SISTER THRESA- MAKING SAINT AND FRAUDS
October 17, 2009 5 Comments
தெராசாவை புனிதராக்க செய்யப்பட திகிடுதத்தம்
Indian Rationalists question mother Teresa’s ovarian miracle
By Sanal Edamaruku
Was Monica Besra’s ovarian tumor really cured by the supernatural powers of Mother Teresa’s picture placed on her abdomen? The Missionaries of Charity insist it was. The Vatican has approved the story officially as a first-class miracle. The Indian Rationalist Association says: Such absurd and dangerous claims call for legal action! The rationalists, who have kicked off the controversy about Mother Teresa’s after-death-miracle, demand that the government of West Bengal take the Missionaries of Charity to court for their false claims.
The case of the miracle makers won’t stand in front of any court of law. Their witnesses have vowed to keep mum, not to contradict each other. Their certifiers are anonymous and untraceable. Their proof is obviously faked. And to top it all: their crown witness has vanished!
According to the Vatican, Monica Besra’s ovarian tumor was cured by the powers of Teresa’s picture, placed on her abdomen. But the medical records prove that it was sheer conventional medical treatment that rescued her life. “In the 21st century how can you talk about miracle healing?” says West Bengal health minister Suyrya Kanta Nishra. The miracle documentation claims that several doctors have certified that the healing was “scientifically inexplicable”, but not a single of these anonymous witnesses could so far be traced. The former health minister of West Bengal, Partho De, revealed that he had been approached by the Vatican agents and asked to name a doctor, who would certify that Monica Besra’s healing was a miracle. He declined support. After ordering the medical records of the case in February 2000 for scrutiny to the Kolkata (Calcutta) health department, he was convinced that there was nothing unusual about the disappearance of the tumor after prolonged medical treatment.
Knitting her saintly cowl with relentless efforts, the miracle agents of the Vatican under the leadership of chief investigator Brian Kolodiejchuk have identified several hundred examples for Mother Teresa’s supernatural capacities. Neatly filed, classified and elaborately documented in a dossier of more than 34,000 pages, they are getting ready to be sent by air fright to Vatican now. On this base, they hope, her canonization has become a mere formality. In December, the Pope is expected to check in the heavy luggage, and may be in spring the Albanian born nun could already enter the annals of saints as the speediest one in the history of the Catholic Church.
The most important of those bundled paranormal claims is the miracle, which Teresa has allegedly done on her first death anniversary. At least one proven after-death-miracle is a must for any saint. Teresa’s managers have offered the “Healing of Monica Besra” for this purpose and the Vatican has officially accepted it as a suitable ticket to sainthood. But unexpectedly the miracle has met with a tough challenge. Stripped off the veil of holiness, it looks like a rough-cut fake.
Dr. Manju Murshed, superintendent of the government hospital in Balurghat, informed that Monica Besra was admitted in the hospital with severe pain. She suffered from tubercular meningitis and from an ovarian tumor, which was discovered during an ultra-sound investigation. She was subsequently treated by Dr.Tarun Kumar Biwas and the gynecologist Dr. Ranjan Mustafi. After she left the hospital, the treatment was continued in the North Bengal Medical College and Hospital and ended successfully in March 1999. A final ultra-sound investigation showed that the tumor had disappeared.
Heart piece of the Vatican’s “proof” is a statement of crown witness Monica Besra. It leaked, despite utmost secrecy, to the press. In this statement, Besra describes that she was suffering from terrible pain from a giant tumor in her stomach and nearly lost all hope. She left her family to seek help with the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata. On 5 October, 1998, Mother Teresa’s first death anniversary, she prayed to her ardently. Two nuns, sister Bartholomea and sister Ann Sevika, took a silver medallion with Mother’s picture from the wall and tied it on Monica’s body with a black thread, right on the tumor. The pain vanished the same night and never came back. Her stomach became smaller and smaller and in the morning she felt that the tumor had vanished. She was miraculously healed!
