Hell's Angel : Mother Teresa by Christopher Hitchens part 1, 2, 3

[Trudy]

 

 

 

quoting Outlander : It is a perfect example of people believing whatever 'image' they are sold.

 

[Trudy]

All true, sure she was saving the dying,, but please dear Simone do you REALIZE how much money was going on??

Where did it all went, not to the one whom were plagued by illness and could indeed could be cured, but all died from lack of medicines ..

but in the end was all They received was the pray of the Lord !!!
...may GOD Bless them Souls

[Trudy]

He who has eyes to see, Will See ...

He who has ears to hear, Will Hear  ...

[Trudy]

Dark Side of the Nun :

Personally, I hate doing this, even though I do it a lot of times. It feels disgusting and dirty, and seriously, the lack of support and influx of hate-mail it can generate severely discourages me from saying much. In the least, I try to maintain good taste (no matter how subtle) when I go off and point a finger at someone. Because that’s just mean, and plus, I’m not exactly perfect either. To make matters worse, I point a finger at someone who is dead. To make matters even worse, I point a finger at someone who was revered (though not declared) as a saint and has already been beatified, so they’re titled as “Blessed” by the Holy See. The unfortunate subject in this case happens to be the Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, or who many of us know as Mother Teresa. 

Alright there, keep your knickers on and stop with the horrified “oohs” and aahs” and just hear me out. It may seem to you that I have blasphemed, but let’s look at this realistically. The Mother was human. Her saintly status was bestowed upon her by other humans. All regular people. But she did a lot of (arguably) good deeds for the world, and in particular for the poor. So why am I ranting on against her? Do I suspect her of foul play? Not exactly. Am I so cynical that I can not appreciate the one truly good person that existed in this world in the last 50 years? Yes, I sort of am, but I do have a case here. Like I said earlier, hear me out.

In 1979, upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Mother Teresa said the following:

“I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child – a direct killing of the innocent child – murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love, and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even his life to love us. So the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love – that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts. By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. And by abortion, the father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. That father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion. Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.”

Of course, this does not mean that I support abortion, nor am I against peace and love, but claiming abortion as the “greatest destroyer of peace” is a touch too far I think. In addition, Mother Teresa was also the biggest campaigner against the use of contraceptives and methods of birth control. If we factor that in to the country where she spent most of her life, India, we can see a problem arising.

By discouraging contraception and abortion, which in numerous cases could have solved many of the problems that her hospice in Calcutta catered to, Mother Teresa was promoting live births to parents who couldn’t afford (more) children because she thought she could eventually take them under the “care” of her institution. Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity project was single-handedly the biggest charity project of that time in that part of the world to not actually produce any success stories. At least not in terms of developing institutions that served as health care centers. Mother Teresa was building centers of death, throughout India and the world. A place where people could die peacefully, with love around them, but received little or no treatment. These were buildings filled with dying men, women and children, and nurses (although we cannot guarantee they were certified as such) observing no codes of hygienic conduct. The Mother was not concerned in helping to reduce poverty. She was not concerned with solving any real issues that the third world was facing – poverty, disease, over-population. She only wanted to give them love before they died. In real world terms, that doesn’t really mean much. But nobody noticed.

Considering the amount of donations she received from global charities, people around the world, and more notably from corrupt allies such as Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, new age spiritualist John-Roger, and a disgraced Charles Keating (of the savings and loan scandal in the 1980s), the Missionaries of Charity should have developed hospices and medical care centers around the world. Instead, the money was used, over time, to open 500 convents in 120 countries. Yes, convents. Schools of Catholic teachings. Let’s also not forget that when the Mother fell ill in 1996, she preferred to be treated in a modern clinic in California, rather than one of her own primitive and impoverished facilities that were apparently good enough for the poor of the world.

And it goes deeper.

