency for Charles Keating calling him a “friend of the poor” and implored Judge Ito to therefore do what Jesus would have done by demonstrating clemency. [12] District Deputy Attorney Paul Turley wrote back to her in a personal response, a respectful but detailed explanation of Keating’s crimes and the undue hardships he had foisted on thousands of individual investors whom he had defrauded out of many hundreds and thousands of dollars. He promptly exhorted that Mother Teresa should do what Jesus would have done, namely not keep the fruits of crime and return the money to its rightful owners. She never responded. It is interesting to note here that she never intervened to assist any others outside her vested interests, in any other trial in spite of so many other legitimate civil and criminal cases as she considered this outside of her religious domain. However at times she said that she wanted to open a special jail for doctors who performed abortions, so she was not against selective custodial sentencing per se. (Chaterjee / Hitchens)

She also accepted donations from a legion of dictators, murderers and thieves such as the infamous “Baby Doc” Duvalier” or Jean-Claud Duvalier [13] whose own corrupt lifestyle was luxurious thanks to revenue from his participation in the drug trade and practice of selling dead Haitian citizen’s cadavers overseas. She had flown to Haiti to accept the “Legion of Honor” and a grant from the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti and in return lavished praise and encomium on the reputedly murderous crime family. Robert Maxwell the infamous British tycoon and fraudster who milked his employees pensions funds to the tune of hundreds and millions of pound had many fundraisers for her. She also accepted undisclosed sums of money from a devout Catholic called Robert Hanson, an FBI agent who received at least one million pounds from the KGB as a spy. [14] Ultra-right wing hawkish war hungry and powerful politicians such as Robert McNamara the US Defense secretary was one of Mother Teresa’s consistent and strongest advocates in her bid for the Nobel Peace prize recommending her over the years on three different occasions. The facts that sinners had presumed that giving to Mother Teresa would somehow absolve or reduce their sins helped Mother Teresa through the years. Many of Mother Teresa’s friends were racists. Her friend Rutelli, the then Mayor of Rome had said he wanted to rid the city of Gypsies by 2000. Time and time again the rich, the powerful, the vicious, the bigoted and the exploiter rallied around her. (Chaterjee / Hitchens)

Mother Teresa had claimed that her organization cannot work for the rich, nor accept any money for the work they do and that her Missionaries of Charity had to be a free service to the poor. The fact of the matter is that the Missionaries of Charity have for decades been the recipients of the extraordinary largess of governments, large foundations, corporations and private citizens, including wealthy Hindu families. She always insisted on having the very best of treatment for her own ailing health at the Birla Heart Research Institute or the Woodlands Nursing Home, one of the best clinics in Calcutta where there were no fees charged to her at all. Moreover strict orders were given to volunteers not to visit her at these fine clinics and hospitals as the order presumably did not wish them to witness the vast gulf between care that she gave and received! Mother Teresa did not deliver at the basic primary level either. With all her funds she could have looked after all the needs of all the poor in Calcutta, such as running a massive soup kitchen, or a primary school in each of Calcutta’s slums. Ninety five percent or more of the buildings of Missionaries of Charity have been donated either by governments or the Church. Mother Teresa has gone on record stating “We don’t accept government grants. We don’t accept Church donations. We depend solely on Providence.” Mother Teresa took money and property from the Calcutta Corporation where her home in Dum Dum, Calcutta is also built on land donated by the West Bengal government. She took large donations from notable and ultra-wealthy Hindu business magnates and even sent her nuns for free training to Hindu charities and non-Catholic charities. In Madras two corporate donors MRJ Tyres and Ashok Leyland donated a lot of the foodstuff. She had no hesitation in twisting and bending facts in order to promote her fiery, intolerant brand of dogmatic Catholicism. (Chaterjee / Hitchens)

