On Monday 23 February 2015, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat claimed that Mother Teresa’s charity work was merely subterfuge to convert poor and vulnerable people to Christianity:“It’s good to work for a cause with selfless intentions.
But Mother Teresa’s work had ulterior motive, which was to convert the person who was being served to Christianity. In the name of service, religious conversions were made. This was followed by other institutes, too”.Also at the function in the village of Bharatpur,, former DGP of Border Security Force Prakash Singh, too, criticised Mother Teresa.
“There are many other organizations that have done far more good work than her. But Christians with the help of media were able to publicize their work.
Gagging Freedom of Speech
He also mentioned that during his posting in the Northeast, he had witnessed forced conversion of tribal by Roman Catholics. Bhagwat’s remarks elicited the usual outrage from opposition parties claiming to represent ‘secularism’. Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Tuesday criticised RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat for his comments on Mother Teresa, saying she was a “noble soul” and should be spared.
“I worked with Mother Teresa for a few months at Nirmal Hriday ashram in Kolkata. She was a noble soul. Please spare her”.
The Congress said the ruling BJP must apologise for the RSS, its ideological mentor. Congress MP Ashwani Kumar said:
“This is just an attempt to confuse people, hide real issues and polarise communities. We will bring a calling attention motion, raise Mohan Bhagwat’s comments in Parliament and outside.”
He said Indians should take pride on Mother Teresa’s work rather than make such comments. Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Yogendra Yadav too objected to Bhagwat’s statement and said the minority of the country are not dependent on the ruling party. Cardinal Gracias was of the view that the RSS chief has been misinformed, and that the Mother does not need any defence and hoped that Bhagwat corrected his statement.
Sunita Kumar of Missionaries of Charity rued the remark and said:
“Sadly, Mr Bhagwat is misinformed. Mother believed in all faith, there was never any attempt to convert, the tradition continues even today. We are not worried with about the RSS chief’s comment, we have nothing to hide, we live in peace.”
However BJP leader Meenakshi Lekhi on 24 February claimed that Mother Teresa had herself in an interview said that her job was to bring people to the fold of Christianity:
“And kindly read Navin Chawla’s book, who was an old Congress loyalist, on Mother Teresa, where Mother Teresa herself during an interview says that ‘a lot of people confuse me as social worker, I am not a social worker. I am in the service of Jesus and my job is to spread the word of Christianity and bring people to its fold’. “
Indeed the hardcore Catholic fundamentalist never disguised her aims or disgust for Hinduism, and indeed her negative attitudes towards reformist and modernising trends in the Catholic Church itself. Ordained as Sister Agnes, this Albanian nun paraded around the world for years under the regal title of Mother Teresa. So why the outrage at the RSS stating the obvious?
In his 1995 book The Missionary Position, late author Christopher Hitchens (an uncompromising atheist and secularist) exposed Mother Teresa in a much more damning light than anything uttered by the RSS:
“As ever, the true address of the missionary is to the self-satisfaction of the sponsor and the donor, and not to the needs of the down trodden. Helpless infants, abandoned derelicts, lepers and the terminally ill are the raw material for demonstrations of compassion. They are in no position to complain, and their passivity and abjection is considered a sterling trait. It is time to recognize that the world’s leading exponent of this false consolation is herself a demagogue, and obscuranist and a servant of earthly powers.”
Western media never hesitates to portray the holy men of Hinduism in the most negative light. In cinema we have the ‘Guru’, a film showing how Indians masquerading as Oriental mystics in order to fleece westerners of their cash under the camouflage of spiritual enlightenment. Bollywood is not far behind, notably with Amir Khan’s PK which singles out Hinduism for mockery in keeping with his ‘secularismThis competes with supposedly fact-based documentaries by such prestigious outlets as the BBC, CNN and NDTV.
Holy figures are again shown to be figures of revulsion, obsessed by money, sex and power, a bizarre chimera of Wolf of Wall Street meets Eastern mysticism. Even when facts are shown to be false, there is no apology nor retraction. Instead the colonialist and racist stereotypes are merely replayed and regurgitated.
India is the spiritual battleground as western ideologies, both religious and their secular progeny, work hard to destroy the last rampart against monotheism. Hinduism is the biggest threat to these one dimensional ideas which like their jealous deity brook no rivals.