Through her rise to power, the Mother went on board with many political and corporate giants, accepting their charities humbly and in return endorsing them in a positive manner. Politicians and businessmen that had come under some negative light sought the help of Mother Teresa, sending their chartered jets to pick her up and bring her over so they could “donate” some money in exchange for her saying the kindest of words in the media about them. Former US President Ronald Reagan, media tycoon Robert Maxwell as well as the communist yet atheistic leadership of Albania have all been endorsed by the Mother, in exchange for millions of charity dollars, of course. In fact, Maxwell’s Mirror franchise became the unofficial propaganda newspaper for the Mother’s agenda. Bit by bit, the mother built her charity conglomerate, spreading from India on to the world.

Mother Teresa was supported by two basic agendas through her life. The first was a political agenda – not in the literal sense of political parties and voters, but rather a Catholic fundamentalist agenda, with the main supporter from the head of the Catholic church himself, the Pope. Which probably explains why the Saint of Calcutta was hardly ever in Calcutta. Over time, the Mother became the global face of the papacy, which has continuously been under scrutiny from various factions of society. By placing a frail old woman who is shown to serve the impoverished of the world, the Catholic church earned brownie points from the world over on good deeds alone. She went on spreading the message of peace and love, with undertones of anti-abortion, distaste towards contraceptives and negative views on alternate sexual lifestyles, all of which echoed the papal propaganda.

The second, and less transparent agenda that the Mother secretly supported, was the overall occidental agenda, easily explained as the white supremacist and capitalist agenda of the Western world. Here was a woman from the West (sort of, she’s from Albania) who was selflessly helping the poor and needy of India, with a mission to spread love through the entire third world. It was beautiful. The West needs that. They need to feel that one of them is doing something for the less fortunate of the world. They can then lay claim to that individual as one of their own, and parade her around as a messenger of peace and love. And that’s exactly what they did. Hailed as an activist for the poor, the Mother became a symbol of goodwill from the West, casting her warm shadow over the left-out-in-the-cold victims of disease, poverty and cruelty.

In this time of evil and godlessness, Mother Teresa appeared as a savior to restore the common man’s belief in a world that is good. It isn’t our fault. Mother Teresa was promoted as such. Hailed as a divine saint and ambassador of humanity, the Mother died in 1997 leaving behind a string of unanswered questions that perhaps no one, out of pure piety, dared to ask her. I have written this piece to restore your faith in this world where nothing is what it seems, and behind the images that we are exposed to, are a web of lies and deceit. True story.

The above article, although entirely my opinion, would not have been possible without the research of Christopher Hitchens, who wrote the controversial book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.

http://confinedwisdom.com/2009/12/09/dark-side-of-the-nun/

[Trudy]

Mother Teresa - not a saint, not even a good person
Yet another myth debunked. Just goes to show, once again, when something is too good to be true, it usually is.


Of the many biographies of Mother Teresa, only two of them are largely critical in nature - "The Missionary Position" by Christopher Hitchens and "Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict" by Aroup Chatterjee.

These books debunk the myth of Mother Teresa, who has been unjustly built into a near-saint by the media. She has been virtually untouchable as an almost sacred figure and anyone who dares to criticize her is promptly rebuked.

Summary of these books:

- Mother Teresa often said that she picked people up from the streets of Calcutta, but she and her order of nuns did not do this. People requesting such service were told curtly to ring 102 (similar to 911).

- While the order owns several ambulances, these are used primarily to transport nuns to and from places of prayer.

- Mother Teresa said that her order fed 4000, 5000, 7000 or 9000 Caltuttans every day (the number varied). The two or three soup kitchens in Calcutta feed a maximum of only 300 people per day. The kitchens will provide food only to people with "food cards" that are distrubuted predominantly to the Catholic poor.

- While Mother Teresa's order has some presence in many countries throughout the world, the majority of these are for training monks or nuns, not for aiding the poor.

