Mother Teresa: Faithless Fraud and HypocriteContributed by admin on Tue, 2007/10/30 - 10:09amIn sections: IndiaInternationalPovertyReligion/SpiritualityHistoryMichaelParenti.org - Oct 27, 2007Mother Teresa, John Paul II, and the Fast-Track Saintsby Michael ParentiDuring his 26-year papacy, John Paul II elevated 483 individuals tosainthood, reportedly more saints than any previous pope. One personagehe beatified but did not live long enough to canonize was MotherTeresa, the Roman Catholic nun of Albanian origin who had been winedand dined by the world's rich and famous while hailed as a champion ofthe poor. The darling of the corporate media and western officialdom,and an object of celebrity adoration, Teresa was for many years themost revered woman on earth, showered with kudos and awarded a NobelPeace Prize in 1979 for her humanitarian work and spiritual inspiration.What usually went unreported were the vast sums she received fromwealthy and sometimes tainted sources, including a million dollars fromconvicted savings & loan swindler Charles Keating, on whose behalf shesent a personal plea for clemency to the presiding judge. She was askedby the prosecutor in that case to return Keating's gift because it wasmoney he had stolen. She never did.[1] She also accepted substantialsums given by the brutal Duvalier dictatorship that regularly stolefrom the Haitian public treasury.Mother Teresa's hospitals for the indigent in India and elsewhere turnedout to be hardly more than human warehouses in which seriously illpersons lay on mats, sometimes fifty to sixty in a room without benefitof adequate medical attention. Their ailments usually went undiagnosed.The food was nutritionally lacking and sanitary conditions weredeplorable. There were few medical personnel on the premises, mostlyuntrained nuns and brothers.[2]When tending to her own ailments, however, Teresa checked into some ofthe costliest hospitals and recovery care units in the world forstate-of-the-art treatment.[3]Teresa journeyed the globe to wage campaigns against divorce, abortion,and birth control. At her Nobel award ceremony, she announced that thegreatest destroyer of peace is abortion. And she once suggested thatAIDS might be a just retribution for improper sexual conduct.[4]Teresa emitted a continual flow of promotional misinformation aboutherself. She claimed that her mission in Calcutta fed over a thousandpeople daily. On other occasions she jumped the number to 4000, 7000,and 9000. Actually her soup kitchens fed not more than 150 people (sixdays a week), and this included her retinue of nuns, novices, andbrothers. She claimed that her school in the Calcutta slum containedfive thousand children when it actually enrolled less than one hundred.Teresa claimed to have 102 family assistance centers in Calcutta, butlongtime Calcutta resident, Aroup Chatterjee, who did an extensiveon-the-scene investigation of her mission, could not find a single suchcenter.[5]As one of her devotees explained, "Mother Teresa is among those wholeast worry about statistics. She has repeatedly expressed that whatmatters is not how much work is accomplished but how much love is putinto the work."[6] Was Teresa really unconcerned about statistics?Quite the contrary, her numerical inaccuracies went consistently andself-servingly in only one direction, greatly exaggerating heraccomplishments.Over the many years that her mission was in Calcutta, there were about adozen floods and numerous cholera epidemics in or near the city, withthousands perishing. Various relief agencies responded to eachdisaster, but Teresa and her crew were nowhere in sight, except brieflyon one occasion.[7]When someone asked Teresa how people without money or power can make theworld a better place, she replied, "They should smile more," a responsethat charmed some listeners. During a press conference in WashingtonDC, when asked "Do you teach the poor to endure their lot?" she said "Ithink it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to shareit with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helpedby the suffering of the poor people."[8]But she herself lived lavishly well, enjoying luxurious accommodationsin her travels abroad. It seems to have gone unnoticed that as a worldcelebrity she spent most of her time away from Calcutta, with protractedstays at opulent residences in Europe and the United States, jettingfrom Rome to London to New York in private planes.