The Devil in Mother Teresa

Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, familiar to millions around the world as Mother Teresa, was canonised on the 4th of September 2016, in Saint Peter’s Square by Pope Francis. And whilst in centuries past it was impossible to accurately analyse the reputation of those that Rome deemed fit to deify, we have a unique advantage over our ancestors. In the 21st century, we can investigate and expose the truth behind candidates for sainthood.

Saint Teresa was born in Skopje (now North Macedonia) in 1910. She travelled to Dublin, aged 18, and joined the Sisters of Loreto order. A year later she moved to Calcutta (Kolkata) and began teaching. It was around this time that she witnessed the humanitarian nightmare of the 1943 Bengal famine. The experience, and Jesus “talking to her” changed the course of her life. She shot to international fame in 1969 when she was the focus of a BBC documentary. Mother Teresa’s name and iconic appearance became synonymous with a particular brand of maternal selfless devotion to the poor.

Her charity suddenly benefited from many wealthy donors from around the world. In 1979 she won the Nobel Peace Prize. For the media-savvy Catholic church spin-doctors, the humble elderly charity worker is an attractive altruistic brand. But on closer inspection, the Albanian nun isn’t the spotless PR goldmine that the ailing church needs as a lifeline to maintain dwindling interest from Western congregations.

One of the first to witness disturbing details from within her charity was British doctor Jack Preger. Whilst working for her he noticed the nuns weren’t delivering proper care…

‘Needles were used over and over unsterilised. One woman with burns was refused painkillers — I smuggled some in for her. Her nuns had to whip themselves, wear chains with spikes… she believed suffering redeemed the world. They had the money to run a decent hospital for poor people, but they never did. They said, ‘We will pray for the alleviation of pain without providing treatment.’

Capitalising on her telegenic high profile friendship with Pope John Paul II, her canonisation provided an expedient media turnaround on the disastrous interminable paedophilia scandal. Pope Francis’s savvy stage management meant that Blessed Teresa of Calcutta was fast-tracked to sainthood with such indecent speed I’m surprised it didn’t knock her trademark headscarf off! The upper echelons of the Vatican are well aware of the valid criticism of her methods, motivations and even her personal crisis of faith, yet her career as the benevolent highly-weathered face of Vatican 2.1 made her irresistible nonetheless. 2016 was the Catholic Church’s Year of Mercy and Pope Francis himself had already proved an incredible and iconoclastic example of succour and rapport with the poor. The current pope’s humble and sincere nature is apparent and genuine, even to a non-Catholic like myself. Yet even he cannot expunge the sins of this salacious saint.

To start with, the Mother Superior’s care for the sick and poor was far from universal. It’s widely acknowledged her institutions favoured Catholics, a distinct minority at her power base in Calcutta. On her orders patients were coerced into conversion to Catholicism to obtain food or shelter, often at that most humbling, frighteningly vulnerable time near death. Unrequested baptisms on dying Hindu and Muslim patients were allegedly commonplace.

A former member of the Missionaries of Charity, Susan Shields, reported that “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 that she was just cooling the patient’s head with a wet cloth, while in fact, she was baptising him”, whispering the necessary incantations. Secrecy was important lest Mother Teresa’s acolytes’ clandestine conversions of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Protestants be exposed.

Whilst non-religious folk may argue that it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference what magic words are chanted or not, it does demonstrate a remarkable disregard for the dignity and religious convictions of that agonised individual. To impose an unwanted evangelical act on a person in their final moments shows an utter contempt for that person’s beliefs. It demonstrates a type of narcissistic attitude wherein the lives of others have value purely as statistics in your spiritual ledger. This procedure was done countless times with the express command of Mother Teresa. The magical matriach wasn’t only involved in religious interference. If her public persona was the apolitical heroine she had no problem meddling with Indian and global politics. In 1975 when India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi made sweeping crackdowns on human rights and curtailed civil liberties, the gentile geriatric publicly endorsed her authoritarian stance. She encouraged her followers to submit to the appalling regressions in human rights saying that “People are happier. There are more jobs. There are no strikes.”

Her friendship with the controversial prime minister wasn’t the only strange bedfellow for the supposed poster girl of benevolence. She frequently courted questionable, decidedly unchristian company. Teresa’s open support of Haitian dictator, mass murderer and violent voodoo cultist François “Popa Doc” Duvalier is one vivid example. The Sister of Charity publicly endorsed his regime of terror, labelling the self-styled cannibal Duvalier as someone who “loved the poor”. Duvalier financially raped the already poverty-stricken banana republic’s economy, leaving it crippled in a debt which breaks the back of Haitians still.

