Post by Bozur on Dec 13, 2017 22:30:30 GMT -5
Disturbing Facts and Stories That Will Change How You See Mother Teresa
Kellen Perry
In 1995, the late author and social critic Christopher Hitchens wrote the ultimate Mother Teresa takedown with his The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, a lean, 98-page argument against the "cult" of the famous nun – and current saint. The book is full of disturbing Mother Teresa facts and unsettling anecdotes, but it's far from the only revelatory takedown out there.
Since the publication of Hitchens's book, plenty of dark Mother Teresa stories have bubbled to the surface, thanks in no small part to an exhaustive 2013 study by scholars at the Université de Montréal. If you didn't know Teresa was considered a corrupt religious figure, the list below will get you up to speed on the key arguments against her.
She Encouraged Secretly Baptizing Dying People
"Multiple accounts," according to the Washington Post, claim Teresa was cool with her nuns baptizing dying people – whether they wanted to be baptized or not. Among these accounts is Fr. Leo Maasburg's Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Personal Portrait. Fr. Maasburg was Teresa's "close companion for many decades" and says she told her nurses that it was good enough to surreptitiously ask the dying if they "would like to go to the God who sent the Sisters" before baptizing them in secret. Another account from a former Missionaries of Charity member claimed Teresa told the nurses to simply ask if the dying wanted a "ticket to heaven" before inconspicuously baptizing unwilling Hindus and Muslims.
She Called AIDS A "Just Retribution For Improper Sexual Conduct"
She Called AIDS A "Just Re... is listed (or ranked) 2 on the list Disturbing Facts and Stories That Will Change How You See Mother Teresa
In 1989, Mother Teresa was honored during a luncheon meeting of the International Health Organization in Washington, DC. At the meeting, she said AIDS wasn't exactly a "scourge of God," but it was a "just retribution for improper sexual conduct." She also said she would never allow "a woman or couple who had had an abortion to adopt one of 'her' babies," remarking that while God could forgive them, she never could.
This wasn't the first time Teresa strayed from her supposedly "apolitical" role: in 1979, while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, she called abortion the "greatest enemy" to peace in the world. She also likened abortion to literal infanticide and suggested legalized abortion would lead to an epidemic of suicide and murder: "Because if a mother can kill her own child, what will prevent us from killing ourselves, or one another? Nothing."
She Once Called Leprosy A "Very Beautiful Gift Of God"
As Murray Kempton reminds readers in his review of Christopher Hitchens's The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice in the New York Review of Books, Teresa once called leprosy "a very beautiful gift of God" that could be used to "learn to love the unloved." Kempton sees this as "an insistence that the poor have been placed among us for the primary purpose of affording the comfortable a chance to discover how virtuous they are." As Kempton explains, essentially, Teresa's claim that those with a disfiguring disease can be tools for learning empathy puts the afflicted in the position of compassion homework, treating them as things rather than as agents in their own right. In her formulation, lepers are objects that can be used for the fulfillment of the unafflicted, which seems like a pretty messed up way of viewing other people when you really think about it.
She Accepted $10,000 From A Known Cult Leader
Teresa once accepted $10,00 from Roger "John-Roger" Hinkins, leader of Insight Transformational Seminars – a known cult – despite Hinkins's claim that he had a "spiritual consciousness" superior to that of Jesus Christ. As Christopher Hitchens notes, Teresa not only willingly lent Hinkins "the luster of her name and image" but also took money Hinkins had surely fleeced from his followers.
At the height of his popularity, Hinkins could bring in $8 million per year selling his seminars and self-help books. A Los Angeles Times report in the late '80s revealed that: "John-Roger was said to be living a lavish lifestyle while keeping staff members at near poverty level. Additionally, some male devotees said they had been 'spiritually seduced' into having sex with him."
Even if Teresa only knew about his blasphemous claims of spiritual superiority, Hitchens argues, that should have been enough evidence for her to refuse his check.
