You need a Happy Meal and cut back on the caffiene.
Posted on 08/05/2005 8:11:31 AM PDT by petconservative
Mother Teresa's House of Illusions How She Harmed Her Helpers As Well As Those They `Helped' by Susan Shields
The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 18, Number 1.
Some years after I became a Catholic, I joined Mother Teresa's congregation, the Missionaries of Charity. I was one of her sisters for nine and a half years, living in the Bronx, Rome, and San Franciso, until I became disillusioned and left in May 1989. As I reentered the world, I slowly began to unravel the tangle of lies in which I had lived. I wondered how I could have believed them for so long.
Three of Mother Teresa's teachings that are fundamental to her religious congregation are all the more dangerous because they are believed so sincerely by her sisters. Most basic is the belief that as long as a sister obeys she is doing God's will. Another is the belief that the sisters have leverage over God by choosing to suffer. Their suffering makes God very happy. He then dispenses more graces to humanity. The third is the belief that any attachment to human beings, even the poor being served, supposedly interferes with love of God and must be vigilantly avoided or immediately uprooted. The efforts to prevent any attachments cause continual chaos and confusion, movement and change in the congregation. Mother Teresa did not invent these beliefs - they were prevalent in religious congregations before Vatican II - but she did everything in her power (which was great) to enforce them.
Once a sister has accepted these fallacies she will do almost anything. She can allow her health to be destroyed, neglect those she vowed to serve, and switch off her feelings and independent thought. She can turn a blind eye to suffering, inform on her fellow sisters, tell lies with ease, and ignore public laws and regulations.
Women from many nations joined Mother Teresa in the expectation that they would help the poor and come closer to God themselves. When I left, there were more than 3,000 sisters in approximately 400 houses scattered throughout the world. Many of these sisters who trusted Mother Teresa to guide them have become broken people. In the face of overwhelming evidence, some of them have finally admitted that their trust has been betrayed, that God could not possibly be giving the orders they hear. It is difficult for them to decide to leave - their self-confidence has been destroyed, and they have no education beyond what they brought with them when they joined. I was one of the lucky ones who mustered enough courage to walk away.
It is in the hope that others may see the fallacy of this purported way to holiness that I tell a little of what I know. Although there are relatively few tempted to join Mother Teresa's congregation of sisters, there are many who generously have supported her work because they do not realize how her twisted premises strangle efforts to alleviate misery. Unaware that most of the donations sit unused in her bank accounts, they too are deceived into thinking they are helping the poor.
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?
When Mother spoke publicly, she never asked for money, but she did encourage people to make sacrifices for the poor, to "give until it hurts." Many people did - and they gave it to her. We received touching letters from people, sometimes apparently poor themselves, who were making sacrifices to send us a little money for the starving people in Africa, the flood victims in Bangladesh, or the poor children in India. Most of the money sat in our bank accounts.
The flood of donations was considered to be a sign of God's approval of Mother Teresa's congregation. We were told by our superiors that we received more gifts than other religious congregations because God was pleased with Mother, and because the Missionaries of Charity were the sisters who were faithful to the true spirit of religious life.
Most of the sisters had no idea how much money the congregation was amassing. After all, we were taught not to collect anything. One summer the sisters living on the outskirts of Rome were given more crates of tomatoes than they could distribute. None of their neighbors wanted them because the crop had been so prolific that year. The sisters decided to can the tomatoes rather than let them spoil, but when Mother found out what they had done she was very displeased. Storing things showed lack of trust in Divine Providence.
The donations rolled in and were deposited in the bank, but they had no effect on our ascetic lives and very little effect on the lives of the poor we were trying to help. We lived a simple life, bare of all superfluities. We had three sets of clothes, which we mended until the material was too rotten to patch anymore. We washed our own clothes by hand. The never-ending piles of sheets and towels from our night shelter for the homeless we washed by hand, too. Our bathing was accomplished with only one bucket of water. Dental and medical checkups were seen as an unnecessary luxury.
Mother was very concerned that we preserve our spirit of poverty. Spending money would destroy that poverty. She seemed obsessed with using only the simplest of means for our work. Was this in the best interests of the people we were trying to help, or were we in fact using them as a tool to advance our own "sanctity?" In Haiti, to keep the spirit of poverty, the sisters reused needles until they became blunt. Seeing the pain caused by the blunt needles, some of the volunteers offered to procure more needles, but the sisters refused.