More Obsessed With The Unborn

Mother Teresa had more of an obsessive preoccupation with unborn children than with living children. She had a dogmatic, fundamentalist opposition to abortion (calling mothers murderers who aborted their fetuses), contraception and divorce. Most of her global agenda was traversing the world, especially the US and Rome where she was literally resident more so than in Calcutta, aggressively courting and lobbying politicians on the world stage who espoused anti-abortion views and pushing the Catholic agenda. Her entire award speech on the occasion of her winning the Nobel peace prize in 1979 was for the most part a vituperative tirade against abortion. Mother Teresa was the emissary of a highly politicized papacy. Her world travels were not the mere wanderings of a pilgrim but highly determined and focused political agendas. In contrast Mother Teresa never spoke out about the practice of child labor as this would be too’ political’ for her. There are at least two dozen organizations in India working to eliminate the ancient tradition of child labor and child slavery. Further Mother Teresa’s involvement with civil or criminal trials that suited her ambitious political agenda can be demonstrated by the fact that she flew to the USA to file a ‘friend- of –the- court’ brief for a Mr. Alexander Loce who had been convicted of trespassing into an abortion clinic to stop his estranged ex-fiancée from having an abortion. Little did Mr. Loce know he would have a ‘living saint’ as an ally! There had been a dire earthquake in Latur, India killing some 1,500 people and causing untold damage and devastation but again the ‘Living Saint’ had more pressing engagements! (Chaterjee / Hitchens)

Her lack of respect and encroachment on women’s rights can be observed in her stance in 1971 during the course of the aggressive war in Bangladesh when mass gang rapes of mainly Hindu women and young girls occurred. Mother Teresa implored the hapless victims not to abort the seed of the invader and violator. She took her fundamentalist dogma to such an insensitive extreme under such tragic circumstances. Thousands of helpless female victims including a mere eight year old girl who was slit, were reportedly used like ‘cigarette’ machines by the invading soldiers and repeatedly brutally raped until they died. Out of many thousands at least fifty of the babies that were born out of these tragic circumstances were adopted by the Missionaries of Charity and in all probability placed in Catholic homes. Mother Teresa’s refugee camp was in Calcutta’s outskirts by the airport and played a minor part in the Bangladesh war relief. Most of the other organizations were helping at the border with Bangladesh where the action was. The fact that her camp was near the airport immensely bolstered her publicity as American senators and dignitaries and journalists from the UN and the WHO made her camp a compulsory and sometimes the only stop when coming to assess the civil war in Bangladesh on the ground. In twenty five years Mother Teresa had not made more than three trips to Bangladesh, the world’s second poorest country and a twenty minute flight from Calcutta. Mother Teresa even opposed abortion out of rape on a political platform. Mother Teresa and the Pope refused to accede that artificial contraception should be available to women under any circumstances including after rape. The Pope had made similar strenuous appeals in Bosnia to scores of raped and traumatized forcibly impregnated hapless women not to abort the seed of the violator. They had such an implacable extreme ideological opposition that the Vatican cancelled their token $2500 annual contribution to UNICEF because it was offering the morning after pill to women who had been raped in central African refugee camps. However, for all her moralizing, when Princess Diana divorced Mother Teresa expressed her support of the divorce in spite of her otherwise dogmatic opposition in Ireland. She expressed no opposition to the royal family of Monaco divorces who were Catholics.  (Chaterjee / Hitchens)

