out of respect to mozz18 and in reply to jantimot i have started a new thread by way of explanation re. jantimott's reply in comparing mother Teresa to Irene Gleeson
mother Teresa "We are first of all religious; we are not social workers, not teachers, not nurses, or doctors,We are religious, we are religious, we are religious."
That pretty much sums it up.
Worth Reading, August 23, 2005 By Tim Challies (Oakville, Ontario) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict (Paperback) Of the many biographies of Mother Teresa available to us, to my knowledge only two of them are largely critical in nature. The first, provacatively titled The Missionary Position examines Mother Teresa's faith and practice. Written by Christopher Hitchens, the book received a fair amount of recognition and formed the basis for a television documentary. The book is quite short and contains very little in the way of footnotes and documentation.
The other critical biography is entitled Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict and is written by Aroup Chatterjee. This title is several hundred pages longer than Hitchens' book and contains extensive documentation. Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict claims to reveal "the REAL Teresa (from the back cover)." Like Hitchens, Chatterjee is an atheist and his dislike of Mother Teresa has little to do with a religious bias. Like Hitchens, he has found that the reality of the woman and her work is a far cry from the legend. However, unlike Hitchens, he is a native of Calcutta, the city where Mother Teresa did her work, and the very city which will forever be linked to her.
Before I summarize the book, allow me to make one general statement. The book is long - probably too long. As I have already mentioned, Chatterjee provides extensive documentation and often provides multitudes of examples where only two or three may have sufficed. He sometimes repeats information in subsequent chapters, using the same information to prove two points. This, of course, is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does call into question the book's organization. In short, the book has some of the problems typical of those that have not been professionally edited. Due to the nature of the book's subject matter, professional publishing was not a possibility, so Chatterjee had to make do largely on his own.
A terse summary of Chatterjee's primary concerns with Mother Teresa appear in the final chapter where he quotes his "Deposition Before the Committee for Beatification/Canonisation of Mother Teresa." Among Chatterjee's concerns are:
* Mother Teresa often said that she picked people up from the streets of Calcutta, but she and her order of nuns did not do this. People requesting such service were told curtly to ring 102 (similar to 911).
* While the order owns several ambulances, these are used primarily to transport nuns to and from places of prayer.
* Mother Teresa said that her order fed 4000, 5000, 7000 or 9000 Caltuttans every day (the number varied). The two or three soup kitchens in Calcutta feed a maximum of only 300 people per day. The kitchens will provide food only to people with "food cards" that are distrubuted predominantly to the Catholic poor.
* While Mother Teresa's order has some presence in many countries throughout the world, the majority of these are for training monks or nuns, not for aiding the poor.
* Mother Teresa's shelters will usually only help children if the parents sign a form of renunciation which signs the rights to the children to her organization.
* Mother Teresa often insists that her natural family clinics prevent unwanted pregnancies, but this number is without any basis in truth.
* Mother Teresa insisted that suffering was beautiful as it evoked Christ's suffering, but when ill she visited exclusive, expensive hospitals.
* The hospice in Calcutta through which Mother Teresa gained such wide recognition is very small (80 beds) and provides little medical care. Needles are reused, all patients are forced to have their heads shaven, visitors are forbidden and painkillers are rarely if ever used. The nurses do not speak the language of the people and are not usually involved in the care of the patients. This duty is assumed by volunteers.
* Mother Teresa often accepted money from suspicious sources, the most notable of which is Charles Keating, America's most notorious thief.
Through his research and involvment in the deposition, Chatterjee came to the realization that canonization is not bestowed on the basis of morality, but on the basis of strict and committed adherence to the tenets of Catholicism. As an atheist, this was exasperating to him.
Chatterjee quotes Mother Teresa as saying, "We are not nurses, we are not doctors, we are not teachers, we are not social workers. We are religious, we are religious, we are religious." Yet Mother Teresa is known as a humanitarian and one who gave her life to the poor. The reality seems far different.