She Wasn't All That Interested In Relieving Suffering
She Wasn't All That Intere is listed (or ranked) 5 on the list Disturbing Facts and Stories That Will Change How You See Mother Teresa
Teresa's organization, the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, earned hundreds of millions of dollars when she was alive, yet researchers discovered that her 517 "homes for the dying" worldwide all had "a shortage of medicine, supplies, and care." In 1997, she said "the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people," claiming it was "very beautiful for the poor to share [their suffering] with the passion of Christ."
This belief may explain why Teresa's clinics "work so pitilessly not to prolong the sufferer’s earthly existence but to teach him how to die," to quote Murray Kempton. This "work" included denying narcotic pain relief and opting for thin cots over real beds. As Christopher Hitchens bluntly puts it, "[the] point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjugation."
Hygiene At Her Clinics Is Abysmal
Hygiene At Her Clinics Is Abys is listed (or ranked) 6 on the list Disturbing Facts and Stories That Will Change How You See Mother Teresa
The often untrained volunteers working at Mother Teresa's "homes" around the world reportedly do not know how to keep the facilities hygienic. One former volunteer at Nirmal Hriday ("The Home for Dying Destitutes"), Mother Theresa's favorite home, for example, claims "needles were washed in cold water and reused." Soiled and infected clothes, as late as 2010, were still washed by hand and reused, as well, according to Forbes, despite the $72 million in estimated yearly donations to Missionaries of Charity by the end of Teresa's life. Christopher Hitchens believed the decision to to run a "haphazard and cranky institution which would expose itself to litigation and protest were it run by any branch of the medical profession is a deliberate one," meant to promulgate Teresa's "cult" of death and suffering.
She Received Her Personal Medical Care In California – Not Her Clinics
She Received Her Personal Medi is listed (or ranked) 7 on the list Disturbing Facts and Stories That Will Change How You See Mother Teresa
Despite offering objectively subpar care in her clinics across the globe – and having way more than the necessary funds to make improvements – Mother Teresa herself "checked into some of the finest and costliest clinics and hospitals in the West during her bouts with heart trouble and old age," preferring a clinic in California.
The Western doctors likely didn't tell her what she once told a terminal cancer patient under her care about his pain: "You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you." That sufferer's amazing reply? "Then please tell him to stop kissing me."
No One Knows What She Actually is listed (or ranked) 8 on the list Disturbing Facts and Stories That Will Change How You See Mother Teresa
If she never really improved the quality of care at her many clinics, what did Mother Teresa do with the estimated $72 million of annual donations? No one knows for sure where it all went, but a 1991 investigation by German news magazine Stern revealed that a paltry 7% of it at that time was actually used for charity. The money has been controlled by the Vatican since 1965, and there's no transparency about how it is used. In 2008, former Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity, Sister Nirmala, told the media the charity received "countless" donations each year, but she wouldn't get specific. "God knows. He is our banker," she said.
Her First Supposed Miracle Was Easily Debunked
Her First Supposed Miracle Was is listed (or ranked) 9 on the list Disturbing Facts and Stories That Will Change How You See Mother Teresa
The first of Mother Teresa's "miracles" leading to her sainthood is easily debunked. A beam of light supposedly emanated from a picture of Teresa, removing – with the help of a magical medallion bearing Teresa's likeness – a Bengali woman's cancerous tumor. The woman's doctor, however, says she never even had a tumor in the first place; it was just a tubercular cyst, cured by prescription drugs. The Vatican didn't bother to interview the doctor or use a "devil's advocate" to investigate the claims. Even the woman's husband didn't buy it: "My wife was cured by the doctors and not by any miracle... This miracle is a hoax," he told Time.
She Didn't Return Stolen Money From Famous Swindler Charles Keating
Not only did Teresa accept more than $1 million from famous financial fraudster Charles Keating in 1988, but she also wrote to the court in 1991 asking for clemency for his crimes, considering his history of charitable giving. The prosecuting attorney wrote a letter in reply, asking her to give the money back, which read, in part: "You have been given money by Mr. Keating that he has been convicted of stealing by fraud. Do not permit him the ‘indulgence’ he desires. Do not keep the money. Return it to those who worked for it and earned it!" Teresa never replied.