Monica Besra is a 30-year-old tribal woman from Dulidnapur village. She is illiterate and speaks her tribal mother tongue only, laced with a few words of broken Bengali. Until recently she has not been a Christian. The statement is written in fluent English and shows familiarity with details of Catholic belief. It is obvious that the text has not been written or dictated by her. But Monica Besra is not available to bring light into the murky story: she has vanished. She must be “under the protection of the church”, suspect those close to her. She was not seen, since her name, despite all efforts of secrecy, became public.
And the nuns involved in the miracle keep their lips sealed. “An objective miracle has happened”, explains archbishop D’Souza of Kolkata. “The sisters don’t want to give different versions as that would spoil things.”
If this obvious fraud is not brought to book and if the idea of miraculous healings gets credence, it will have dangerous consequences for the uneducated and the poor, insists Indian Rationalist Association. Confidence in modern medicine and science has to be developed and strengthened and people have to be encouraged to use available medical facilities for treatment instead of taking to superstition and miracle belief. The efforts should be to expand the outreach of the modern medicine to all strata of the society.
தேவப்ரியா 
Mother Teresa: Faithless Fraud and Hypocrite
Contributed by ron collins on Tue, 2007-10-30 10:09.
In sections: India International Poverty Religion/Spirituality History
MichaelParenti.org – Oct 27, 2007
http://www.michaelparenti.org
Mother Teresa, John Paul II, and the Fast-Track Saints
by Michael Parenti
During his 26-year papacy, John Paul II elevated 483 individuals to
sainthood, reportedly more saints than any previous pope. One personage
he beatified but did not live long enough to canonize was Mother
Teresa, the Roman Catholic nun of Albanian origin who had been wined
and dined by the world’s rich and famous while hailed as a champion of
the poor. The darling of the corporate media and western officialdom,
and an object of celebrity adoration, Teresa was for many years the
most revered woman on earth, showered with kudos and awarded a Nobel
Peace Prize in 1979 for her humanitarian work and spiritual inspiration.
What usually went unreported were the vast sums she received from
wealthy and sometimes tainted sources, including a million dollars from
convicted savings & loan swindler Charles Keating, on whose behalf she
sent a personal plea for clemency to the presiding judge. She was asked
by the prosecutor in that case to return Keating’s gift because it was
money he had stolen. She never did.[1] She also accepted substantial
sums given by the brutal Duvalier dictatorship that regularly stole
from the Haitian public treasury.
Mother Teresa’s hospitals for the indigent in India and elsewhere turned
out to be hardly more than human warehouses in which seriously ill
persons lay on mats, sometimes fifty to sixty in a room without benefit
of adequate medical attention. Their ailments usually went undiagnosed.
The food was nutritionally lacking and sanitary conditions were
deplorable. There were few medical personnel on the premises, mostly
untrained nuns and brothers.[2]
When tending to her own ailments, however, Teresa checked into some of
the costliest hospitals and recovery care units in the world for
state-of-the-art treatment.[3]
Teresa journeyed the globe to wage campaigns against divorce, abortion,
and birth control. At her Nobel award ceremony, she announced that the
greatest destroyer of peace is abortion. And she once suggested that
AIDS might be a just retribution for improper sexual conduct.[4]
Teresa emitted a continual flow of promotional misinformation about
herself. She claimed that her mission in Calcutta fed over a thousand
people daily. On other occasions she jumped the number to 4000, 7000,
and 9000. Actually her soup kitchens fed not more than 150 people (six
days a week), and this included her retinue of nuns, novices, and
brothers. She claimed that her school in the Calcutta slum contained
five thousand children when it actually enrolled less than one hundred.
Teresa claimed to have 102 family assistance centers in Calcutta, but
longtime Calcutta resident, Aroup Chatterjee, who did an extensive
on-the-scene investigation of her mission, could not find a single such
center.[5]
As one of her devotees explained, “Mother Teresa is among those who
least worry about statistics. She has repeatedly expressed that what
matters is not how much work is accomplished but how much love is put
into the work.”[6] Was Teresa really unconcerned about statistics?
Quite the contrary, her numerical inaccuracies went consistently and
self-servingly in only one direction, greatly exaggerating her
accomplishments.