Hence then entire media apparatus is focused on breaking down spiritual resistance in the name of ‘progress’. In this regard even such dangerous demagogues like Mother Teresa, who would be a laughing stock in developed nations, is shoved down the throats of India’s masses in this macabre replay of the White Man’s Burden. Western media and a host of ‘adjuncts’ do not attempt to even understand the ancient Hindu culture they are constantly denigrating. Hence the manufacture of a stifling discourse where freedom of speech available to others is off limits for Hindus such as Bhagwat.
The Wolf of Kolkotta
The myth of Mother Teresa was born when Malcolm Muggeridge filmed her work in the Kolkotta slums in 1969 for the BBC documentary, later made into a book, Something Beautiful for God.
Muggeridge was a regular on BBC screens after serving as a soldier and a spy during the Second World War, becoming known in his later years as a religious and moral campaigner. He was an anti-abortion activist who shared the hardcore Catholic orthodoxy of the Albanian missionary.
He died in 1990. But in the book ‘Pinkoes and Traitors’, Professor John Seaton has examined previously unseen documents and interviewed women who worked at or with the corporation at the time, to uncover some shocking facts:
“Huw Wheldon – a great public service broadcaster, and Malcolm Muggeridge, the anguished voice of dissent of the time – were both gropers.”
Indeed Muggeridge was very much part of the sexual predator culture that saturated the BBC during the 1970s and 1980s, large parts of which were only exposed after the death of prolific paedophile and rapist entertainer Jimmy Saville – who was himself honoured by the Catholic Church with a Papal knighthood by being made a Knight Commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Gregory the Great (KCSG) by Pope John Paul II in 1990. It is these hallowed institution of British media which helped to foster the negative image of Hinduism through the distorted camera lens of serial sex pests and gropers such as Muggeridge; and even now has the audacity to lecture Modi’s government on the values of civilised behaviour.
In 1994, the editor of the medical journal Lancet, Dr. Robin Fox, found that even the most basic medication and medical screening processes were missing in Teresa’s unhygienic clinics. In fact the conditions were incredibly primitive when one considers the amount of money that has been lavished on the Albanian born missionary.
Volunteer worker Mary Loudon accurately compared Teresa’s Home for the Dying to concentration camps like Belsen. Patients were not given pain killers, antibiotics, have enough drips, and the needles were being washed in cold water rather than being sterilised in the relatively simple process of using boiling water. Not only did Teresa receive lavish contributions, but she herself regularly checked into the most expensive hospitals in the West. This was the same hypocrite who told terminally ill patients that they should be grateful for their suffering, for it was Christ’s way of kissing them.
Even in western countries her other worldly approach with its contempt for society’s most vulnerable was in evidence. In the San Francisco branch, homeless inmates were again denied proper medication and instead offered prayer and sacrifice. TB is not uncommon in such places due to the unhygienic conditions. Mother Teresa encouraged the poor to bare their suffering as it was Christ’s way of kissing them.
Her hospitals and clinics consisted of penalstyle unhygienic holding pens which made battery farming of hens look like the Ritz. Meanwhile Mother Teresa was treated in a private hospital owned by the very people whose religion she spent her entire life denigrating and setting out to annihilate using the old usual tactic of social service in order to ensnare the desperate and needy into her bony fingered vice trap. For Agnes abortion and even contraception was a crime worse than that of poverty. For this she condemned millions into poverty as well as a lifetime of unwanted pregnancies with advice on matters which being a nun she would probably not have experience of.
Her concern for human suffering was a well known yet little publicised sham for siphoning millions into private bank accounts of the Sisters of Charity then sent to the Vatican. If she was so concerned for the poor why would this vile specimen of humanity speedily hasten to Bhopal in 1984 after the poisoning of thousands by gas from the Union Carbide plant and encourage them to “forgive”. What about the western company which caused the poisoning? Why the silence? But then this disgusting loathsome evil putrid mass of walking flesh always did prefer the company of the rich and powerful.