What do we learn from a book like this? We learn that as Christians we must have a consistent witness in our words and our deeds. We also learn the importance of choosing our heroes with the utmost of care. And we learn that many heroes are manufactured - that the legend far exceeds the reality. -----------------------------------------
Dr. Chaterjee, a Calcutta native, has gone to great lengths to expose Mother Teresa for what she was: a faithful servant of the Catholic Church whose work to help the poor in Calcutta was hugely exaggerated by herself and by the Western media. This substantial book is fairly well-documented, often painstakingly by himself, in videotapes, voice recordings, and photographs. As the Mother freely admitted herself, her primary goals were religious, not humanitarian in nature. I think there can be little doubt but that she was a scheming woman who intentionally misled the world press and public in order to obtain funds, which were used primarily to build religious orders, promote an anti-birth-control agenda, and go mysteriously to the Vatican Bank, and use only a tiny fraction for show to help Calcutta's poor. She shamelessly defended anyone who sent her large enough sums of cash: the Duvaliers, Charles Keating, and so on. Yet these gifts went mostly to help support her nunneries/religious institutions and Catholic families, and even minor expenditures towards the comforts of her residents were denied (such as inexpensive pain medications). Even the corporate gift of ambulances were used almost exclusively to shuttle the nuns around town. While this book has enough documentation to prove the essential truth of its message, I would be remiss in presenting this as a perfectly-written or documented book. For example, on some occasions his documentation consists of phrases such as "it's widely known," or "anyone will tell you." On page 106, he writes "I have seen shiploads of [towels, underwear, aluminium mugs, gifts] arriving at Calcutta port as donations to the Missionaries of Charity"....."These are sold off to the local shops. Also a vast amount of clothes destined for the poor find their way to the Calcutta street markets--any street trader will tell you." At other times he impugns thoughts into Mother Teresa's head. For example, when he describes her speech to President Reagan in which she said "Because of your suffering and pain, you will now understand the suffering and pain of the world." He then states "By 'suffering and pain,' she meant abortion, not the suffering of poverty and disease." While perhaps quite true, it would have been more appropriate to state "she PROBABLY meant...". It's unfortunate that Dr. Chaterjee is one of the few people to truly investigate the facts behind Mother Teresa. Even an ardent fan of hers cannot honestly praise her unless he's read this book and reconciled the facts it contains. Despite its imperfections, this is probably the only book which objectively examines the truth behind Mother Teresa's facade. I would go so far as to say one cannot have any meaningful understanding of her work without reading this book. One can praise Mother Teresa for her faithless devotion to the Catholic Church if one likes, but not for her honesty, her caring attitude towards Calcutta's poor, or her lack of hypocrisy.
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I knew a deeply religious Catholic woman who volunteered to work with the order in the early 80s, and was horrified to see how so little help was given to the needy, and how funds, medicines and goods donated for that purpose were sold, used for the sisters' benefit, discarded, or left to gather dust in cupboards and corners, forgotten and unused (not deliberately stored; storing things showed "lack of trust in Divine Providence"). I worked in a London hospital where sisters from her order occasionally received treatment (Teresa preferred American clinics when she was sick herself), while the unfortunates in their care, in Calcutta as in other cities throughout the world, received little more than the odd paracetamol (acetaminophen) and a bed (sometimes shared) to die in. Dr. Chatterjee's book provides much more evidence of the hypocrisy evident in the order's practices.
In 1994, Lancet editor Robert Fox visited their facility for the dying, and was shocked to find maladministration in diagnosis and treatment practices, a failure to isolate TB patients, and refusal to use strong analgesics for intractable pain. Many volunteers have told how syringes were washed in luke-warm water before being used again; medicines and mosquito nets lay unused in cupboards; diagnostic tests were not performed; patients died needlessly from septicaemia as a direct result of the sisters' poor hygiene, and of readily curable infections for want of a short course of antibiotics (which in some instances the sisters already had in their possession); patients requiring life-saving surgery were refused transfer to hospital. Ambulances donated for the collection of the sick were used as taxis for the sisters; the sick were told to use Corporation ambulances.
Parents were forced to formally renounce their children before the order would accept them; dying Hindus and Muslims were "baptised" without their knowledge or consent.
Susan Shields, who was a member of the order from 1980-89, wrote in the Free Enquirer [...] that 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."
