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.
If you join an order where you take a vow of poverty, why complain about the lack of luxuries?
Reminds me of the guy who joined the army and then sued when he was going to be sent to war, because 'when he signed up he never intended to go to war'. The world is full of nut cases.
I agree about misuse of fraud. I meant that if the info about her being a bit goofy is true, someone saying this needn't be attacked. It doesn't spoil her good work, so why get upset? The comment was more aimed at the posters taking great offense on this thread.
Zek has risen above Mother Teresa. Enlighten us!
Basic question, why wasn't the money spent on the poor?
Can anyone refute the facts that are alleged?Which facts, that they lived with and as the poor? That was widely known, was openly advertised as part of the Order, and it was intentional. If this woman was surprised by that she is a fool.
If you mean the claims that the money disappeared, or whatever it was this woman insinuated, she provides no “facts” to support that insinuation.
All she can say is that she processed lots of checks. For an order as large and as well known as this, that is hardly surprising, nor is it evidence of malfeasance. She also notes that Mother Theresa wasn’t out shaking folks down for that money. It costs a lot of money to treat aids patients and others, and I see little evidence the money wasn’t spent, or is unaccounted for. That they don’t want to open their books to you is hardly a basis for you to claim there are problems. To the extent you think otherwise, I’ll look forward to stopping by and examining your professional books.
When donations are solicited for helping the poor, and are not used for that purpose, that's what we call fraud.Do you have some evidence that this happened?
Mother Theresa took money under false pretenses, pure and simple.Again, your evidence is?
A lot of you people scare me. Because of people like many of you in this thread, eye witnesses of all sorts of injustice are reluctant to come forward, thus the truth rarely sees the light of day. When it finally does, you ridicule it or cover it up; keep it at an arm's length. This is what keeps the status quo going by keeping the money hoarders and sex abusers in a relatively protected place. Why do you do this to yourselves? Do you even care what is happening on a global scale?
Wake up.
" Why do you do this to yourselves? Do you even care what is happening on a global scale? "
Why do you do this(torment) to yourself? Do YOU even know what is true, false and inbetween on a global scale? How on earth were you able to cover so much ground in such little time? Can you walk on water too? Part any seas lately? Believe most biased news stories?
Even the Catholic Church at one point said that Mother Theresa was possessed, so what do you say about that?
I think that there is a danger in trying to follow one person, and not God, because humans do err.
What? What is your source on this?
Yes humans do err and I do not follow Mother Theresa but I do admire her. Christ says that you should know them by their fruits and Mother Theresa produced great comfort for the most "untouchable" among us.
I'm a Methodist but am able to give credit where it is due.
You got it! The Nun's Story, I Leaped over the Wall--Failures with obedience always come first. After that, la deluge.
You are a complete and total liar.
Hey I have to compliment you. You have the all-consuming satan-inspired hatred of the Catholic Church thing down pat. Good luck with that gig.
You're right.
Great speech to the National Prayer Breakfast in 1994
. . .But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child - a direct killing of the innocent child - murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?
How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts. By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. And by abortion, the father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world.
Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.
Hasn't Christopher Hitchens done at least one savage hit piece on her? The neocons love Christopher Hitchens. Not me.
Cal Thomas, an eyewitness at the event, wrote a great column shortly thereafter (wish I could find it now) describing the Clintons' discomfiture and quoting some of Mother Teresa's ear-burning denunciations of abortion.
Thank you for posting that link. I am not a Catholic but I appreciate that woman, even if for no other reason than what she did on that day.
Her death within days of Princess Diana's death was, unfortunately, overshadowed by Diana's death and the world paid scant attention to the passing of this great lioness of the church.
In other words...You can't name one.
.
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