“Once word of a complaint gets out, you are labelled and can’t escape the stigma. I am a paediatric nurse and a well known children’s rights activist. For me to be accused of child abuse is like calling Mother Teresa a pervert or the Pope a Protestant.”
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OK Flo ... nice self-description:> "a well-known children's rights activist."
.... I shall be posting on these boards and these posts will enlighten readers as to the true nature and "calling" of MT
.... as to calling the pope a Protestant I feel its very significant that the some of the most telling opposition to Hitler in Germany came from Protestants and we all know the Wehrmacht and Hitler "Youth" background of the present pope !!!
The Knitter
Ireland's Child Care Institutions during the 20th. Century. Fo'T: The most vivid and passionate stories - banished babies, cruel orphanages, old abuses of power - have concerned things that went unnoticed, or at least unarticulated, at the time. News has often had to be redefined, not as the latest sensation but as that which everybody knew all along yet could not say.
Friday, May 27, 2005
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Lots of organizations have been doing work in India, many indigenous organizations. For what Mother T. did, she received the lion's share of the publicity and funding from overseas by relatively wealthy Western contributors (including the stock market thief, Keating, who gave her millions he had stolen from investors). That there were many organizations of charity in India doing MORE work than hers. They were ignored while she was beatified by the Pope. What about the Bophal plant explosion that killed many from cyanide gas, Mother T. sent a few sisters and they all arrived late, and they didn't do anywhere near as much what the other organizations did, yet she received even more publicity. Moreover, Mother T. used that publicity to argue against birth control in INDIA of all countries (soon to be the most populous nation on earth, and soon to surpass China in population.)
ReplyDelete(web source)
Christopher Hitchens, a trenchant critic, had dismissed MT in his book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Verso 1998) as a fraud and fanatic. In the Daily Mirror (London, 02 Jan 03). he pointed out - M Teresa received millions of pounds in charity, some of it from dubious sources like the murderous Duvaliers of Haiti and the American swindler Charles Keating. She spent more time travelling and posing with the rich and famous than treating the sick & lepers. When she was sick, she made sure of being treated at top US clinics, not in Calcutta. More recently, Hitchens has elaborated - here are extracts:
ReplyDelete"What is so striking about the "beatification" of "Mother" Teresa is the abject surrender, on the part of the church, to the forces of showbiz, superstition, and populism. A person could not even be nominated for "beatification," the first step to "sainthood," until five years after his or her death. This was to guard against local or popular enthusiasm in the promotion of dubious characters. But the pope nominated MT a year after her death in 1997. the usual apparatus of inquiry including the scrutiny of an advocatus diaboli or "devil's advocate," to test any extraordinary claims was abolished by the pope John Paul II.
As for the "miracle" that is required, a Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of MT and relieved her of a cancerous tumour. Her physician, Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn't have a cancerous tumor in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican's investigators? No.
MT was not a friend of the poor. SHE WAS A FRIEND OF POVERTY. She said that SUFFERING WAS A GIFT FROM GOD. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.
The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions.
Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries of Charity," but they had no audience for their story.
She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions. "
Vijay Prashad, Associate Prof of International Relations at Trinity College, Hartford, CT (USA) has noted:
ReplyDelete- To Teresa, poverty was 'beautiful', people must put up with it, not challenge its causes.
- Like the Popes, she took care not to criticise the powerful. She moved with the makers of poverty like Reagan or Thatcher but did not question their policies that spread terror and misery in Africa & (in the case of Reagan) in Latin America.
- How did she & Pope John Paul II jointly view the Bhopal disaster (1984)? As an example of capitalist greed and contempt for Third World people?
Hardly. They called it a ‘sad event’ that resulted from ‘man’s efforts to make progress.’
Aroup Chatterjee, a Calcutta critic, had submitted cogent objections to the Saint-making committee way back in 21 Feb 1998. Here are extracts:
ReplyDelete- As somebody born, brought up and educated in Calcutta, I feel I am in a unique situation to offer evidence to the Committee. Over the years I have been dismayed at the discrepancy between Mother Teresa's words and her deeds. Mother Teresa kept saying that she used to "pick up" people from the streets of Calcutta. She said this in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize (1997). Her order did (and does) not "pick up" destitutes from Calcutta's streets. I believe that Mother Teresa had deliberately misled the world by such assertions in order to bolster her own image and that of her faith.
- She had been donated a number of ambulance vehicles. These are used mainly (though not solely) to ferry nuns, often to and from places of prayer. I believe that this constitutes an abuse of other people's trust in her.
- Worship inside Mother Teresa's homes is solely Catholic, and non-Catholic worship is not at all permitted therein. Only a minute proportion of the residents in her homes in Calcutta belong to the Catholic faith. Denying poor people in her care the right to worship their own god(s) is surely harsh and demeaning.
- In her Nobel Prize speech, Mother Teresa disingenuously asserted that in 6 years "61,273” fewer babies were born in Calcutta because of natural family planning methods. There is no basis whatever for this claim.
- In the April 1996 issue of the US magazine Ladies Home Journal, Mother Teresa said that she wanted to die like the poor in her home. By then she had had numerous in-patient medical treatments in some of the most expensive clinics around the world - including the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California, the Gemelli Hospital in Rome, Calcutta's Woodlands and Belle Vue Clinics.
- In 1984 Mother Teresa (publicly) declined the offer of cataract surgery from the St Francis Medical Centre in Pittsburgh, USA, telling the media that she could not possibly accept the £5000 treatment; but the very next year she had the same surgery (which cost even more) at St Vincent's Hospital , New York.
- I would question her being named "Saint Teresa of Calcutta". She had a visceral opposition to abortion, whereas Calcutta has hundreds of clinics (one of them not that many yards from Mother House) offering abortion virtually on demand.
- The Committee should note the wide discrepancy between Mother Teresa's words and deeds.
I think we can safely assume that the true character and nature of MT is not anywhere near the description of MT in her adoring media - indeed it seems that the further away from MT you the more adorable she appears to be.
ReplyDeleteShe loved poverty and the attention it brought her. Isn't that a perversion of Christianity ? Which would make MT a pervert.
What else can anyone expect from the Great Roman Catholic Church Empire! ALL Catholics are mad!!!
ReplyDelete