Confined Wisdom

Personally, I hate doing this, even though I do it a lot of times. It feels disgusting and dirty, and seriously, the lack of support and influx of hate-mail it can generate severely discourages me from saying much. In the least, I try to maintain good taste (no matter how subtle) when I go off and point a finger at someone. Because that’s just mean, and plus, I’m not exactly perfect either. To make matters worse, I point a finger at someone who is dead. To make matters even worse, I point a finger at someone who was revered (though not declared) as a saint and has already been beatified, so they’re titled as “Blessed” by the Holy See. The unfortunate subject in this case happens to be the Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, or who many of us know as Mother Teresa.

Alright there, keep your knickers on and stop with the horrified “oohs” and aahs” and just hear me out. It may seem to you that I have blasphemed, but let’s look at this realistically. The Mother was human. Her saintly status was bestowed upon her by other humans. All regular people. But she did a lot of (arguably) good deeds for the world, and in particular for the poor. So why am I ranting on against her? Do I suspect her of foul play? Not exactly. Am I so cynical that I can not appreciate the one truly good person that existed in this world in the last 50 years? Yes, I sort of am, but I do have a case here. Like I said earlier, hear me out.

In 1979, upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Mother Teresa said the following:

“I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child – a direct killing of the innocent child – murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love, and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even his life to love us. So the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love – that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts. By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. And by abortion, the father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. That father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion. Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.”

Of course, this does not mean that I support abortion, nor am I against peace and love, but claiming abortion as the “greatest destroyer of peace” is a touch too far I think. In addition, Mother Teresa was also the biggest campaigner against the use of contraceptives and methods of birth control. If we factor that in to the country where she spent most of her life, India, we can see a problem arising.

By discouraging contraception and abortion, which in numerous cases could have solved many of the problems that her hospice in Calcutta catered to, Mother Teresa was promoting live births to parents who couldn’t afford (more) children because she thought she could eventually take them under the “care” of her institution. Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity project was single-handedly the biggest charity project of that time in that part of the world to not actually produce any success stories. At least not in terms of developing institutions that served as health care centers. Mother Teresa was building centers of death, throughout India and the world. A place where people could die peacefully, with love around them, but received little or no treatment. These were buildings filled with dying men, women and children, and nurses (although we cannot guarantee they were certified as such) observing no codes of hygienic conduct. The Mother was not concerned in helping to reduce poverty. She was not concerned with solving any real issues that the third world was facing – poverty, disease, over-population. She only wanted to give them love before they died. In real world terms, that doesn’t really mean much. But nobody noticed.

Considering the amount of donations she received from global charities, people around the world, and more notably from corrupt allies such as Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, new age spiritualist John-Roger, and a disgraced Charles Keating (of the savings and loan scandal in the 1980s), the Missionaries of Charity should have developed hospices and medical care centers around the world. Instead, the money was used, over time, to open 500 convents in 120 countries. Yes, convents. Schools of Catholic teachings. Let’s also not forget that when the Mother fell ill in 1996, she preferred to be treated in a modern clinic in California, rather than one of her own primitive and impoverished facilities that were apparently good enough for the poor of the world.

And it goes deeper.

Through her rise to power, the Mother went on board with many political and corporate giants, accepting their charities humbly and in return endorsing them in a positive manner. Politicians and businessmen that had come under some negative light sought the help of Mother Teresa, sending their chartered jets to pick her up and bring her over so they could “donate” some money in exchange for her saying the kindest of words in the media about them. Former US President Ronald Reagan, media tycoon Robert Maxwell as well as the communist yet atheistic leadership of Albania have all been endorsed by the Mother, in exchange for millions of charity dollars, of course. In fact, Maxwell’s Mirror franchise became the unofficial propaganda newspaper for the Mother’s agenda. Bit by bit, the mother built her charity conglomerate, spreading from India on to the world.

Mother Teresa was supported by two basic agendas through her life. The first was a political agenda – not in the literal sense of political parties and voters, but rather a Catholic fundamentalist agenda, with the main supporter from the head of the Catholic church himself, the Pope. Which probably explains why the Saint of Calcutta was hardly ever in Calcutta. Over time, the Mother became the global face of the papacy, which has continuously been under scrutiny from various factions of society. By placing a frail old woman who is shown to serve the impoverished of the world, the Catholic church earned brownie points from the world over on good deeds alone. She went on spreading the message of peace and love, with undertones of anti-abortion, distaste towards contraceptives and negative views on alternate sexual lifestyles, all of which echoed the papal propaganda.

The second, and less transparent agenda that the Mother secretly supported, was the overall occidental agenda, easily explained as the white supremacist and capitalist agenda of the Western world. Here was a woman from the West (sort of, she’s from Albania) who was selflessly helping the poor and needy of India, with a mission to spread love through the entire third world. It was beautiful. The West needs that. They need to feel that one of them is doing something for the less fortunate of the world. They can then lay claim to that individual as one of their own, and parade her around as a messenger of peace and love. And that’s exactly what they did. Hailed as an activist for the poor, the Mother became a symbol of goodwill from the West, casting her warm shadow over the left-out-in-the-cold victims of disease, poverty and cruelty.

In this time of evil and godlessness, Mother Teresa appeared as a savior to restore the common man’s belief in a world that is good. It isn’t our fault. Mother Teresa was promoted as such. Hailed as a divine saint and ambassador of humanity, the Mother died in 1997 leaving behind a string of unanswered questions that perhaps no one, out of pure piety, dared to ask her. I have written this piece to restore your faith in this world where nothing is what it seems, and behind the images that we are exposed to, are a web of lies and deceit. True story.

The above article, although entirely my opinion, would not have been possible without the research of Christopher Hitchens, who wrote the controversial book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.