CUNNING EVIL MOTHER TERESA - SINGLE MOST EMOTIONAL CON-JOB OF THE 20th CENTURY

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MOTHER TERESA - SINGLE MOST EMOTIONAL CON-JOB OF THE 20th CENTURY

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http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Hitchens,Christopher/MissionaryPosition.html

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
Christopher Hitchens (1995)


Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every
possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanour.

.... Thus we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a
prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its
relations to reality just as the illusion itself sets no store by
verification.

— Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion


Mother Teresa's views on peace, and on abortion

When Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, few people
had the poor taste to ask what she had ever done, or even claimed to do,
for the cause of peace. Her address to the ceremony of investiture did
little to resolve any doubt on this score and much to increase it:


'We speak of peace ... I think that today peace is trheatened by
abortion, too, which is a true war, the direct killing of a child by its
own mother. In the Bible we read that God clearly said: 'Even though a
mother did forget her infant, I will not forget him.' Today, abortion is
the worst evil, and the greatest enemy of peace. We who are here today
were wanted by our parents. We would not be here if our parents had not
wanted us. We want children, and we love them. But what about the other
millions? Many are concerned about the children, like those in Africa,
who die in great numbers either from hunger or for other reasons. But
millions of children die intentionally, by the will of their mothers.
Because if a mother can kill her own child, what will prevent us from
killing ourselves, or one another? Nothing.'

... At a vast open-air mass in Knock, Ireland, in 1992, Mother Teresa
made it plain yet again that there is no connection at all in her mind
between the conditions of poverty and misery that she 'combats' and the
inability of the very poor to reach the plateau on which limitation of
family size becomes a rational choice. Addressing a crowd of the devout,
she said,


'Let us promise Our Lady who loves Ireland so much that we will never
allow in this country a single abortion. And no contraceptives.'


In this instance, she fell into the last great fallacy and offence to
which Church teaching on this subject is prone. Ireland is now, to a
great extent, a secular society. It is also a society which has to seek
an accommodation with its huge Protestant-majority province. The Church
claims the right to make law, in states where it is strong enough, for
believers and unbelievers alike. Mother Teresa's 'pacific'
humanitarianism and charity therefore translate directly into an
injunction to the faithful to breed without hindrance, an admonishment
to the rest to live under laws not made by them, and an attack on the
idea of a non-sectarian state. What this does for the cause of peace
does not, in Ireland, take long to estimate.

... It is often said, inside the Church and out of it, that there is
something grotesque about lectures on the sexual life when delivered by
those who have shunned it. ... it might be added that the call to go
forth and multiply, and to take no thought for the morrow, sounds
grotesque when uttered by an elderly virgin whose chief claim to
reverence is that she ministers to the inevitable losers in this very
lottery.

(pp. 58-59)



Mother Teresa helped the poor as a campaign against abortion

The pleasant surprise that awaits the visitor to Calcutta is this: it is
poor and crowded and dirty, in ways which are hard to exaggerate, but it
is anything but abject. Its people are neither inert nor cringing. They
work and they struggle, and as a general rule (especially as compared
with ostensibly richer cities such as Bombay) they do not beg. This is
the city of Tagore, of Ray and Bose and Mrinal Sen, and of a great
flowering of culture and nationalism. There are films, theatres,
university departments and magazines, all of a high quality. The
photographs of Raghubir Singh are a testament to the vitality of the
people, as well as to the beauty and variety of the architecture.
Secular-leftist politics predominate, with a very strong
internationalist temper: hardly unwelcome in a region so poisoned by
brute religion.

When I paid my own visit to the city some years ago, I immediately felt
rather cheated by the anti-Calcutta propaganda put out by the [Malcolm]
Muggeridges of the world. And when I made my way to the offices of the
Missionaries of Charity on Bose Road, I received something of a shock.
First was the inscription over the door, which read 'He that loveth
correction loveth knowledge'. I don't know the provenance of the
quotation, but it had something of the ring of the workhouse about it.
Mother Theresa herself gave me a guided tour. I did not particularly
care for the way that she took kisses bestowed on her sandalled feet as
no more than her due, but I decided to suspend judgment on this -
perhaps it was a local custom that I understood imperfectly. The
orphanage, anyway, was moving and affecting. Very small (no shame in
that) and very clean, it had an encouraging air and seemed to be run by
charming and devoted people. One tiny cot stood empty, its occupant not
having survived the night, and there was earnest discussion about a
vacancy to be filled. I had begun to fumble for a contribution when
Mother Theresa turned to me and said, with a gesture that seemed to take
in the whole scene,


'See, this is how we fight abortion and contraception.'