[9]Mother Teresa is a paramount example of the kind of acceptablyconservative icon propagated by an elite-dominated culture, a saint whouttered not a critical word against social injustice, and maintainedcozy relations with the rich, corrupt, and powerful.She claimed to be above politics when in fact she was pronouncedlyhostile toward any kind of progressive reform. Teresa was a friend ofRonald Reagan, and an admiring guest of the Haitian dictator Baby DocDuvalier. She also had the support and admiration of a number ofCentral and South American dictators.Teresa was Pope John Paul II's kind of saint. After her death in 1997,he waived the five-year waiting period usually observed before beginningthe beatification process that leads to sainthood. In 2003, in recordtime Mother Teresa was beatified, the final step before canonization.But in 2007 her canonization confronted a bump in the road, it havingbeen disclosed that along with her various other contradictions Teresawas not a citadel of spiritual joy and unswerving faith. Her diaries,investigated by Catholic authorities in Calcutta, revealed that she hadbeen racked with doubts: "I feel that God does not want me, that God isnot God and that he does not really exist. People think my faith, myhope and my love are overflowing and that my intimacy with God andunion with his will fill my heart. If only they knew," she wrote,"Heaven means nothing."Through many tormented sleepless nights she shed thoughts like this: "Iam told God loves me and yet the reality of darkness and coldness andemptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul." Il Messeggero,Rome's popular daily newspaper, commented: "The real Mother Teresa wasone who for one year had visions and who for the next 50 haddoubts---up until her death."[10]Another example of fast-track sainthood, pushed by Pope John Paul II,occurred in 1992 when he swiftly beatified the reactionary Msgr. JosiMarma Escriva de Balaguer, supporter of fascist regimes in Spain andelsewhere, and founder of Opus Dei, a powerful secretiveultra-conservative movement feared by many as a sinister sect withinthe Catholic Church.[11] Escriva s beatification came only seventeenyears after his death, a record run until Mother Teresa came along.In accordance with his own political agenda, John Paul used a churchinstitution, sainthood, to bestow special sanctity uponultra-conservatives such as Escriva and Teresa---and implicitly on allthat they represented. Another of the ultra-conservatives whom JohnPaul put up for sainthood, bizarrely enough, was the last of theHapsburg rulers of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Emperor Karl, whoreigned during World War I. Still another of the reactionaries whomJohn Paul set up for sainthood was Pius IX, who reigned as pontiff from1846 to 1878, and who referred to Jews as dogs.John Paul also beatified Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, the leadingCroatian cleric who welcomed the Nazi and fascist Ustashi takeover ofCroatia during World War II. Stepinac sat in the Ustashi parliament,appeared at numerous public events with top ranking Nazis and Ustashi,and openly supported the Croatian fascist regime that exterminatedhundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma (gypsies).[12]In John Paul's celestial pantheon, reactionaries had a better chance atcanonization than reformers. Consider his treatment of Archbishop OscarRomero who spoke against the injustices and oppressions suffered by theimpoverished populace of El Salvador and for this was assassinated by aright-wing death squad. John Paul never denounced the killing or itsperpetrators, calling it only tragic. In fact, just weeks before Romerowas murdered, high-ranking officials of the Arena party, the legal armof the death squads, sent a well-received delegation to the Vatican tocomplain of Romero's public statements on behalf of the poor.[13]Romero was thought by many poor Salvadorans to be something of a saint,but John Paul attempted to ban any discussion of his beatification forfifty years. Popular pressure from El Salvador caused the Vatican tocut the delay to twenty-five years.[14] In either case, Romero wasconsigned to the slow track.John Paul's successor, Benedict XVI, [waived] the five-year waitingperiod in order to put John Paul II himself instantly on a super-fasttrack to canonization, running neck and neck with Teresa. As of 2005there already were reports of possible miracles attributed to therecently departed Polish pontiff.One such account was offered by Cardinal Francesco Marchisano. Whenlunching with John Paul, the cardinal indicated that because of anailment he could not use his voice. The pope caressed my throat, like abrother, like the father that he was. After that I did seven months oftherapy, and I was able to speak again. Marchisano thinks that thepontiff might have had a hand in his cure: It could be, he said.[15] Unmiracolo! Viva il papa!1. Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa inTheory and Practice (Verso, 1995), 64-71.