Dubious Political Alliances

Teresa was a non-honoree Vatican citizen and simultaneously an Indian citizen which is illegal and used to vote up until the 1970s and influenced her nuns to vote for the Congress Party with whom many believe the Vatican is aligned. She was also given an honorary US citizenship in 1996. However when it came to friends in high places such as her strong political connections to the Congress Party she endorsed (by stating that there are more jobs and the people never seemed happier) the harsh Emergency of 1975 to 1977 when her close friend and ally PM Indira Gandhi suspended democracy and civil rights in India and censored the media and incarcerated many political prisoners who opposed her repressive tactics and draconian and anti-democratic measures. It is ironic that Indira Gandhi’s son Sanjay Gandhi who was the de facto ruler of the Congress party even though officially he did not hold political office ran amok of basic  human rights during the Emergency on a coercive campaign of forced sterilization of Indian males. Many of these men had not even been married. Sanjay Gandhi also razed homes of the poor in his obsession to beautify Delhi. Mother Teresa voiced no opposition to these flagrant violations and human rights abuses which she was well aware of. Mother Teresa was very well connected to Jyoti Basu West Bengal’s former chief minister whom she gleaned special favors from and she retained powerful allies in the bureaucratic system both at state and Centre levels. Bureaucrats hesitated to ask uncomfortable questions especially about her funds as they were fearful of her political connections especially her powerful friends within the Congress party which was extensively influential at the time.  (Chaterjee / Hitchens) Mother Teresa also reportedly defended a pedophile priest, Fr Donald MacGuire who was convicted of molesting boys in federal and state courts and is serving a twenty five year federal prison sentence. [15] The Vatican is a leading offender in the pandemic child sex abuse scandal. There has been prevalent ritualistic abuses and extensive child pornography ‘farm’ of 2,500 children including a one year old boy in Goa by a Catholic priest called Freddie Peat. Of course no compensation is offered by the Church to its poor victims in the Third World. (Chaterjee / Hitchens)

Teresa Used And Abused Calcutta

Christopher Hitchens wrote in his critical commentary ‘The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice’ stated that with all the funds at her command Teresa could have built the finest teaching hospital in Calcutta. However, Mother Teresa and her allies had a vested interest in portraying Calcutta as a stone age and primitive city to give the impression that her primitive and substandard charitable functions and sites are appropriate and sufficient given the squalor and backdrop of Calcutta as justification. She used Calcutta and denigrated the city and the Hindu religion that gave her so much. The order built their Tangra home for the mentally ill destitute in Calcutta with the building (built for her) donated by a local businessman Bimal Jain. The pumping house for the home was donated by Navin Khilani. The land was given rent free by the government. Even her first trip abroad in 1960 was sponsored and paid for by the late G.D. Birla, the wealthy Hindu business magnate. Mother exploited institutions in Calcutta and its tradition of tolerance towards all religions and proved herself to actually be an obstacle for other charities in the city in getting funds from abroad. She also often sent her residents from Prem Daan to Calcutta’s National Medical College and the Pavlov Hospital for anti-TB medication. Mother Teresa took for free from other charities of Calcutta such as the children’s charity CRY where her Sisters were trained for free. She used the mental handicap charity where she sent some of her charges for the day everyday as her order did not provide any training or rehabilitation facilities in her orphanage. The children were bought to and from her orphanage in the Kendra’s sole ambulance when all the ambulances donated to Mother Teresa by Indian doctors and others were being used as taxi services to chauffeur nuns, brothers and novices to Church or other religious homes. [16] There is even a documented picture of one of the ambulances filled with live chickens for a feast on Mothers birthday. The side panels inside the ambulances were reportedly removed and replaced with seats for the nuns and brothers to sit! (Chaterjee / Hitchens)

Mother Teresa even took money from an orphanage called Nav Jeevan to accept one of their older children who could not be adopted! Mother Teresa requested Anandalok, a fledging Indian charity that provides amongst other services cardiac intensive care to the poor for a nominal charge to provide funds for one of her charges who required treatment for leukemia at a hospital run by Christians. Only a year before Mother Teresa had snubbed Anandalok charity who had invited her to preside over an artificial limb donation ceremony for poor handicapped villagers. She lied and called out sick and ditched at the last moment to go and get an award in Delhi by her cohorts in the ruling Congress Party, her Catholic co-religionist Sonia Gandhi. Her priorities were always political opportunities for the Church and Vatican to gain greater access to the corridors of power. Mr.D.K. Saraf the head of Anandalok also related how in February 1996 when a large number of shacks adjoining Mother’s Prem Daan home burnt down and the slum dwellers did not even think of going to her for assistance but instead came to the fledgling charity Anandalok which undertook the rebuilding of the shacks and also bought pots and pans etc. for them. The nuns merely watched as the charity workers from Anandalok worked through the day rebuilding. Mr. Saraf stated that he was surprised and amused Mother Teresa asked a poor charity like Anandalok compared to her financial strength for money. However he opined ‘But I am quite bitter the West (and so many Indians), make such a fuss about her. Can you tell me what exactly she is doing?’ She gave credence to the unfair, undeserved reputation and widely held belief and perception in the Western world that Calcutta was a mere charnel house full of poverty and dying people on the streets and that she and her roving band of ‘angels’ were the sole saviors of the city’s impoverished inhabitants. She in fact indirectly tarnished Calcutta’s reputation and lost the city countless billions in tourism by continuously and consistently projecting it as a city of poverty, death and decay in order to propagate her own cult of suffering, death and misery which she immensely profited by. Whitman lucidly describes how Mother Teresa dealt with ingratiating Indians who did not matter- she had little time and barely masked her contempt for them.  Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread. She said that suffering of the poor was very beautiful as it bought them closer to God. This theory was never applied to her when she was ill. (Chaterjee / Hitchens)