If not for this, it would have been trifling to point out the
drop-in-a-bucket contribution that such a small establishment makes to
such a gigantic problem. But it is difficult to spend any time at all in
Calcutta and conclude that what it most needs is a campaign against
population control. Nor, of course, does Mother Teresa make this
judgment based on local conditions. She was opposed on principle to
abortion and birth control long before she got there. For her, Calcutta
is simply a front in a much larger war.

(pp. 23-24)



Malcolm Muggeridge: 'So you wouldn't agree with people who say there are
too many children in India?'

Mother Teresa: 'I do not agree because God always provides. He provides
for the flowers and the birds, for everything in the world that he has
created. And those little children are his life. There can never be enough.'

... if it were true that God 'always provides', then, obviously, there
would be no need for the Missionaries of Charity in the first place.

(p.30)





Mother Teresa thought suffering was beautiful; she helped sufferers to
continue suffering

Journalist: 'Do you teach the poor to endure their lot?'

Mother Teresa: 'I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept
their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is
being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.'

(p. 11)

Those prepared to listen to criticism of Mother Teresa's questionable
motives and patently confused sociological policy are still inclined to
believe that her work is essentially humane. Surely, they reason, there
is something morally impressive in a life consecrated to charity. If it
were not for the testimony of those who have seen the shortcomings and
contradictions of her work firsthand, it might be a sufficient argument,
on the grounds that Mother Teresa must have done some genuine good for
the world's suffering people.

However, even here the record is somewhat murky and uneven, and it is
qualified by the same limitations as apply to the rest of Mother
Teresa's work: that such work is undertaken not for its own sake but to
propagandise one highly subjective view of human nature and need, so
that she may one day be counted as the beatific founder of a new order
and discipline within the Church itself. Even in the quotidian details
of ostensibly 'charitable' labour, this unresolved contradiction
repeatedly discloses itself.



A selection of testimonies follow:

[Dr Robin Fox, editor of The Lancet, perhaps the world's leading medical
journal, visited and reported on Mother Teresa's Calcutta work in 17
September 1994:]


'There are doctors who call in from time to time but usually the sisters
and volunteers (some of whom have medical knowledge) make decisions as
best they can. I saw a young man who had been admitted in poor shape
with high fever, and the drugs prescribed had been tetracycline and
paracetamol. Later a visiting doctor diagnosed probable malaria and
substituted chloroquine. Could not someone have looked at a blood film?
Investigations, I was told, are seldom permissible. How about simple
algorithms that might help the sisters and volunteers distinguish the
curable from the incurable? Again no. Such systematic approaches are
alien to the ethos of the home. Mother Teresa prefers providence to
planning; her rules are designed to prevent any drift towards
materialism: the sisters must remain on equal terms with the poor. ...
Finally, how competent are the sisters at managing pain? On a short
visit, I could not judge the power of the spiritual approach, but I was
disturbed to learn the formulary includes no strong analgesics. Along
with the neglect of diagnosis, the lack of good analgesia marks Mother
Teresa's approach as clearly separate from the hospice movement. I know
which I prefer.'


It should be underlined that the state of affairs described by Dr Fox
was not that obtaining in some amateur, impoverished clinic in a
disaster zone. Mother Teresa has been working in Calcutta for four and a
half decades, and for nearly three of them she has been favoured with
immense quantities of money and material. Her 'Home for the Dying',
which was the part of her dominion visited by Dr Fox, is in no
straitened condition. It is as he described it because that is how
Mother Teresa wishes it to be. The neglect of what is commonly
understood as proper medicine or care is not a superficial
contradiction. It is the essence of the endeavour, the same essence that
is evident in a cheerful sign which has been filmed on the wall of
Mother Teresa's morgue. It reads,


'I am going to heaven today.'


(pp. 37-39)



Mary Loudon, a volunteer in Calcutta who has since written extensively
about the lives of nuns and religious women, has this testimony to offer
about the Home for the Dying:


'My initial impression was of all the photographs and footage I've ever
seen of Belsen and places like that, because all the patients had shaved
heads. No chairs anywhere, there were just these stretcher beds. They're
like First World War stretcher beds. There's no garden, no yard even. No
nothing. And I thought what is this? This is two rooms with fifty to
sixty men in one, fifty to sixty women in another. They're dying.
They're not being given a great deal of medical care. They're not being
given painkillers really beyond aspirin and maybe if you're lucky some
Brufen or something, for the sort of pain that goes with terminal cancer
and the things they were dying of ...

'They didn't have enough drips. The needles they used and re-used over
and over and over and you would see some of the nuns rinsing needles
under the cold water tap. And I asked one of the why she was doing it
and she said: 'Well to clean it.' And I said, 'Yes, but why are you not
sterilising it; why are you not boiling water and sterilising your
needles?' She said: 'There's no point. There's no time.'

