Mommie
dearest
The pope beatified Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a
fundamentalist, and a fraud
By Hosein
DeVilt
December 15, 2003
The Iranian
I think it was Macaulay who said that the Roman Catholic
Church deserved great credit for, and owed its longevity to, its
ability
to handle and contain fanaticism. This rather oblique compliment
belongs to a more serious age. What is so striking about the "beatification" of
the woman who styled herself "Mother" Teresa is the abject
surrender, on the part of the church, to the forces of showbiz,
superstition, and populism.
It's the sheer tawdriness that strikes the eye first
of all. It used to be that a person could not even be nominated
for "beatification," the
first step to "sainthood," until five years after his
or her death. This was to guard against local or popular enthusiasm
in the promotion of dubious characters. The pope nominated MT a
year after her death in 1997. It also used to be that an apparatus
of inquiry was set in train, including the scrutiny of an advocatus
diaboli or "devil's advocate," to test any extraordinary
claims. The pope has abolished this office and has created more
instant saints than all his predecessors combined as far back as
the 16th century.
As for the "miracle" that had to be attested,
what can one say? Surely any respectable Catholic cringes with
shame at
the obviousness of the fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra
claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of MT, which
she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous
tumor.
Her physician, Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, says that she
didn't have a cancerous tumor in the first place and that the tubercular
cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine.
Was he interviewed by the Vatican's investigators? No. (As it
happens,
I myself was interviewed by them but only in the most perfunctory
way. The procedure still does demand a show of consultation with
doubters, and a show of consultation was what, in this case,
it got.) According to an uncontradicted report in the Italian
paper L'Eco di Bergamo, the Vatican's secretary of state sent a
letter to senior
cardinals in June, asking on behalf of the pope whether they favored
making MT a saint right away. The pope's clear intention has been
to speed the process up in order to perform the ceremony in his
own lifetime. The response was in the negative, according to Father
Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who has acted as postulator
or advocate for the "canonization." But the damage, to
such integrity as the process possesses, has already been done.
During the deliberations over the Second Vatican
Council, under the stewardship of Pope John XXIII, MT was to the
fore in opposing
all suggestions of reform. What was needed, she maintained, was
more work and more faith, not doctrinal revision.Her position was
ultra-reactionary and fundamentalist even in orthodox Catholic
terms. Believers are indeed enjoined to abhor and eschew abortion,
but they are not required to affirm that abortion is "the
greatest destroyer of peace," as MT fantastically asserted
to a dumbfounded audience when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize*.
Believers are likewise enjoined to abhor and eschew
divorce, but they are not required to insist that a ban on divorce
and remarriage
be a part of the state constitution, as MT demanded in a referendum
in Ireland (which her side narrowly lost) in 1996. Later in that
same year, she told Ladies Home Journal that she was pleased
by the divorce of her friend Princess Diana, because the marriage
had so obviously been an unhappy one ... This returns us to the medieval corruption of the
church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire
and continence
to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend
of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent
her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the
empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock
version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the
worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious
Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and
from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan.
Where did
that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice
in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been--she
preferred California clinics when she got sick herself--and
her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her
own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred
countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but
this is modesty
and humility? The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people
liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman
who seemed
like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People
do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a
vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy
media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions.
Many volunteers
who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern
ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries
of Charity," but they had no audience for their story. George
Orwell's admonition in his essay on Gandhi--that saints should
always be presumed guilty until proved innocent--was drowned
in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda. One of the curses of India, as of other poor countries,
is the quack medicine man, who fleeces the sufferer by promises
of miraculous
healing. Sunday was a great day for these parasites, who saw their
crummy methods endorsed by his holiness and given a more or less
free ride in the international press. Forgotten were the elementary
rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary
evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also
be dismissed without evidence.
More than that, we witnessed the
elevation and consecration of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith,
and the cult of a mediocre human personality. Many more people
are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be
poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic,
a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects
those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign
of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions. * Correction, Dec 10, 2003: This piece
originally claimed that in her Nobel Peace Prize lecture, Mother
Teresa
called abortion
and contraception the greatest threats to world peace. In that
speech Mother Teresa did call abortion "the greatest destroyer
of peace." But she did not much discuss contraception, except
to praise "natural" family planning. December is Donate
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