- Mother Teresa's shelters will usually only help children if the parents sign a form of renunciation which signs the rights to the children to her organization.
Mother Teresa often insists that her natural family clinics prevent unwanted pregnancies, but this number is without any basis in truth.

- Mother Teresa insisted that suffering was beautiful as it evoked Christ's suffering, but when ill she visited exclusive, expensive hospitals.

- The hospice in Calcutta through which Mother Teresa gained such wide recognition is very small (80 beds) and provides little medical care. Needles are reused, all patients are forced to have their heads shaven, visitors are forbidden and painkillers are rarely if ever used. The nurses do not speak the language of the people and are not usually involved in the care of the patients. This duty is assumed by volunteers.

- Mother Teresa often accepted money from suspicious sources, the most notable of which is Charles Keating, America's most notorious thief.

More details:

Mother Teresa received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, yet she never did anything for peace. In fact, in her acceptance speech she said, “Abortion is the worst evil, and the greatest enemy of peace... Because if a mother can kill her own child, what will prevent us from killing ourselves or one another? Nothing.”

Wherever she went this is her constant message. In 1992 at an open air mass in Knock, Ireland, she said, “Let us promise our Lady who loves Ireland so much, that we will never allow this country a single abortion. And no contraceptives.” She obviously saw no connection between poverty and too many children.

In one interview cited in the book, she was asked, “So you wouldn’t agree with people who say there are too many children in India?” She said, “I do not agree, because God always provides. He provides for the flowers and the birds, for everything in the world He has created. And those little children are his life. There can never be enough.”

One of Mother Teresa’s volunteers in Calcutta described her “Home for the Dying” as resembling photos of concentration camps such as Belsen. No chairs, just stretcher beds. Virtually no medical care or painkillers beyond aspirin, and a refusal to take a 15-year-old boy to a hospital. Hitchens adds, “Bear in mind that Mother Teresa’s global income is more than enough to outfit several first class clinics in Bengal. The decision not to do so... is a deliberate one. The point is not the honest relief of suffering, but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection.”

It should also be noted that Mother Teresa “has checked into some of the finest and costliest clinics and hospitals in the West during her bouts with heart trouble and old age.”

During her visit to Haiti, Mother Teresa endorsed the Duvaliers, the source of much deprivation of the poor in Haiti. Also, there is an issue of her acceptance of stolen money from Charles Keating, “now serving a ten-year sentence for his part in the savings and loan scandal.” Keating, a “Catholic fundamentalist”, gave Mother Teresa one and a quarter million dollars and “the use of his private jet.”

During the course of Keating’s trial, Mother Teresa wrote Judge Ito asking clemency and asked Ito “to do what Jesus would do.”

One of the prosecutors in the trial wrote her telling her “of 17,000 individuals from whom Mr. Keating stole $252,000,000.” He added, “You urge Judge Ito to look into his heart--as he sentences Charles Keating--and do what Jesus would do. I submit the same challenge to you. Ask yourself what Jesus would do if he were given the fruits of a crime; what Jesus would do if he were in possession of money that had been stolen; what Jesus would do if he were being exploited by a thief to ease his conscience.” The prosecutor asked her to return the money, and offered to put her “in direct contact with the rightful owners of the property now in your possession.”

This supposed paragon of virtue never replied to his letter.

No one knows what happens to the millions of dollars Mother Teresa receives. There is no accounting and no evidence that she has built a hospital or orphanage that reflects modern health and sanitary conditions.

Lets not forget the reactionary political activities of Mother Teresa, from aiding the Spanish right wing against the anti-Franco forces who were seeking a secular society in post-Franco Spain, to her visits to Nicaragua and Guatemala to whitewash the atrocities of the Contras and death squads.