There seemed to be nothing in the conscience of this ugly Behemoth which would deter her from making a complete joke of her sheep like adoring millions. With the Union Carbide industrial calamity in Bhopal in1984, Mother Teresa arrived at the airport with the words of counsel “Forgive,forgive”. But what was there to forgive? And why should only the poor be asked to do this? For too long has Mother Teresa been immune from rational critique.
The Missionaries of Charity have never been accountable to anyone for the vast donations they have received. Robert Maxwell allowed Teresa to use his newspaper group to raise money. In the early 1980s, Charles Keating, a conservative and fundamentalist American Catholic, fleeced investors in this Savings and Loan scandal. In 1992 he was eventually brought to trial. Before this he has made generous donations of investors money to Mother Teresa and given her the use of his private jet.
For this reason the Catholic fundamentalist nun pleased with Judge Lance Ito to show clemency to the Catholic fraudster. A reply sent by Paul Turley, Deputy District Attorney for Los Angeles , that she should instead follow Jesus’ teachings and return the money, elicited no response form the pompous missionary leader. The Teresa operation in Kolkotta is the remnant of what was once a vast empire of conquest and crusading, directly linked to European imperialism.
Poverty as Profit Motive
The myth of altruism and generosity surrounding Mother Teresa is further dispelled in a paper by Serge Larivée and Genevieve Chenard of University of Montreal’s Department of Psychoeducation and Carole Sénéchal of the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Education. Published in the March 2014 issue of the journal Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses, itis an analysis of the published writings about Mother Teresa. Like the journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, who is amply quoted in their analysis, the researchers conclude that her hallowed image—which does not stand up to analysis of the facts—was constructed, and that her beatification was orchestrated by an effective media relations campaign.
“While looking for documentation on the phenomenon of altruism for a seminar on ethics, one of us stumbled upon the life and work of one of Catholic Church’s most celebrated woman and now part of our collective imagination—Mother Teresa—whose real name was Agnes Gonxha,” says Professor Larivée, who led the research. “The description was so ecstatic that it piqued our curiosity and pushed us to research further.”
As a result, the three researchers collected 502 documents on the life and work of Mother Teresa. After eliminating 195 duplicates, they consulted 287 documents to conduct their analysis, representing 96% of the literature on the founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity (OMC). Facts debunk the myth of Mother Teresa, such as “her rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce.”
Mother Teresa was generous with her prayers but rather miserly with her foundation’s millions when it came to humanity’s suffering. During numerous floods in India or following the explosion of a pesticide plant in Bhopal, she offered numerous prayers and medallions of the Virgin Mary but no direct or monetary aid. On the other hand, she had no qualms about accepting the Legion of Honour and a grant from the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. Millions of dollars were transferred to the MCO’s various bank accounts, but most of the accounts were kept secret, Larivée says. “Given the parsimonious management of Mother Theresa’s works, one may ask where the millions of dollars for the poorest of the poor have gone?”
Now compare all this blind hero worship of Sister Agnes to the treatment of Sathya Sai Baba. The media portrayal of his death in 2011, especially by the BBC, was almost wholly negative. Little was mentioned of his philanthropic activities such as providing fresh clean drinking water for thousands of poverty stricken villages in India , nor the state of the art modern hi-tech hospitals where patients are treated for free.
The latter is by no means an insignificant fact in a country like India where millions suffer from adequate health care. It would be a significant fact in America where millions of decent, ordinary hard working people lack any health cover and where the doctors are more interested in your wallet than your well-being.
News media such as the BBC muck raked as much defamatory abuse that yellow journalism could muster in their coverage of Sathya Sai Baba’s death focusing on whether his miracles were real and resurrecting allegations of sexual misconduct which have not only failed to be proven but in fact been withdrawn in the star witness case. Where was all the ‘secular’ outrage then? Secularism means state neutrality in religion. Religious beliefs should not have any privileged status over secular ideas. The state should not fund religious institutions.
There should be full rational scrutiny of beliefs. Is this being allowed to happen with Mother Teresa? As soon as the RSS speaks up on the nefarious and devious motives of this sinister figure, it is guilty of attacking all minorities. Yet what Bhagwat said is merely what Hitchens wrote back in 1995, with the exception that the British-born writer elaborated on it in more detail.
