Don't we
ALL reverence the late Mother's piety and devotion to the service of God in the
poor?
The
following from a secular humanist publication, Free Inquiry, Vol. 18,
No. 1
(Another
article from another source, for further corroboration, is listed below.)
Mother Teresa's House of Illusions
How She
Harmed Her Helpers As Well As Those They 'Helped'
by Susan Shields
"For
nearly a decade, Susan Shields was a Missionaries of Charity sister. She played a key role in Mother Teresa's organization until she
resigned."
Some years after I became a Catholic, I joined Mother
Teresa's congregation, the Missionaries of Charity. I was one of her sisters
for nine and a half years, living in the Bronx, Rome, and San Francisco, until
I became disillusioned and left in May 1989. As I reentered the world, I slowly
began to unravel the tangle of lies in which I had lived. I wondered how I
could have believed them for so long.
Three of Mother Teresa's teachings that are
fundamental to her religious congregation are all the more dangerous because
they are believed so sincerely by her sisters. Most basic is the belief that as
long as a sister obeys she is doing God's will. Another is the belief that the
sisters have leverage over God by choosing to suffer. Their suffering makes God
very happy. He then dispenses more graces to humanity. The third is the belief
that any attachment to human beings, even the poor being served, supposedly
interferes with love of God and must be vigilantly avoided or immediately
uprooted. The efforts to prevent any attachments cause continual chaos and
confusion, movement and change in the congregation. Mother Teresa did not
invent these beliefs - they were prevalent in religious congregations before
Vatican II - but she did everything in her power (which was great) to enforce
them.
Once a sister has accepted these fallacies she will do
almost anything. She can allow her health to be destroyed, neglect those she
vowed to serve, and switch off her feelings and independent thought. She can
turn a blind eye to suffering, inform on her fellow sisters, tell lies with
ease, and ignore public laws and regulations.
Women from many nations joined Mother Teresa in the
expectation that they would help the poor and come closer to God themselves.
When I left, there were more than 3,000 sisters in approximately 400 houses
scattered throughout the world. Many of these sisters who trusted Mother Teresa
to guide them have become broken people. In the face of overwhelming evidence,
some of them have finally admitted that their trust has been betrayed, that God
could not possibly be giving the orders they hear. It is difficult for them to
decide to leave - their self-confidence has been destroyed, and they have no
education beyond what they brought with them when they joined. I was one of the
lucky ones who mustered enough courage to walk away.
It is in the hope that others may see the fallacy of
this purported way to holiness that I tell a little of what I know. Although
there are relatively few tempted to join Mother Teresa's congregation of
sisters, there are many who generously have supported her work because they do
not realize how her twisted premises strangle efforts to alleviate misery.
Unaware that most of the donations sit unused in her bank accounts, they too
are deceived into thinking they are helping the poor.
As a Missionary of Charity, I was assigned to record
donations and write the thank-you letters. The money arrived at a frantic rate.
The mail carrier often delivered the letters in sacks. We wrote receipts for
checks of $50,000 and more on a regular basis. Sometimes a donor would call up
and ask if we had received his check, expecting us to remember it readily
because it was so large. How could we say that we could not recall it because
we had received so many that were even larger?
When Mother spoke publicly, she never asked for money,
but she did encourage people to make sacrifices for the poor, to "give
until it hurts." Many people did - and they gave it to her. We received
touching letters from people, sometimes apparently
poor themselves, who were making sacrifices to send us a little money for the
starving people in Africa, the flood victims in Bangladesh, or the poor
children in India. Most of the money sat in our bank accounts.
The flood of donations was considered to be a sign of
God's approval of Mother Teresa's congregation. We were told by our superiors
that we received more gifts than other religious congregations because God was pleased
with Mother, and because the Missionaries of Charity were the sisters who were
faithful to the true spirit of religious life.
Most of the sisters had no idea how much money the
congregation was amassing. After all, we were taught not to collect anything.
One summer the sisters living on the outskirts of Rome were given more crates
of tomatoes than they could distribute. None of their neighbors wanted them
because the crop had been so prolific that year. The sisters decided to can the
tomatoes rather than let them spoil, but when Mother found out what they had
done she was very displeased. Storing things showed lack of trust in Divine
Providence.
The donations rolled in and were deposited in the
bank, but they had no effect on our ascetic lives and very little effect on the
lives of the poor we were trying to help. We lived a simple life, bare of all
superfluities. We had three sets of clothes, which we mended until the material
was too rotten to patch anymore. We washed our own clothes by hand. The never-ending
piles of sheets and towels from our night shelter for the homeless we washed by
hand, too. Our bathing was accomplished with only one bucket of water. Dental
and medical checkups were seen as an unnecessary luxury.
Mother was very concerned that we preserve our spirit
of poverty. Spending money would destroy that poverty. She seemed obsessed with
using only the simplest of means for our work. Was this in the best interests
of the people we were trying to help, or were we in fact using them as a tool
to advance our own "sanctity?" In Haiti, to keep the spirit of
poverty, the sisters reused needles until they became blunt. Seeing the pain
caused by the blunt needles, some of the volunteers offered to procure more
needles, but the sisters refused.
We begged for food and supplies from local merchants
as though we had no resources. On one of the rare occasions when we ran out of
donated bread, we went begging at the local store. When our request was turned
down, our superior decreed that the soup kitchen could do without bread for the
day.
It was not only merchants who were offered a chance to
be generous. Airlines were requested to fly sisters and air cargo free of
charge. Hospitals and doctors were expected to absorb the costs of medical
treatment for the sisters or to draw on funds designated for the religious.
Workmen were encouraged to labor without payment or at reduced rates. We relied
heavily on volunteers who worked long hours in our soup kitchens, shelters, and
day camps.
A hard-working farmer devoted many of his waking hours
to collecting and delivering food for our soup kitchens and shelters. "If
I didn't come, what would you eat?" he asked.
Our Constitution forbade us to beg for more than we
needed, but, when it came to begging, the millions of dollars accumulating in
the bank were treated as if they did not exist.
For years I had to write thousands of letters to
donors, telling them that their entire gift would be used to bring God's loving
compassion to the poorest of the poor. I was able to keep my complaining
conscience in check because we had been taught that the Holy Spirit was guiding
Mother. To doubt her was a sign that we were lacking in trust and, even worse,
guilty of the sin of pride. I shelved my objections and hoped that one day I
would understand why Mother wanted to gather so much money, when she herself
had taught us that even storing tomato sauce showed lack of trust in Divine
Providence.
For further reading:
The Following Feature Appeared in
Germany's STERN magazine on 10 September 1998 on occasion on Mother Teresa's
1st death anniversary. It is worth pointing out here that STERN, one of
Europe's highest selling magazines, is a conservative organ, not known for its
anti-Catholic bias.
MOTHER TERESA : WHERE ARE HER
MILLIONS? by
Walter Wuellenweber
see http://members.lycos.co.uk/bajuu/