In order for us to set the proper context for this post it is important to give a little background on Mother Teresa the so called saint of Calcutta. Then I will discuss why I say “so called saint”. Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (pronounced Agnes Gongsa Boyoku) in Skopje, Macedonia, on August 26, 1910. At the age of eighteen she left home and joined the Sisters of Loreto, which is an Irish community of nuns with missions in India. After training for a few months with a convent in Dublin, she was sent to work in India. Agnes Bojaxhiu took her vows to be a nun on May 24, 1931. In 1948 she received permission from her superiors to leave the convent school she had taught at since 1931 and devoted herself to working with the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta. Mother Teresa received permission from the Vatican on October 7 1950 to start her own order, “The Missionaries of Charity”, whose primary task was to love and care for those people that no one else would. In 1965 the Society became an International Religious Family by a decree of Pope Paul VI.
Some of the awards that Mother Teresa received were: The Pope John XXIII Peace Prize (1971) and the Nehru Prize for her promotion of international peace and understanding (1972). She also received the Balzan Prize (1979), the Nobel Peace Prize (1979) and the Templeton and Magsaysay awards.
What most people know about the Missionaries of Charity came from a documentary about her Order from 1969, the church, and mainstream media that refused any ideas from critics wasn’t worth following. Now on to the unpleasant truth behind the squalid conditions that these poor people suffered in under the care of this Order. I will be discussing accounts from volunteers of the Missionaries of Charity as well as a former sister of the Order including a documentary film maker/reporter both of whom had seen first hand what life was actually like in these aptly named “homes for the dying”.
First I would like to bring to you a man named Donal MacIntyre who is an investigative journalist. He went undercover as a volunteer in her “flagship home” in Kolkata, India. His description as to what he saw is distressing at best. Here is his account of what he saw in this home for disabled boys and girls. “I worked undercover for a week in Mother Teresa’s flagship home for disabled boys and girls to record Mother Teresa’s Legacy, a special report for Five News broadcast earlier this month. I winced at the rough handling by some of the full-time staff and Missionary sisters. I saw children with their mouths gagged open to be given medicine, their hands flaying in distress, visible testimony to the pain they were in. Tiny babies were bound with cloths at feeding time. Rough hands wrenched heads into position for feeding. Some of the children retched and coughed as rushed staff crammed food into their mouths. Boys and girls were abandoned on open toilets for up to 20 minutes at a time. Slumped, untended, some dribbling, some sleeping, they were a pathetic sight. Their treatment was an affront to their dignity, and dangerously unhygienic.” The first time I read this I was absolutely sickened at the thought of children no matter where they live being treated in such an inhumane condition. Now if it were just this account alone I would hold a more skeptical view of the validity of these claims so I did some more digging and found out some other unfortunate tidbits of knowledge.
The following excerpts are from a story in free inquiry magazine called “Mother Teresa’s House of Illusions” by Susan Shields a former sister in the Missionaries 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?” In that same article she describes an obvious hypocrisy “Our Constitution forbade us to beg for more than we needed, but, when it came to begging, the millions of dollars accumulating in the bank were treated as if they did not exist.” In another part Ms. Shields describes the horribly unsafe and unsanitary practice in Haiti of the sisters reusing hypodermic needles until they were blunt in order to keep the spirit of poverty. When some of the volunteers offered to go and get more needles the sisters refused. At one point the Missionaries of Charity had around $50 million in the bank, and yet they refused to offer the people that needed real help anything but dull needles and horrible living conditions.
This is absolutely unconscionable especially for those that purport to follow Christ’s teachings yet Mother Teresa seems to be obsessed with the suffering of others with comments like “We see Christ in the broken body, and we touch him and that touch is comes from that deep faith that Christ cannot deceive“, to me that appears to say she needed the decrepit state and suffering of others for her to be closer to Christ. I have a hard time believing this is what Christ meant in Matthew 19:14 when he said “But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”
In conclusion I am sure some fundamentalists out there are going to say I am lying and that I just hate Catholics and want to discredit a great woman. This could not be farther from the truth. I had no opinion on Mother Teresa or the Missionaries of Charity other than what I heard from admirers and the news until I started looking into her and her order and read the first hand accounts corresponded with previous volunteers and saw photos of the conditions that these people lived in unnecessarily. Yet the blissfully uninformed seem to hold people like Agnes and others who walk around with undeserved adulation or sainthood as society looks the other way when it comes to the atrocities that they commit. If you find comfort, security or happiness in the memory and works of Mother Teresa and her order I am not out to change your mind or defame Catholicism in anyway but purely to inform people of the reality behind those society holds as caretakers of virtue.
Next on the chopping block of reality. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Until Next time: Courage.