Teresa Treated Indians Differently Than Westerners

Mother Teresa was philosophically opposed to spending even small amounts of money to buy medicine or equipment to save lives in India. There was astronomical difference between the standards of care in her homes in the West and those in India. Conditions were so stark that even those prone to elevate Mother Teresa bought out the facts at time. In an authorized biography Kathryn Spink who admires Mother Teresa notes ‘There were those trained doctors and nurses who came to work there on a voluntary basis who were horrified at the failure to observe the kind of fundamental rules of hygiene that would protect the sisters from infection and the patients from contaminating each other. “Further the ‘No Family’ cases was always rigidly applied. Mother Teresa uncompromising tone and message was ‘If you had lied to us that you did not have any family, so without a family you shall remain during such time that you are under our holy roof’. Visits by friends or family were not allowed. It is interesting to note at this point that a human resources expert commented that in pure financial terms alone, the money Mother Teresa saved every year through her volunteers in Calcutta amounted to millions of dollars. She refused to hire doctors and nurses unless and until they volunteered. Hardly any of the Westerners have even heard of the Ramakrishna Mission, a Hindu based charity and the country’s biggest charity that does immense and outstanding relief work for the poor with comparably less resources and publicity. On the other hand Calcutta Rescue which was started as an alternative charity by a dissatisfied and disgusted Teresa volunteer is better known because it was started by a Westerner. Mother Teresa built up a distorted image with repeated inferences and comments that it was she who taught charity to Indians. ’We thought charity was for Christians only’. (Chaterjee / Hitchens)

Conclusions

In summary it is easy to see why Mother Teresa was not a saint but merely a fundamentalist Catholic (when asked, she flatly stated she would have sided with the Church authorities against Galileo!) with a global domination political agenda, taking every opportunity to promote and propagate her dogmatic and rigid faith and her political ally and master namely the Pope and the Vatican. Visiting and bringing Catholicism to people are seen by the order as the most vital functions of a Teresa nun worldwide. She was not small, humble and pious but immensely rich and powerful. She did not like ‘institutions’ that offered better care to people but she made strenuous efforts to develop her order into a world-wide institution, including stations in Islamic countries. Missionaries of Charity was a Catholic Empire and its founder strove extremely hard to expand it at any cost. She was the grand officiate and administrator overseeing and  building ever increasing tight knitted networks with religious authorities, worldwide political leaders and governments to open more and more convents and homes. She even attempted to meddle in Indian politics and democratic political processes by using her position and leverage to bring pressure to bear on the Indian government. Image making aside she was a very powerful and influential person who could have done immense sincere good works with her wealth and resources that genuine charities could only imagine. The transgressions of the order are so humongous and inveterate that there would be sufficient evidence to build a dossier of virulent and systematic human, child and women’s and religious rights abuses against Missionaries of Charity in orders of magnitude not to mention donor fraud and financial irregularities. The message is loud and clear, namely a clarion call to mankind for zero tolerance for high crimes and pandemic corruption in the appealing garb of religiosity and piety.

Source: www.justiceforhindus.org



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