Over the many years that her mission was in Calcutta, there were about a
dozen floods and numerous cholera epidemics in or near the city, with
thousands perishing. Various relief agencies responded to each
disaster, but Teresa and her crew were nowhere in sight, except briefly
on one occasion.[7]
When someone asked Teresa how people without money or power can make the
world a better place, she replied, “They should smile more,” a response
that charmed some listeners. During a press conference in Washington
DC, when asked “Do you teach the poor to endure their lot?” she said “I
think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share
it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped
by the suffering of the poor people.”[8]
But she herself lived lavishly well, enjoying luxurious accommodations
in her travels abroad. It seems to have gone unnoticed that as a world
celebrity she spent most of her time away from Calcutta, with protracted
stays at opulent residences in Europe and the United States, jetting
from Rome to London to New York in private planes.[9]
Mother Teresa is a paramount example of the kind of acceptably
conservative icon propagated by an elite-dominated culture, a saint who
uttered not a critical word against social injustice, and maintained
cozy relations with the rich, corrupt, and powerful.
She claimed to be above politics when in fact she was pronouncedly
hostile toward any kind of progressive reform. Teresa was a friend of
Ronald Reagan, and an admiring guest of the Haitian dictator Baby Doc
Duvalier. She also had the support and admiration of a number of
Central and South American dictators.
Teresa was Pope John Paul II’s kind of saint. After her death in 1997,
he waived the five-year waiting period usually observed before beginning
the beatification process that leads to sainthood. In 2003, in record
time Mother Teresa was beatified, the final step before canonization.
But in 2007 her canonization confronted a bump in the road, it having
been disclosed that along with her various other contradictions Teresa
was not a citadel of spiritual joy and unswerving faith. Her diaries,
investigated by Catholic authorities in Calcutta, revealed that she had
been racked with doubts: “I feel that God does not want me, that God is
not God and that he does not really exist. People think my faith, my
hope and my love are overflowing and that my intimacy with God and
union with his will fill my heart. If only they knew,” she wrote,
“Heaven means nothing.”
Through many tormented sleepless nights she shed thoughts like this: “I
am told God loves me and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and
emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.” Il Messeggero,
Rome’s popular daily newspaper, commented: “The real Mother Teresa was
one who for one year had visions and who for the next 50 had
doubts—up until her death.”[10]
Another example of fast-track sainthood, pushed by Pope John Paul II,
occurred in 1992 when he swiftly beatified the reactionary Msgr. Josi
Marma Escriva de Balaguer, supporter of fascist regimes in Spain and
elsewhere, and founder of Opus Dei, a powerful secretive
ultra-conservative movement feared by many as a sinister sect within
the Catholic Church.[11] Escriva s beatification came only seventeen
years after his death, a record run until Mother Teresa came along.
In accordance with his own political agenda, John Paul used a church
institution, sainthood, to bestow special sanctity upon
ultra-conservatives such as Escriva and Teresa—and implicitly on all
that they represented. Another of the ultra-conservatives whom John
Paul put up for sainthood, bizarrely enough, was the last of the
Hapsburg rulers of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Emperor Karl, who
reigned during World War I. Still another of the reactionaries whom
John Paul set up for sainthood was Pius IX, who reigned as pontiff from
1846 to 1878, and who referred to Jews as dogs.
John Paul also beatified Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, the leading
Croatian cleric who welcomed the Nazi and fascist Ustashi takeover of
Croatia during World War II. Stepinac sat in the Ustashi parliament,
appeared at numerous public events with top ranking Nazis and Ustashi,
and openly supported the Croatian fascist regime that exterminated
hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma (gypsies).[12]
In John Paul’s celestial pantheon, reactionaries had a better chance at
canonization than reformers. Consider his treatment of Archbishop Oscar
Romero who spoke against the injustices and oppressions suffered by the
impoverished populace of El Salvador and for this was assassinated by a
right-wing death squad. John Paul never denounced the killing or its
perpetrators, calling it only tragic. In fact, just weeks before Romero
was murdered, high-ranking officials of the Arena party, the legal arm
of the death squads, sent a well-received delegation to the Vatican to
complain of Romero’s public statements on behalf of the poor.[13]
Romero was thought by many poor Salvadorans to be something of a saint,
but John Paul attempted to ban any discussion of his beatification for
fifty years. Popular pressure from El Salvador caused the Vatican to
cut the delay to twenty-five years.[14] In either case, Romero was
consigned to the slow track.