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Kellen Perry
In 1995, the late author and social critic Christopher Hitchens wrote the ultimate Mother Teresa takedown with his The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, a lean, 98-page argument against the "cult" of the famous nun – and current saint. The book is full of disturbing Mother Teresa facts and unsettling anecdotes, but it's far from the only revelatory takedown out there.
Since the publication of Hitchens's book, plenty of dark Mother Teresa stories have bubbled to the surface, thanks in no small part to an exhaustive 2013 study by scholars at the Université de Montréal. If you didn't know Teresa was considered a corrupt religious figure, the list below will get you up to speed on the key arguments against her.
She Encouraged Secretly Baptizing Dying People
"Multiple accounts," according to the Washington Post, claim Teresa was cool with her nuns baptizing dying people – whether they wanted to be baptized or not. Among these accounts is Fr. Leo Maasburg's Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Personal Portrait. Fr. Maasburg was Teresa's "close companion for many decades" and says she told her nurses that it was good enough to surreptitiously ask the dying if they "would like to go to the God who sent the Sisters" before baptizing them in secret. Another account from a former Missionaries of Charity member claimed Teresa told the nurses to simply ask if the dying wanted a "ticket to heaven" before inconspicuously baptizing unwilling Hindus and Muslims.
She Called AIDS A "Just Retribution For Improper Sexual Conduct"
She Called AIDS A "Just Re... is listed (or ranked) 2 on the list Disturbing Facts and Stories That Will Change How You See Mother Teresa
In 1989, Mother Teresa was honored during a luncheon meeting of the International Health Organization in Washington, DC. At the meeting, she said AIDS wasn't exactly a "scourge of God," but it was a "just retribution for improper sexual conduct." She also said she would never allow "a woman or couple who had had an abortion to adopt one of 'her' babies," remarking that while God could forgive them, she never could.
This wasn't the first time Teresa strayed from her supposedly "apolitical" role: in 1979, while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, she called abortion the "greatest enemy" to peace in the world. She also likened abortion to literal infanticide and suggested legalized abortion would lead to an epidemic of suicide and murder: "Because if a mother can kill her own child, what will prevent us from killing ourselves, or one another? Nothing."
She Once Called Leprosy A "Very Beautiful Gift Of God"
As Murray Kempton reminds readers in his review of Christopher Hitchens's The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice in the New York Review of Books, Teresa once called leprosy "a very beautiful gift of God" that could be used to "learn to love the unloved." Kempton sees this as "an insistence that the poor have been placed among us for the primary purpose of affording the comfortable a chance to discover how virtuous they are." As Kempton explains, essentially, Teresa's claim that those with a disfiguring disease can be tools for learning empathy puts the afflicted in the position of compassion homework, treating them as things rather than as agents in their own right. In her formulation, lepers are objects that can be used for the fulfillment of the unafflicted, which seems like a pretty messed up way of viewing other people when you really think about it.
She Accepted $10,000 From A Known Cult Leader
Teresa once accepted $10,00 from Roger "John-Roger" Hinkins, leader of Insight Transformational Seminars – a known cult – despite Hinkins's claim that he had a "spiritual consciousness" superior to that of Jesus Christ. As Christopher Hitchens notes, Teresa not only willingly lent Hinkins "the luster of her name and image" but also took money Hinkins had surely fleeced from his followers.
At the height of his popularity, Hinkins could bring in $8 million per year selling his seminars and self-help books. A Los Angeles Times report in the late '80s revealed that: "John-Roger was said to be living a lavish lifestyle while keeping staff members at near poverty level. Additionally, some male devotees said they had been 'spiritually seduced' into having sex with him."
Even if Teresa only knew about his blasphemous claims of spiritual superiority, Hitchens argues, that should have been enough evidence for her to refuse his check.
She Wasn't All That Interested In Relieving Suffering
She Wasn't All That Intere is listed (or ranked) 5 on the list Disturbing Facts and Stories That Will Change How You See Mother Teresa
Teresa's organization, the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, earned hundreds of millions of dollars when she was alive, yet researchers discovered that her 517 "homes for the dying" worldwide all had "a shortage of medicine, supplies, and care." In 1997, she said "the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people," claiming it was "very beautiful for the poor to share [their suffering] with the passion of Christ."