She was also linked to several high profile corrupt politicians, robber-barons and embezzling businessmen, such as Robert Maxwell. She even wrote letters to judges and presidents begging clemency for criminal millionaires like Charles Keating. Coincidentally he donated millions to the Reverend Mother which she refused to return even after corruption investigations. Keating even gave her the use of his private jet. It’s slightly incongruous that a supposed apolitical religious advocate, with a vow of poverty, was so interested in cosying up to monstrous dictators and jailbird businessmen. It seems the common denominator in these devilish dealings was nothing more spiritual than an unholy interest in money. Lots and lots of money.

Dr Aroup Chatterjee, an esteemed Indian-born clinician who worked closely with Mother Teresa within her organisation, began to lift the lid on some shady dealings when he moved to the safety of the UK. Together with British journalists such as the late great Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ali, they produced a book and documentary outlining her financial mismanagement, neglectful medical practices, and connections to corrupt politicians and underworld crime figures.

Underling all the dirty money was the perverse quackery of her mission’s medical practices. Her methodology was not treatment or cures, but pious propagation of disease and starvation. The icing on this Munchausen by proxy flavoured cake was Mother Teresa’s active campaigning against contraception and safe sex. By the time she came to global prominence as a celibate celebrity, she had already carved out quite an empire for herself. Her “Missionaries of Charity” consisted of thousands of nuns, lay staff and an impressive portfolio of premises spanning 133 countries. They nominally worked with the poor and the perishing, with a particular focus on HIV/AIDS and children. The works of her Mission won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

When she wasn’t globetrotting glamorous charity gigs on the arms of princesses and patrons, she was campaigning voraciously against the “evils” of contraception and abortion whilst surrounded daily by the devastating starvation of abandoned children ravaged by AIDS. Her unquestionable authority among the vulnerable disciples in third world countries and Latin America meant that millions upon millions of children were born to starve to death or die of agonising diseases, merely to comply with her subjective self-serving interpretation of Catholicism. This steady tide of death and misery ensured that her hospices and orphanages were always full of what she called “beautiful suffering “.

At a casual glance, the photogenic facilities of the Missionaries of Charity were chock full of patients receiving medical help and meals. However, on closer inspection of the statistics, the Missionaries of Charity weren’t even ranked in the top charitable organisations in the city of Calcutta. This was primarily due to how relatively few individuals were actually served. Most of the premises the Missionaries of Charity owned were little more than administration operations working to convert as many locals as possible to Roman Catholicism. In locations outside of India, such as the Missionaries of Charity in Papua New Guinea, all eight facilities had absolutely no patients at all! There were purely conversion centres and not even of the lifesaving kind run by the so-called Protestant “Soupers” during the Irish famine who fed the starving at the price of ex-communication and re-baptising in the colonial covenant.

So instead of supplying the hungry and the terminally ill with food, medicine and shelter, the majority of charitable funds were being funnelled into running a bureaucracy whose primary role was assimilating uneducated local and indigenous peoples in to a personality cult with Mother Teresa at the helm. Despite refusing to allow advanced medical treatments to cure or alleviate the suffering of those in her care, she happily accepted modern medicine when it came to her own hospital treatments, including heart surgery and a pacemaker. The hypocrisy is breathtaking, the only misanthrope who comes close was Mahatma Gandhi allowing loved ones to die painfully of treatable diseases by forbidding them medicine whilst simultaneously availing of modern remedies to save his own skin.

There was something extremely dark at the heart of Mother Teresa’s sacred sadistic vision of poverty. Rather than a social issue to be remedied she viewed the suffering of others as an ascetic ritual, a type of medium through which she could demonstrate her magnanimous virtue. Without the agony caused by the disease and hunger of her disciples, there could be no opportunity for her to display her charitable virtues. Redemption requires damnation. If everyone is healthy who can she healthy? One of the many self-admission of this ethos was her answer to a question at a press conference in 1981. When asked: “Do you teach the poor to endure their lot?” Mother Teresa chillingly replied: “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.”

The aim of her Missions was not to cure or prevent. This is Munchausen by proxy syndrome on a scale of millions. For whose glory then was this suffering? How many thousands of men, women and children have been exposed to HIV/AIDS and starvation to satisfy this woman’s staggering insatiable arrogance? Bizarrely witnesses testified that conditions within said hospices and orphanages were occasionally worse than even the most dreadful and hellish kips which those victims were “rescued” from. All this despite the steady flow of cash and every increasing purchase of premises around the globe. The patients were pawns in her game of misery and pain, plain and simple.