John Paul’s successor, Benedict XVI, [waived] the five-year waiting
period in order to put John Paul II himself instantly on a super-fast
track to canonization, running neck and neck with Teresa. As of 2005
there already were reports of possible miracles attributed to the
recently departed Polish pontiff.
One such account was offered by Cardinal Francesco Marchisano. When
lunching with John Paul, the cardinal indicated that because of an
ailment he could not use his voice. The pope caressed my throat, like a
brother, like the father that he was. After that I did seven months of
therapy, and I was able to speak again. Marchisano thinks that the
pontiff might have had a hand in his cure: It could be, he said.[15] Un
miracolo! Viva il papa!
1. Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in
Theory and Practice (Verso, 1995), 64-71.
2. Aroup Chatterjee, Mother Teresa, The Final Verdict (Meteor Books,
2003), 196-197.
3. Chatterjee, Mother Teresa, 188-189.
4. Mother Teresa, Nobel Lecture, 11 December 1979:
http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1979/teresa-lecture.html.
5. Chatterjee, Mother Teresa, 32, 179-180..
6. Chatterjee, Mother Teresa, 19-23, 106-107, 157, and passim
7. Chatterjee, Mother Teresa, 332-333.
8. Hitchens, The Missionary Position, 11 and 95.
9. Chatterjee, Mother Teresa, 2-14.
10. Bruce Johnston, Mother Teresa’s diary reveals her crisis of faith,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/11….
11. http://www.odan.org/escriva_to_franco.htm and Curtis Bill Pepper,
Opus Dei, Advocatus Papae, Nation 3-10 August 1992.
12. Edmond Paris, Genocide in Satellite Croatia, 1941-1945 (American
Institute for Balkan Affairs, 1961), 201-205 and passim; also How the
Catholic Church United with Local Nazis to Run Croatia during World War
II: The Case of Archbishop Stepinac (Embassy of the Federal Peoples
Republic of Yugoslavia, Washington, DC, 1947); posted 2 August 2004,
http://emperors-lothes.com/croatia/stepinac1.htm#11.
13. Barry Healy, Pope John Paul II, A Reactionary in Shepherds Clothing,
Green Left Weekly, 6 April 2005.
14. Healy, Pope John Paul II, A Reactionary in Shepherds Clothing.
15. New York Times, 14 May 2005.
[Michael Parenti’s recent publications include: Contrary Notions: The
Michael Parenti Reader (City Lights, 2007); Democracy for the Few, 8th
ed. (Wadsworth, 2007); The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories, 2006). For
further information visit his website: http://www.MichaelParenti.org.]
Abusing Children Teresa Style
4 AUGUST 2005 29 COMMENTS
On Aug 1st British television carried an investigative piece by Donal McIntyre about the treatment of children in an orphanage run by Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. He quotes Dr Aroup Chatterjee, a medical doctor in London and the author of Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict, as saying that “the Indian government is “terrified” of her reputation but if similar practices were found in any other home, it would have been shut down.”
In brief, the report said that handicapped children were maltreated in the orphanage. No surprise there for anyone who has cared to read what the true story is behind the façade that Mother Teresa carefully built around her mission. She used the misery that is all too evident in Calcutta (and in India in general) to demand charity from all and sundry around the world. What she did with the donations is not clear and is unlikely to ever become clear because she refused to have her books audited. Untold millions of dollars flowed into her coffers. The money was not used to build even one small hospital anywhere. In her homes, it was even forbidden to hand out simple painkillers. She, in the meanwhile, got jetted around to hospitals in the US whenever she was suffering some illness.
I have been a severe critic of Mother Teresa ever since I came to know of what her mission was all about. Christopher Hitchens was one of the first to provide a devastating critique of her. The Ghoul of Calcutta, as he called his piece on her, is as honest an appraisal of her as anyone has ever done. His book The Missionary Position was a welcome counterbalance to the hagiography that was built around her myth. I started a small collection of critical pieces about M. Teresa some years ago. Through my interest in her, around 1997 I came to meet Hitchens when he was visiting Berkeley for a conversation with Gore Vidal. Last year I met Chatterjee in London, again in connection with a review of his book that I had written on my blog.