Why the double standards? This can be explained by the fact that ‘secularism’ in India is far from neutral. Indeed it has morphed into a gagging tool to silence any Hindu thought or aspiration. What Bhagwat said would have gone unnoticed it uttered by a white European. But because an Indian and Hindu had dared to state the obvious, it immediately becomes a political crisis and above all a threat to secularism.
How inconvenient then that if Mother Teresa and her types had their way there would be no secularism, no free speech, no freedom of thought, and scant democracy. That is why in much of the developed world, figures like Mother Teresa would be regarded with a mixture of pity and contempt.
Teresa as Apologist for Fascism and Genocide
While claiming to be above politics, Mother Teresa backed the pro-Franco Catholic and fascist forces in Spain in their opposition to divorce, abortion and birth control legislation by the democratic government. Teresa visited London in 1988. Ignoring the plight of the homeless, she had a private meeting with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to discuss legislation to limit the availability of abortion.
Mother Teresa praised Mengistu in order to allow her missionaries to work in Ethiopia. Mother Teresa visited Nicaraguato admonish the Sandanista regime. But she said nothing against Miguel Obando Bravo, the Cardinal Archbishop of Managuaas well as being official patron and confessor to the Contra rebels, who madeit deliberate policy to attack clinics, schools, and farms.
Not a word against Guatamala’s regime for its paramilitary death squads and extirpation of the indigenous people, but instead praise for how peaceful the country was. Agnes/Teresa praised Jean-Claude ‘Baby-Doc’ Duvalier as a president loved by his people.
In January 1981, Mother Teresa visited Haiti where she praised the Duvalier dictatorship for being so close and familiar with their impoverished and oppressed subjects. Teresa was awarded the national Légion d’honneur and appeared in the regime mouthpiece L’Assautwith the dictator’s wife Michèle Duvalier.
It seemed nothing could sink any lower than a public figure projecting one of the worst dictatorships known to humanity than the Duvalier dynasty of Haiti. She did not even mind their use of Voudon ‘bogeymen’ to instil fear in the minds of millions of Haitians even if this did go against the Catholic Church in that country. Money of course was more holy than even a belief in Jesus, which to paraphrase Pope Leo X, has been a myth which has served the Papacy very well indeed.
Yet she did go lower, laying a wreath at the shrine of communist despot Enver Hoxha of Albania , under whose rule she would not have even been allowed to pray to the god (and myth) which served her so well let alone don her dirty habit and become a swindler in ecclesiastical garb.
In 1990, Teresa was allowed to visit Tirana and place a wreath at the monument for Mother Albania and a bouquet of flowers on the grave of Enver Hoxha , Albania’s brutal communist leader who had suppressed all religion. The Mother Albania monument was a symbol of Greater Albania, encompassing not just Albania, but also Kosovo, and parts of Serbia, Montenegro ,and Greece . Indeed in Macedonia and Kosovo, Albanian secessionists brandish pictures of Mother Teresa. Hitchens:
“The picture, and its context, announce Mother Teresa as what she is: a religious fundamentalist, a political operative, a primitive sermonizer and an accomplice of worldly secular powers. Her mission has always been of this kind. The irony is that she has never been able to induce anybody to believe her.”
What modern hospital did Teresa ever open? How many villages benefited from her efforts to give them running water? How many development projects did she inaugurate? How many free schools and universities did she start? Why was this Mother Teresa creature so keen to point out poverty in India when her own Albanian homeland remains perhaps the poorest nation in Europe, joining other countries in the region in having people trafficking for the sex trade as its main export commodity?
If she loved the poor so much why were they kept at bay during her regal funeral procession? If she thought poverty and misery were a gift from Christ why was she constantly jet-setting around the world, often by private aircraft, in a manner more be fitting a villain from James Bond? If her clinics were so good why was she treated in a India’s most prestigious and expensive hospitals?
Did Teresa ever teach respect for all religions? Rhetorical question since she even supported the Church’s persecution of Galileo just because he stated that the earth revolved around the sun. Are India’s ‘secularists’ going to defend superstitious behaviour like that?
On the flip side how many lavish foreign trips did Sathya Sai Baba make? In fact he only ever went abroad once. Did he ever publicly defend criminals who thought themselves above the law? Did he pay homage and deliberately keep the company of fascist despots who crushed the aspirations of their own people, tortured them, incarcerated them, let them starve while they enjoyed a lifestyle that would be the envy of French aristocrats before the revolution of 1789?
