Credit – The Nationalist View

In the first week of September, 2016 when Mother Teresa gets canonised by the  Vatican, her life and times would be projected as if she was God’s gift to the humanity? But is it the reality?

It is time to go back to  credible works  exposing the hypocrisy of  Mother Teresa in   documentary “Hell’s Angel”  and Christopher Hitchen’s damning indictment of Mother Teresa’ in “The Missionary Position.


Why no one is referring to the first person accounts of the people who have worked with Mother Teresa and in her organisation “Missionary of Charity

We are going to try and find answer to the basic question whether Mother Teresa deserved to be called a saint?

To begin with  let us recall what Susan Shields had to say about her experience. Shields worked for nine-and-half years with Missionary of Charity in Bronx, Rome and San Francisco. Interestingly, she wrote a book called “In Mother’s House” but could never found a publisher! Noted journalist Christopher Hitchens, author of “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in theory and practice”

observed, “It seems to me a disgrace that such an original piece of courageous work should have failed to find a publisher when the Pope can receive an advance of around $5million for the book he did not write.”

Shields gives a damning evidence of how Missionary of Charity under the leadership of Mother Teresa was rampantly used for conversions:

“In the homes  for the dying, Mother taught the sisters how to secretly baptize those who were dying. 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 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 Muslems”.

Was Mother Teresa a Champion of the poor or Champion of poverty? Carol Hunt answers this in an article published in ‘The Independent’ in year 2015. Hunt writes, “Evidence – and her own words – show that Mother Teresa was not so much a “champion of the poor” but a religious fanatic who took pleasure in their suffering. Not only did she refuse to alleviate the pain of her patients but she gloried in it. As she herself said: “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.”Her famous ‘Home for the Dying’ in Calcutta was deliberately kept as barren, destitute and inadequate to the needs of her patients as possible. This, according to Teresa, was God’s will. Even though the donations from wealthy patrons were enough to fund a number of world-class clinics, her patients languished in Dickensian poverty.”In  1994, Robin Fox, editor of prestigious medical journal The Lancet, visited  a ‘home’ run by Mother Teresa’s ‘Missionaries of Charity’ in Kolkata. His scathing observations are recorded in an article  titled   “Calcutta Perspective: Mother Teresa’s care for the dying”. Fox observed, “TB patients were not isolated and syringes were washed in lukewarm water before being used again. Even patients in unbearable pain were refused painkillers, not because the order did not have them but on principle”. Hemley Gonzale, another volunteer who worked at Missionaries of Charity home in Kolkata in 2008  made some shocking revelations in an interview. Gonzale said, “It happened almost instantly, literally on my first day volunteering. I was shocked to discover the horrifically negligent manner in which this charity operates and the direct contradiction of the public’s general understanding of their work. Workers wash needles under tap water and then reuse them. Medicine and other vital items are stored for months on end, expiring and still applied sporadically to patients. Volunteers with little or no training carry out dangerous work on patients with highly contagious cases of tuberculosis and other life-threatening illnesses. The individuals who operate the charity refuse to accept and implement medical equipment and machinery that would safely automate processes and save lives.
After further investigation and research, I realized that all of the events I had witnessed amounted to nothing more than a systematic human rights violation and a financial scam of monumental proportions. Not once in its sixty-year history have the Missionaries of Charity reported the total amount of funds they’ve collected in donations, what percentage they use for administration and where the rest has been applied and how.”

