If you, like me, were up at 3 a.m. Monday night browsing Twitter, you would have seen a quick trend that soon disappeared come morning entitled “Mother Teresa.”
This was in response to the leader of the Indian political party RSS saying that Mother Teresa’s primary purpose, instead of doing good, was to convert the people who came to her for help.
I know very little about Indian politics and plead ignorance about the character and morals of the person speaking. But he’s right about Mother Teresa. Perhaps more than he knows.
Most people have never heard Mother Teresa called a fraud, a liar and fundamentalist demagogue before, so let me get this out of the way.
Mother Teresa was a fraud, a liar and a fundamentalist demagogue. Everything you think you know about her is a fabrication.
First — her fraudulence. She is often said to have cared for the poor in her Home for the Dying, located in the slum-sprawled city of Kolkata.
She did not provide anything resembling adequate medical care to those she admitted. It is a house for the dying in the most literal sense of the word — it is where people go to die.
Instead of a hospital, where one’s life might potentially be saved, they are greeted with untrained and often violent volunteers administering approximate medication.
One volunteer recounts the death of a man in Mother Teresa’s house, “I stood there in shock, not because I had witnessed a death, but because I had witnessed this volunteer inject this poor man several times, jabbing into his arm with careless force while appearing to have no idea how to find his vein.”
This was in 2009 and resembles the kind of treatment that was commonplace in Mother Teresa’s time there as well.
What is shocking, to me at least, is that this kind of mistreatment still happens long after her death in 1997. By that point she had raised millions of dollars to support her “Missionaries of Charity” organization. There is absolutely no possible way that she could not afford better treatment for the people she pretends to help.
She publicly supported the Duvalier regime in Haiti, the worst dictators in the western hemisphere in their time. She called “Papa Doc” Duvalier a friend of the poor and was paid with money he stole from the people of his country.
She also took stolen money — millions — from Charles Keating, a lout and a swindler who was convicted of defrauding people of millions in the Lincoln Savings & Loan scandal. She acted like his paid PR representative, sending a letter to the judge pleading Keating's case.
Additionally, as a matter of character, people seem to forget that she was against abortions unconditionally as well as condoms. This is the “fundamentalist demagogue” portion of her that isn’t known so well.
Think of it this way: the lack of family planning in places like Kolkata is one of the reasons that so many people die in poverty in her House for the Dying.
To put it another way, breaking human reproductive behavior from the cycles of animals — as Mother Teresa would have it — might give them a better shot at creating a sustainable household. Mother Teresa’s teachings fueled the influx of dying people into her sickly hospice and have helped cause the misery she purported to alleviate.
I feel I must credit Christopher Hitchens, who made these points more than 20 years ago. His book "The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice" is well worth reading.
Mother Teresa is perhaps one of the most revered figures on earth. When one thinks of someone who has only done good, Mother Teresa is one of the first people that comes to mind.
This, therefore, is perhaps the central principle of checking first — it is always better to research things for oneself than to accept the societal narrative based on nothing but what is always repeated.
And it only takes a little bit of research to understand what is patently true: she ruined the lives of mothers who — following their saint — believed that divorce was a sin even in the most disgusting violent marriage, that abortion was unacceptable even in cases of rape and that the concept of sex for pleasure was a faceless horror.
Mother Teresa is the last person who deserved that revered title “mother.”
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