Did Sathya Sai Baba ever keep company of the Duvalier clan or Enver Hoxha? Did he interfere in people’s personal lives to the extent of demanding loyalty when it flew in the race of all reason and rationality, as Teresa demanded abortion and contraception be stopped in countries where the demographic time bomb is ticking.
Intellectual Sado-Masochism of India’s ‘Secularists’
Mother Teresa even proudly announced her opposition to scientific achievements when they went against the teachings of her beloved imperialist dogmatic intolerant Church. By contrast Sathya Sai Baba embraced the modern world as evidenced by practical attempts to help India’s most poverty stricken villages or towns and the modern hi-tech hospital where he himself was treated.
How many complaints of HIV infection, TB and other nasty diseases came from this aforementioned medical centre? When did it ever lack basic facilities? Sathya Sai Baba spoke of the truth in all religions, in contrast to the dogmatic, inflexible and intolerant message of Mother Teresa who hated the very culture and beliefs in the nation which had played host to her.
In 1979 Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize despite not actually earning it. On acceptance she inveighed against abortion and family planning. In an open air mass in Knock in Ireland, she again spoke on the same theme, hoping Ireland would outlaw both abortion and even contraception.
This at a time when hundreds of innocent children were being raped and physically abused and mentally traumatised by priests and nuns in the powerful Catholic Church, which the Vatican took many pains to suppress. Teresa gave no thought to the demographic implications of her advice let alone recognise the sexual depravity being carried on right under her very nose by her very own Catholic Church, or even as it turns out by Malcolm Muggeridge and Jimmy Saville.
When did Sathya Sai Baba ever compromise for fame and glory. By contrast this despicable women Teresa even threw her own anti-abortionism in the dustbin when it suited her, accepting friendship and honours from Indira Gandhi, even though the latter brutally enforced family planning through enforced sterilisation.
When did Sathya Sai Baba ever seek such honours? Did Sathya Sai Baba demand respect of heads of state, especially those who specialised in slaughtering and massacring their own people? Did he siphon of billions which remain unaccounted for as Teresa did? Yet the media does not pick up on this, especially the media in India which suffers from a racial inferiority complex to the west.
There is no doubt that had Sathya Sai Baba been born in a western country such as Albania, been white, been part of some huge hatecore Christian missionary apparatus as the Catholic Church remains in India since the days of the marauding psychopath `Saint’ Francis Xavier, that the Indian media would have fallen over themselves to eulogise him. It is perhaps the best sign that although India gained independence in 1947, the colour at the apex merely changed.
Attitudes did not. Hence Mother Teresa, born Agnes Bojaxhiu in 1910 Skopje, was sent forth as yet another example of the unwanted garbage of Europe and a Church which constantly stood against democracy, liberalism and progress culminating in its collaboration with the Third Reich.
Teresa’s cosy friendship with Third World despots is part of a well trodden path. It is this which she should be remembered for, as well as being the angel of death to millions of poor who were incarcerated and infected within her centres of death, misnomered as clinics.
Just as Dr. Joseph Mengele found human guinea pigs for his nauseating experiments among what the Nazis deemed as the sub-human strata of Europe , so Teresa too found her victims among the poor and helpless of Kolkotta to be the human mice which would propel her to fame and glory. One can only imagine in retrospect how she must have smiled sardonically as she saw her own miracle to turning so many normally rational and sensible human beings into gullible sheep.
The truth about this sinner, this blot on India’s landscape, this fake, this hypocrite, this abuser of humanity, manipulator of the poor, is long overdue. Nowhere is this more so than in India. As the country modernises it can get jettison the impediments to this process. Agnes Bojaxhiu came to India to find victims for her dogmatic ideology that were fast dwindling in Europe. She was a reject of that continent, out of place in the twentieth century.
In similar manner India should unfrock this Mother Teresa for what she really was and detoxify itself of the poison which Agnes Bojaxhiu brought with her in the form of aggressive proselytisation, contempt for the poor and an affinity for Third World dictators, financial swindlers and other shady characters.