There is much more in this book, such as letters from former workers with Mother Teresa exposing her hypocrisy. The author concludes his 98-page book with reference to her fund-raising for clerical nationalists in the Balkans, her endorsement by Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition, and her “cover for all manner of cultists and shady businessmen.” His last sentence is, “It is past time that she was subjected to the rational critique that she has evaded so arrogantly for so long.”

http://brutik.livejournal.com/10304.html

[Trudy]

[Trudy]

http://youtu.be/30XdrOLT7J4

[Trudy]

I hope this is enough research dear Simone .. Unfortunately, Mother Teresa is fallen off her pedestal and she will stay there if I may say so !!!

[Trudy]

Dear dear P T this can't ever be a question   !!!  ... in a perfect world WE WILL  know what to do with ourselves :)))

[Trudy]

And btw what do you mean with these words : 'Why can't a man put his ego aside and just pull out'?
do you mean the intercourse ?? Already for fertilization he doesn't need  a ejaculation !! ... the premoisture of the man is sufficient for a pregnancy ...

[Trudy]

Beautiful Song P T yeah girl you touched my heart there :)))

If you do not live up to your own words...  then not only you be a fool to yourself but also to the rest of the world... and that is the end result  of Mother Teresa ...

My respons how paradoxical, it for you may be, it is always given in my deepest respect towards Oneness ...

in Lak'ech

[Trudy]

''If you are kind'' ... you reuse the needles until they are blunt !!!
Mother Teresa and money

At some point I'm going to want to argue that Mother Teresa was a bad person. But I'm going to start more modestly. In this post, I'm just going to show how Mother Teresa's use of money invalidates the myth that she was some kinda paragon of moral virtue. I won't argue that this makes her an especially bad person. But I do think it makes her not-a-champion-of-the-sick-and-poor.

Fact: Mother Teresa controlled lots and lots of money.

How much? Well, it's hard to say for certain. Unless I've missed something, the finances of the Missionaries of Charity remain undisclosed and unaudited. But it was (and remains) a lot of money.

Says Susan Shields, former Missionary of Charity:

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?

Shields doesn't suggest how much that might add up to, but Hitchens has it that there were at least $50 million in the New York bank account of the Missionaries of Charity, and figures that, this being but a part of the organization's wealth, there must be several times more all told. So let's place the MoC's wealth in the 9-10 figure range.

Now, it would not be correct to say that all this money belonged to Teresa. I take it that she herself owned next to nothing. I'm just saying that she controlled this money. It didn't belong to her personally, but, if she'd really wanted, she could have used it, on behalf of her organization, to buy all sorts of medicines, pay all sorts of trained medical personnel, and maybe even keep her facilities stocked with clean new needles on a regular basis.

You may be able to guess what's coming up next.

Fact: Mother Teresa used only a tiny fraction of that money to improve the lives of the sick and the poor

Shields continues:

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 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.

Well, who cares about the lives of the nuns: they got what they signed up for, right? That bit about the poor, though, that's a little worrisome.

Here are some examples of how the MoC failed to spend its money.

Shields gives one: in Haiti, "the sisters reused needles until they became blunt". Out of the MoC's bloated bank accounts, no money could be spared for new needles.

Likewise, in an article in the British Medical Journal (a review of Hitchens' book), Mary Loudon reports visiting the MoC's facilities and seeing "syringes run under cold water and reused, aspirin given to those with terminal cancer, and cold baths given to everyone". No money for oncological care beyond aspirin, no money for hot water, and, again, no money for new syringes, or even proper sterilization for old ones.

And in an article in the Lancet (9/17/94, Issue 8925), Robin Fox reports having visited the Home for the Dying in Kolkata, and describes the medical care there as "haphazard": no trained medical personnel are present unless some happen to drop by to volunteer their time, and the sisters themselves are not given any proper training in medical care. "How about simple algorithms that might help the sisters and volunteers distinguish the curable from the incurable? Again no." Out of the millions or billions, not enough for the salary of a single Kolkata doctor, or any other way of ensuring minimally consistent medical care.

That should do for now.

Ethical claim: If you are a champion of the sick and poor, and you have lots and lots of money at your disposal, you will use more than a tiny fraction of that money to improve the lives of the sick and poor.