We begged for food and supplies from local merchants as though we had no resources. On one of the rare occasions when we ran out of donated bread, we went begging at the local store. When our request was turned down, our superior decreed that the soup kitchen could do without bread for the day.
It was not only merchants who were offered a chance to be generous. Airlines were requested to fly sisters and air cargo free of charge. Hospitals and doctors were expected to absorb the costs of medical treatment for the sisters or to draw on funds designated for the religious. Workmen were encouraged to labor without payment or at reduced rates. We relied heavily on volunteers who worked long hours in our soup kitchens, shelters, and day camps.
A hard-working farmer devoted many of his waking hours to collecting and delivering food for our soup kitchens and shelters. "If I didn't come, what would you eat?" he asked.
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.
For years I had to write thousands of letters to donors, telling them that their entire gift would be used to bring God's loving compassion to the poorest of the poor. I was able to keep my complaining conscience in check because we had been taught that the Holy Spirit was guiding Mother. To doubt her was a sign that we were lacking in trust and, even worse, guilty of the sin of pride. I shelved my objections and hoped that one day I would understand why Mother wanted to gather so much money, when she herself had taught us that even storing tomato sauce showed lack of trust in Divine Providence.
Like satan won over the molested boys who dared accuse thier priests? Right! The catholic church is not above quiestioning.
I'm not saying I believe this article, but I'd rather see someone soundly refute it than you and other poster's baseless, over-the-top and potentially slanderous condemnations.
Come on they needed those millions to pay off the victims of pedophile Priests.
With respect, I'd like to ask a question. It has been many years since I studied the Catechism and I left the Church long ago. But I remember things like, "Offer it up for the souls in purgatory" - that suffering had its purposes. I don't recall that I was to endure suffering to be closer to Christ, but that may just be my memory.
Perhaps post-Vatican II Catholics don't 'offer up' their suffering anymore? I think suffering can give you character, can make you more aware of the plight of others, and if you believe in the purgatory thing, it can help there. But I just don't recall that suffering is supposed to get me closer to Christ. For those who believe, Christ's sacrifice was so overwhelming, how do you possibly get close to that? And if He died for our sins, why do I have to recreate that suffering in myself? I thought the idea was to contemplate Christ's sacrifice and to be sorry for one's imperfections, trying not to repeat them.
I'm just trying to learn the Church's current stand on suffering. It may be worthwhile to learn to suffer gracefully that which is unavoidable, but it can't be that Christians are supposed to go looking for it or impose it on others in order to get closer to Christ.
Nothing matters but Grace...
Just one little thought: what if it's true???
"Though He were a son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered."
This author has joined the ranks of the the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Germaine Greer, both of whom had burrs up their butts about Mother Teresa. I wonder about this woman; did she join the order with the intention of looking for dirt about them? She certainly wasn't in there for very long.
"The African contenant is a place of real suffering. Ask the people in Niger if, after watching 35000 of their children die in the last month, they feel their character has been built up."
Oh not this African stuff again. If Africans were so outraged then why haven't the millions of them stormed their dictators luxury residences and slaughtered them for stealing their decades of $$ billions in stolen relief money and food? Instead they attack and mutilate each other. I've been observing that broken dam my entire life.
Let's see if i can simplify this enough for you to understand it.
1. Soliciting money for a specific purpose, then not using the money for that purpose, is fraud.
2.Mother Theresa solicited scads of money for the poor.
3. Mother Theresa spent very little money on the poor.
4. Mother Theresa committed fraud.
Nor can you disprove she was not a more benevolent and self sacrificing person than thou.
People who live in glass houses had best be wary of casting stones at their betters.
"It's so easy to judge from your vantage point. You wouldn't last two seconds in some countries in Africa before you started begging the consulate to get you out of there."
First of all I wouldn't be CAUGHT DEAD in Africa the way things have been going there. So, next?
the author of this piece clearly has a chip on her shoulder and is seizing the opportunity to parade her misunderstanding and secularization of teaching to justify herself. Poor, warped thing. She's bitter, probably signed on for all the wrong reasons, and didn't get the hoped for results. Now, consistent with this sort of personality, it's all the authority figure's fault (in this case, Mother Theresa). This person could lead many astray. And damn the media that lust after material like this.
You need a Happy Meal and cut back on the caffiene.
baloney. close in physical proximity, perhaps. in another world spiritually and intellectually. and, an "eye witness?" that's exactly her token here. you're buying it?
somewhere there's a scripture about the devil being the "accuser of the bretheren."
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