To  be canonised as a Saint by the Catholic Church,  an individual  must have performed  two miracles.  Mother Teresa also is also said to have performed two miracles paving way for her sainthood on September 4, 2016. Let us look at the real story behind these miracles.
The first miracle reportedly happened in 1998. The version given by Missionaries of Charity and readily accepted by the Catholic Church is  that Monica Besra, a tribal living in a remote village about 500 km from  Kolkata (capital of the state of West Bengal in India)  was cured of a massive tumor on September 6, 1998, a day after the first anniversary of Mother Teresa’s death,after two nuns tied on her body an aluminium medal that had been in contact with the Mother’s dead body, and prayed all night !
However interestingly, one of the doctors involved in Besra’s treatment told The Washington Post’s correspondent Anni Gowen recently that it was not a miracle but medicines which  cured Besra.
Gowen writes in a news report quoting Dr Ranjan Mustafi : “I’ve said several times that she was cured  cured by the treatment, and nothing has happened.”  Besra herself had initially said she was cured  by the medicine, her husband is also known to have said the same thing. But later on, it seems, she was ‘convinced’ by the Church to change her stand again.
The net result of this ‘change in stand’ is reflected in what Gowen found after meeting Besra, “The couple, who own about three acres of rice paddy, has gotten a bit of support in the intervening years from the Missionaries of Charity, including assistance with school expenses for their five children. Last year, a local priest built a small green chapel opposite their home where the related families worship most Sundays. They all converted to Catholicism more than a decade ago.”
Could it be just coincidence that Besra and her family, who belonged to a tribal Hindu community, get converted to Catholicism and subsequently get financial support of the Church. And now there  is a Church which has been built opposite their home! It is also clear from above that not only Besras but a number of other tribal Hindu families  have also been converted in this area ( otherwise why to build a Chapel?). Surely they myth of this “Miracle” must have worked  well to convince the innocent tribal communities here to believe in the ‘miraculous’ power of Catholicism.

Even as selective images of  Mother Teresa flash all around on television screens on the day of canonisation, one  can’t blame the current crop of journalists who seem to have taken the bait. As one looks back it is clear that a systematic campaign to build a larger than life image of Mother Teresa had always been on.
This campaign was interestingly started by a well known British Broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge who made a documentary on Mother Teresa  titled “Something Beautiful for God”. The documentary was screened  by BBC in 1969. He later wrote a book with same title.
Let’s see how Muggeridge manipulated facts to perpetuate the myth that Mother Teresa was something more than a human!  He told the whole world that during  making of this film he recorded probably the first photographic miracle! The miracle, according to Muggeridge was, that in very poorly lit “Home of Dying”, it was impossible to shoot due to lack of light but still they went ahead and shot the film. When they later looked at those portions of the camera film, he found clear impressions of a divine light which was highly luminous.
In the words of Muggeridge , “(It was)… luminous like the haloes artists have seen and made visible round the heads of saints. I find it not all surprising that the luminosity should register on a photographic film.”
Interestingly the truth was quite different. Renowned cameraman Ken Macmillan who headed the camera crew  for  this particular film (Something Beautiful for God) busts the blatantly hagiographic assertions of Muggeridge. Here is what Macmillan said : “During Something Beautiful for God, there was an episode  where we were taken to a building that Mother Teresa called the House of Dying. Peter Chaferthe director said, “Ah well, it’s very dark in here. Do you think we can get something?” And we had just taken delivery at BBC of some new film made by Kodak which we hadn’t had time to test before we left, so I said to Peter, “Well, we may as well have to go.” So we shot it. And when we got back several weeks later, a month or two later, we are sitting in the rushes theater at Ealing Studios and eventually up came the shots of the House of the Dying. And it was surprising. You could see every detail. And I said, “That’s amazing. That’s extraordinary.” And I was going on to say, you know, three cheers for Kodak. I didn’t get a chance to say that though, because Malcolm, sitting in the front row, spun round and said, “It’s divine light!It’s Mother Teresa. You will find that it’s divine light old boy.” And three or four days later I found I was being phoned by journalists from London newspapers who were saying things like: “We hear you’ve just come back from India with Malcolm Muggeridge and you were the witness of a miracle.”
Christopher Hitchens , the author of “The Missionary Position”  observed, “Ken Macmillan’s testimony came far, far too late to prevent the spread , largely by the televisual and mass media  methods that Muggeridge affected to despise, of the reported miracle.”
Incidentally, Muggeridge one of the key spin doctors who helped to create the present image of Mother Teresa   was  termed as a “Serial Groper”. BBC historian Jean Seaton makes the revelations in Pinkoes and Traitors: The BBC and the nation 1974-1987, that renowned BBC broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge “groped incontinently”,
Muggeridge, who served as a British soldier and spy during the second world war, passed away in 1990.Seaton also told “The Guardian”  that Malcolm Muggeridge, the anguished voice of dissent of the time – was a groper.
In a letter to the British Newspaper “The Telegraph”, Malcolm Muggerdige’s niece Sally says Muggeridge was reportedly nicknamed “The Pouncer” within the BBC and was also described as “a man fully deserving of the acronym NSIT – not safe in taxis”.

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