Or, equivalently:

Ethical claim: If you have lots and lots of money at your disposal, and you use no more than a tiny fraction of that money to improve the lives of the sick and poor, then you are not a champion of the sick and poor.

This post is already going to be too long, so I'm going to be dogmatic and just assume that that claim is right.

Conclusion: Mother Teresa was no champion of the sick and poor.

It's been a while since I studied logic, but I'm pretty sure that follows.

Now, again, this has not been an argument to the effect that Mother Teresa was evil. The world is full of people who have lots of money, and spend none of it, or next to none of it, improving the lives of the needy. I wouldn't say that means they're particularly evil, but it does mean that they're not particularly good. Similarly, I'm not (in this post) arguing that Mother Teresa was particularly evil, just that she wasn't particularly good, and that she certainly was not the epitome of moral virtue that her mythical image makes her out to be.

Now, in light of some common objections, I'd like to close with a few notes about that ethical claim above.

1. Note that the claim goes against more than self-indulgent greed. The claim is not "If you are a champion of the sick and poor, and you have lots and lots of money at your disposal, you will refrain from spending it on luxuries for yourself." It's quite irrelevant that Mother Teresa lived a life of poverty herself. It sure helped her image that she did, but her personal poverty did nothing to improve the lot of other poor people. It's quite irrelevant to the poor that the MoC's millions or billions sat rotting away in bank accounts, rather than providing Mother Teresa and her nuns with habits embroidered with gold threads (or whatever it is that a greedy nun would do with lots of money). Either way, the lives of the needy are not much improved. But improving the lives of the needy is what a champion of the needy would do with lots and lots of money.

2. The problem this makes for Mother Teresa is not just that she could have made better use of the MoC's money. When faced with criticisms of her use of money, Teresa's defenders often respond with something along the lines of: "Well, fine, so she could have used her money better or more efficiently. No one is saying that she was perfect, and certainly not a perfect administrator!" This response misses the point, which is this: The problem with Mother Teresa's use of money isn't just that it imperfectly embodied the ideal of using financial resources to improve the lives of the needy; rather, the problem with Mother Teresa's use of money is that it didn't embody that ideal. Mother Teresa manifested indifference to that ideal. That ideal just wasn't one of Mother Teresa's ideals. (On occasion she said as much in fairly explicit terms. More on which later.)

3. Also note that I'm not saying that being a good person is just a matter of how you spend your money. All I'm saying is that being a good person is in part a matter of how you spend your money. Of course, it is not only that. For example, how you spend your time also matters.

4. On a related note, one might object that a person can be virtuous in one way, not so virtuous in another. So one of Teresa's defenders might grant that Mother Teresa did not use her money in ways that benefited the poor, but still maintain that, say, she did use her time in ways that were genuinely helpful. Indeed, the myth of Mother Teresa leans heavily on an image of how she devoted her time to the poor. Washing lepers by hand doesn't involve much money, but the image of her doing that sure does warm the heart. Well, here are three points about this line of thought. First, she could have spent some of her time figuring out what to do with all that money, or at least telling someone else to do so. At any given point in time, she could have said, "Sister so-and-so, I want you to figure out how to use the millions or billions to help the poor," with plenty of time left over for washing lepers. Second, I think it's bad ethics to give her a pass on how she spent her money, no matter how she spent her time--especially since her money could have helped the needy so much more than her time. If she'd cared for the poor as her mythical image says she did, she would have made better use of that money. Third, I hope to show how Mother Teresa didn't spend her time in a particularly good way, either--so neither her money nor her time was put to good use. But that will have to wait.

[CHRISTINA]

.......this world where nothing is what it seems, and behind the images that we are exposed to, are a web of lies and deceit.

 

Mother Teresa not all she was cracked up to be

http://www.cosmicbaseball.com/mteresa01.html

http://www.meteorbooks.com/chap1.html