In high school, my dearest friend Sirisha and I were huge fans of Mother Teresa. We thought if things didn’t go as planned for us, we will become nuns at her charity. Thank God that it never came to pass 🙄.
Krishnan and I had an opportunity to meet Mother Teresa in 1992, when the MILT convention happened in Kolkata. Several of our friends did go and meet her but for some strange reason, we never went. In retrospect we didn’t miss anything !
I came across this Twitter thread today and it corroborates what Christopher Hitchens wrote !! Do read my blogpost from 2018 – A book that’s deeply disturbing – The Missionary Position.
The link to the Twitter thread written by @cogitoiam – Mother Teresa – Saint or Con Woman?
She harvested post colonial sufferings of India to deliver souls to Vatican masters, defended perpetrators of Bhopal tragedy, supported Christian fascists, received funds from western convicts & built a fortune.
A thread on the sins of Teresa
Teresa was relatively unknown until 1969, when a missionary Malcolm Muggeridge of BBC & a spy for British in WW2 came to Calcutta. He made a documentary called “Something Beautiful for God” on Teresa, taking her to world media. A meticulously choreographed climb to global fame.
It served the white man’s burden for Christians of the west that a white woman was leading the baptizing crusade, bringing culture to savages of India & saving brown bodies from their own failings & sins. As colonialism became unjustifiable, Teresas filled that void by “charity”.
In 1984 as the Bhopal Gas disaster took away 16,000 lives & disabled 6 Lakh people, Teresa defended fellow Christian Warren Anderson of Union Carbide, culpable for the tragedy. Absolving the American firm of any responsibility, she asked the victims to seek forgiveness from God.
When asked about the deaths caused, she felt Indians were overreacting over the tragedy & said on record:
“We are so excited because it has affected us. No one thinks of the millions of abortions taking place all over the world. This was an accident”
The article link – https://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/12/world/mother-teresa-carries-her-message-to-bhopal.html
She belittled the 16K deaths, asking victims to forgive Anderson & finding the deaths less important than abortions around the world, tying into this the church pet project of aborted babies by lamenting losses of lives they couldn’t baptize to boost the Global Christian numbers.
In her lifetime, Teresa baptized close to 3000 dying patients without their consent in addition to thousands who suffered disabilities, without regard to the individual’s religion or family. Greater the baptized numbers she could show abroad, greater the donations that poured in.
Susan Shields, a member of Teresa’s charity said the sisters asked each patient in danger of death if he wanted a ‘ticket to heaven’. An affirmative reply was consent to baptism. The sister in pretense of cooling the patient’s head with a wet cloth, baptized them in secrecy.
By her death, she had saved so much money, that Italian journo Gianluigi Nuzzi writes
“Teresa had so much money in the Vatican Bank that if she had withdrawn money, entire Vatican Bank would have emptied.”
How did a Saint have so much money slashed abroad? Who were the donors?
One of them was a child sex offender & American Jesuit priest Donald McGuire. Despite the courts awarding him a 25 years life sentence, she wrote to the Church in desperately pleading with them to reinstate the disgraced priest for he was a generous donor.
Mother Teresa and the Paedophile
Another of Teresa’s biggest donors was Charles Keating, an American who scammed thousands of daily wage earners of their savings. An US attorney wrote to Teresa, explaining how Keating stole the money & suggested she return Keating’s donation to the victims, she never replied.
Another donor to Teresa was Robert Maxwell, British MP & media baron who stole millions of pounds from his own companies’ pension funds. Its no coincidence her biggest donations came from fraudsters & embezzlers, to embellish their own reputation with the myth of ‘Saint Teresa’.
Teresa supported & received donations from various dictators including Enver Hoxha, an Albanian communist leader who executed 1000s of his own people & put millions in labour camp. She paid a visit to his tomb in Albania & paid respects accompanied by Hoxha’s family in 1989.
Teresa personally wrote & lobbied for Nobel prize for Licio Gelli, Fascist leader known for numerous killings & corruption in Italy & Latin America. As long as the dollars poured in, Mother had no qualms accepting money from communist or fascist despots.
catholicworldreport.com/2020/09/05/st-…
Teresa’s association with dictators continued in India. As millions suffered from the emergency’s brutality, she was a fervent supporter of Indira saying “People were happier in the emergency with no strikes”. All that mattered was Indira Govt didn’t touch her foreign donations.
Teresa’s work primary motivation in her own words wasn’t to serve but to harvest the suffering of the poor for Jesus:
“It is very beautiful for poor to accept their lot, to share it with the Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.”
She didn’t want to change the fate of the poor, but justified it was ‘beautiful’ for them to accept it. Never mind poverty of third world was primarily because of Christian imperialism but she urged them to accept it, even gaslighting them saying their suffering helped the world.
Teresa banned pain-relievers for the sick as she believed they had to endure for their sins. There was poor hygiene, 50-60 dumped in one room, shortage of care & inadequate food despite millions in donation. Her stated belief was “The sick must suffer like Christ on the cross”.
Volunteers at her charity said she showed no interest in curing patients as their pain was the asset in her missionary enterprise. The suffering Indian bodies were mere numbers to be counted & reported to the wider Christian world, to embellish her reputation & receive funds.
Celebration of Teresa means idealizing poverty & India’s dark decades as it climbed out of foreign rule, it is to brand the poor & destitute as sinners, it is to accept only Catholicism can save Hindu souls, it is to accept Indians lack the morality to take care of their own.
Teresa was an agent in a post-colonial world providing cover to absolve the west of their crimes, collecting souls for her Vatican masters, supported fascists, sex offenders, mass murderers & died with a fortune in the Vatican bank, accumulated by parading India’s sufferings.
I am appalled at the workings of the conversion factory ! Just read the comment that a Dhimmi Hindu who has probably converted to Christianity has posted on my earlier blog – Welcome to Christian Nadu. This is precisely why the North Eastern states became Christian so easily ….. Hindus don’t proselytise while the conversion factories go hard at it 😔.
The Church doesn’t seem to be the house of God but more the house of a politician and the Vatican seems to be getting rich with all the donations pouring into its bank. 😡
Time to wake up otherwise not many of us would be left to even speak about Hindu persecution.
#HinduPersecutionIsReal #AntiConversionLaw
Hardly a saint !!! That myth has been blown to pieces a while ago. It just hasn’t registered in the minds of colonial-obsessed self-righteous minds. A self-professed atheist (from a Christian family) told me Christians convert because of their “noble” intention to give salvation to all, as they believe Christ is the only saviour. What arrogance is this !! Conversion is the DNA of Christianity even if Jesus did not preach it Himself. The Churches have made a business out of this and would have continued to do so with the help of foreign donations if they hadn’t been frozen in the recent years. I firmly believe all history books have to remove references to Missionaries of Charity and their founder. Complete hogwash. Dying patients were not taken in to be given treatment and healed, but to be baptized and add to the conversion numbers.
So true Deepa ! I think we should have chapters in our textbooks that speak of how Missionaries converted and continue to convert in India and why it’s got nothing to do with God but everything to do with money and world politics. Also the African and South American history of conversion has to be taught. The coercive tactics that Islam uses and the incentive route that Christianity takes – both have to be taught so that young minds understand the damage conversion does to indigenous people. 😞
It was an eye opener… never saw it that way actually
I was shocked when I read Christopher Hitchens book in 2018. Then this. It’s just sad :(.