'... [a boy of fifteen who was dying] had a really relatively simple
kidney complaint that had simply got worse and worse and worse because
he hadn't had antibiotics. And he actually needed an operation. ... [The
American doctor looking after him said...] 'they won't take him to
hospital.' And I said: 'Why? All you have to do is get a cab. Take him
to the nearest hospital, demand that he has treatment. Get him an
operation.' She said: 'They don't do it. They won't do it. If they do it
for one, they do it for everybody.' And I thought - but this kid is
fifteen.'

(pp. 40-41)



The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of
a cult based on death and suffering and subjection. Mother Teresa (who
herself, it should be noted, has checked into some of the finest and
costliest clinics and hospitals in the West during her bouts with heart
trouble and old age) once gave this game away in a filmed interview. She
described a person who was in the last agonies of cancer and suffering
unbearable pain. With a smile, Mother Teresa told the camera what she
told this terminal patient:

'You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.'

Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she
then told of the sufferer's reply:

'Then please tell him to stop kissing me.'


(p. 41)



[From Susan Shields' unpublished manuscript, In Mother's House:]


'For Mother, it was the spiritual well-being of the poor that mattered
most. Material aid was a means of reaching their souls, of showing the
poor that God loved them. In the homes for the dying, Mother taught the
sisters how to secretly baptise those who were dying. Sisters were to
ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a 'ticket to heaven'. An
affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. The sister was then to
pretend she was just cooling the person's forehead with a wet cloth,
while in fact she was baptising him, saying quietly the necessary words.
Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother
Teresa's sisters were baptising Hindus and Moslems.'


(p. 48)



'Is it going too far to liken Mother Teresa to some of our infamous
televangelists, turning their audiences on to what is in God's heart and
mind while encouraging and accepting all donations?'

— Emily Lewis, nurse, who attended Mother Teresa's honouring by the
International Health Organisation in Washington, D.C. in 1989.

(p. 49)





People commonly believe Mother Teresa is a saint, but she performed one
miracle, which turned out to be ...

Mother Teresa is already worshipped as something more than human, but
she has not transcended our common lot to the extent of being cited as a
wonder-worker [i.e. canonised or beatified] by Mother Church.

[Malcolm Muggeridge writes, in his 1971 book, Something Beautiful for
God, about the 'miracle' of Mother Teresa, the evidence for which was a
documentary of the same name, screened in 1969:]


'This is precisely what miracles are for - to reveal the inner reality
of God's outward creation. I am personally persuaded that Ken
[Macmillan, the cameraman] recorded the first authentic photographic
miracle.

'... This Home for the Dying is dimly lit by small windows high up in
the walls, and Ken was adamant that filming was quite impossible there.
.... It was decided that, nonetheless, Ken should have a go, but by way
of insurance he took, as well, some film in an outside courtyard where
some of the inmates were sitting in the sun. In the processed film, the
part taken inside was bathed in a particularly beautiful soft light,
whereas the part taken outside was rather dim and confused. ... I myself
am absolutely convinced that the technically unaccountable light is, in
fact, the Kindly Light [Cardinal] Newman refers to in his well-known
exquisite hymn.

'... I find it not at all surprising that the luminosity [of the love
shown by workers in the home] should register on a photographic film.
The supernatural is only an infinite projection of the natural, as the
furthest horizon is an image of eternity. Jesus put mud on a blind man's
eyes and made him see.'

[Ken Macmillan's direct testimony of the 'miracle' is as follows:]


'During Something Beautiful for God, there was an episode where we were
taken to a building that Mother Teresa called the House of the Dying.
Peter Chafer, the director, said, 'Ah well, it's very dark in here. Do
you think we can get something?' And we had just taken delivery at the
BBC of some new film made by Kodak, which we hadn't had time to test
before we left, so I said to Peter, "Well, we may as well have a go.' So
we shot it. And when we got back several weeks later, a month or two
later, we are sitting in the rushes theatre at Ealing Studios and
eventually up came the shots of the House of the Dying. And it was
surprising. You could see every detail. And I said, 'That's amazing.
That's extraordinary.' And I was going to go on to say, you know, three
cheers for Kodak. I didn't get a chance to say that though, because
Malcolm, sitting in the front row, spun round and said: 'It's divine
light! It's Mother Teresa. You'll find that it's divine light, old boy.'
And three or four days later I found I was being phoned by journalists
from London newspapers who were saying things like: 'We hear you've just
come back from India with Malcolm Muggeridge and you were the witness of
a miracle.'

[RH156RH]

Just keep reading your Koran... RH