In 1991 when Robin Fox of the British medical journal The Lancet visited her notorious “Home for Dying Destitutes” in Calcutta he was astonished by the lack of care and professionalism. Individuals with no medical knowledge, equipped only with rosary beads, were routinely making decisions which could hasten death or increase suffering among the unfortunate inmates. Foxes’ investigation also noted that whilst wounds were cleaned and people were spoken to kindly, there was very little attention paid to pain management. The pain it seems was all part of the “graceful suffering” of Teresa’s vision.

The physical conditions of the facility were likewise pitiful and tortuous. There is little to distinguish between patients with a chance of survival, those curable by conventional medicine, and those who were terminally ill. Basically, they were all deprived of medicine and therapy with the assumption they would all die. And die they did, miserably and frequently unnecessarily. No wonder Mother Teresa herself laconically labelled them “Houses of the Dying”. But these gross, immoral breaches of human rights and dignity were not only confined to that one location The Lancet visited. Nor were they confined to the nineties.

Université de Montréal academics reviewed the modus operandi of the Missionaries of Charity facilities in 2013 and labelled the practice as “caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it, … [her] questionable political contacts, suspicious management of the enormous sums of money received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce.”

Malpractice and criminality aside, the incumbent saint’s own faith was equally fraudulent. Bizarrely she questioned her own belief in that most fundamental tenets of Christianity: the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This despite his alleged torment during the passion being the inspiration for the suffering she so sinisterly valued in those within her care. Imagine that hypocrisy, that arrogance. In her Will, she cynically ordered that all of her personal correspondence be destroyed. But when she eventually died in 1997 a selection of her letters were saved by her disciples and published posthumously. In these works, she confesses to losing her faith in God. A lot. It appears this was no temporary crisis of faith but lasted for decades throughout her life, at the very heights of her proselytising to multitudes. She was the ultimate hyperbole of not practising what she preached.

The woman demanded generations of destitute people endure AIDS, starvation and slow painful death for a religious dogma she didn’t even believe in herself! Unlike other small-time religious and political hypocrites and demagogues who don’t believe their own bullshit Mother Teresa was in a uniquely powerful, self-appointed position. She totally controlled countless lives with her prescriptions and doctrine. To raise her up now posthumously to superhuman status worsens the insult to humanity and increases her malevolent power after death. Her abuse of this influence, her faux-piety and the demonstration of insincerity with her counterfeit Christianity make her a uniquely reprehensible person.

Doubtless, she occasionally did some good, as even a stopped clock is correct twice daily, it was likely an epiphenomenon of the sheer massive amount of amoral havoc she wrought. That her false image as a faultless champion of the impoverished inspired some sincere devotees around the world to do good is an unintentional side effect, easily dwarfed by a cultish reign that perpetuated and exacerbated the misery of thousands. The Catholic Church has offered us enough false idols to worship, mostly men but occasionally women whose brutish exploitation of the weak and vulnerable was made possible by unquestioning submission of ourselves and our children to the assumed holy power of all too imperfect humans. Granted Mother Teresa did not openly petition for her life to be held up on such a pedestal as sainthood, though it would be disingenuous of any Catholic observer to say that she didn’t have it in mind. Courting the international media like a demonic debutant definitely gets you in the headlines. However, Pope Francis is doing just that, setting in stone and doubtlessly in the hearts of countless religious devotees the image of a woman far from perfect or even far from moderately moral.

If a human being is to be presented as a supernaturally good example of humanity then their history and intentions must be fair game for examination and criticism. The fact that she spent part of her long life in Ireland, where her legacy is still extremely powerful, means the Irish faithful more than most need to take a hard look at this supposed paragon of perfection. With Irish people more conscious than ever of the disastrous effects of allowing Catholic despot’s activities to go unchecked and also of the necessity for family planning and abortion legislation, we need to treat the Sainthood of Mother Teresa with informed, critical eyes.

Unquestioned obedience to all-too-human authorities presenting themselves as the voice of God invites suffering, exploitation and criminality. The Irish Catholic psyche is a heritage of obsequious submission to false idols. We know better than most the devastating tragedy of offering up our offspring unquestioningly and the disastrous, devastating effects of allowing dogma and miseducation to guide reproductive rights. Let the Mother Teresa “effect” be an example of this folly. Not the kind of example that Pope Francis would intend her to be, but an answer to our prayers nonetheless.