This belief may explain why Teresa's clinics "work so pitilessly not to prolong the sufferer’s earthly existence but to teach him how to die," to quote Murray Kempton. This "work" included denying narcotic pain relief and opting for thin cots over real beds. As Christopher Hitchens bluntly puts it, "[the] point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjugation."
Hygiene At Her Clinics Is Abysmal
Hygiene At Her Clinics Is Abys is listed (or ranked) 6 on the list Disturbing Facts and Stories That Will Change How You See Mother Teresa
The often untrained volunteers working at Mother Teresa's "homes" around the world reportedly do not know how to keep the facilities hygienic. One former volunteer at Nirmal Hriday ("The Home for Dying Destitutes"), Mother Theresa's favorite home, for example, claims "needles were washed in cold water and reused." Soiled and infected clothes, as late as 2010, were still washed by hand and reused, as well, according to Forbes, despite the $72 million in estimated yearly donations to Missionaries of Charity by the end of Teresa's life. Christopher Hitchens believed the decision to to run a "haphazard and cranky institution which would expose itself to litigation and protest were it run by any branch of the medical profession is a deliberate one," meant to promulgate Teresa's "cult" of death and suffering.
She Received Her Personal Medical Care In California – Not Her Clinics
She Received Her Personal Medi is listed (or ranked) 7 on the list Disturbing Facts and Stories That Will Change How You See Mother Teresa
Despite offering objectively subpar care in her clinics across the globe – and having way more than the necessary funds to make improvements – Mother Teresa herself "checked into some of the finest and costliest clinics and hospitals in the West during her bouts with heart trouble and old age," preferring a clinic in California.
The Western doctors likely didn't tell her what she once told a terminal cancer patient under her care about his pain: "You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you." That sufferer's amazing reply? "Then please tell him to stop kissing me."
No One Knows What She Actually is listed (or ranked) 8 on the list Disturbing Facts and Stories That Will Change How You See Mother Teresa
If she never really improved the quality of care at her many clinics, what did Mother Teresa do with the estimated $72 million of annual donations? No one knows for sure where it all went, but a 1991 investigation by German news magazine Stern revealed that a paltry 7% of it at that time was actually used for charity. The money has been controlled by the Vatican since 1965, and there's no transparency about how it is used. In 2008, former Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity, Sister Nirmala, told the media the charity received "countless" donations each year, but she wouldn't get specific. "God knows. He is our banker," she said.
Her First Supposed Miracle Was Easily Debunked
Her First Supposed Miracle Was is listed (or ranked) 9 on the list Disturbing Facts and Stories That Will Change How You See Mother Teresa
The first of Mother Teresa's "miracles" leading to her sainthood is easily debunked. A beam of light supposedly emanated from a picture of Teresa, removing – with the help of a magical medallion bearing Teresa's likeness – a Bengali woman's cancerous tumor. The woman's doctor, however, says she never even had a tumor in the first place; it was just a tubercular cyst, cured by prescription drugs. The Vatican didn't bother to interview the doctor or use a "devil's advocate" to investigate the claims. Even the woman's husband didn't buy it: "My wife was cured by the doctors and not by any miracle... This miracle is a hoax," he told Time.
She Didn't Return Stolen Money From Famous Swindler Charles Keating
Not only did Teresa accept more than $1 million from famous financial fraudster Charles Keating in 1988, but she also wrote to the court in 1991 asking for clemency for his crimes, considering his history of charitable giving. The prosecuting attorney wrote a letter in reply, asking her to give the money back, which read, in part: "You have been given money by Mr. Keating that he has been convicted of stealing by fraud. Do not permit him the ‘indulgence’ he desires. Do not keep the money. Return it to those who worked for it and earned it!" Teresa never replied.
www.ranker.com/list/disturbing-mother-teresa-facts/kellen-perry?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=historypost&pgid=642850749204637&utm_campaign=disturbing-mother-teresa-facts&publish=true