What exactly is my main grouse with M. Teresa? I think that she was evil. She manipulated others and cheated them, and she did so on the backs of Kolkata’s miserable. She was the most famous “beggar lord” – a person who makes a living by taking the money that people give to beggars and using that money for some other purpose. In her case, it is suspected that the money is funneled to the Vatican so that she would get on the fast tract to being canonized.
But siphoning money to the Vatican does not immediately brand her as evil, in my book. Hitler also supported the Vatican and that was not his most egregious fault. No, M. Teresa did far worse than just steal from the poor to enrich the fabulously wealthy. She compounded the problem that is the root cause of many of the world’s miseries. She cynically campaigned against birth control and contraceptives and did everything that she could to make the population problem more acute. The more born in misery and hopelessness, the more souls she would be able to save and more the brownie points that she would have to win the prize in heaven (sit next to Jesus Christ) and on earth (made into a saint by the bishop of Rome.)
My hope is that one of these days soon the Indians at least will wake out of their deep slumber of ignorance to realize that she has done incalculable harm to India, both in terms of the image that she advertised to the world about India, but even more tragically by catalyzing tens of millions of excess births that will result in decades of needless suffering and pain.
Too bad I don’t believe in hell and in a just power governing the universe. Otherwise I would have consoled myself with the thought that she would definitely end up in hell and suffer for all of eternity what she imposed on others.
Update: (Oct 26th, 2005) Here are two more articles, both by Christopher Hitchens, on Mother Teresa. In Oct 2003, Hitchens wrote The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.
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.
Earlier that year, he had argued why teresa should not be a saint in the Mirror (UK):
“Wait a minute,” said a TV host in Washington a few nights ago, when I debated all this with Mr John Donahue of the Catholic Defence League. “She built hospitals.” No, sir, you wait a minute.
Mother Teresa was given, to our certain knowledge, many tens of millions of pounds. But she never built any hospitals. She claimed to have built almost 150 convents, for nuns joining her own order, in several countries. Was this where ordinary donors thought their money was going?
Furthermore, she received some of this money from the Duvaliers, and from Mr Charles Keating of the notorious Lincoln Savings and Loan of California, and both these sources had acquired the money by – how shall I put it? – borrowing money from the poor and failing to give it back.
How could this possibly be true? Doesn’t everyone know that she spent her time kissing the sores of lepers and healing the sick? Ah, but what everyone knows isn’t always true. You were more likely to run into Mother Teresa being photographed with Nancy Reagan, or posing with Princess Diana, or in the first-class cabin of Air India (where she had a permanent reservation).
Former Catholic Sister Says Even Mother Teresa Is a Fraud
According to Susan Shields, Mother Teresa ‘harmed her helpers as well as those they helped.’
By Greg Szymanski
June 6, 2007
For nine years Susan Shields worked as a devoted Catholic Sister, working for Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. When finally becoming fed-up in 1989, she left Mother Teresa in disgust over the misuse of millions in charitable donations that never got to their destination — the poor and afflicted.
Shields story was recently sent to the Arctic Beacon, as printed in the
Free Inquiry Magazine, revealing how Mother Teresa really turned a blind eye to the poor while millions of dollars in donations are still sitting
in Vatican bank accounts.
Here is her story entitled “Mother Teresa’s House of Illusions:
How She Harmed Her Helpers As Well As Those They `Helped’
“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 re-entered 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.”
அற்புதமும் முக்திபேறும்
http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%85%E0%AE%A9%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%A9%E0%AF%88_%E0%AE%A4%E0%AF%86%E0%AE%B0%E0%AF%87%E0%AE%9A%E0%AE%BE
1997 ல்,அன்னை தெரேசாவின் மரணத்துக்குப் பின் போப்பானவரின் அரியணை, அவர் அர்ச்சிப்பிற்கு முந்தைய நிலையான முக்திப்பேறு நிலையை எய்துவதற்கான முயற்சியில் இறங்கியது. இச்செயல் அன்னைதெரேசாவின் பரிந்துரையால் நிகழ்ந்த அற்புதத்தின் அதிகாரப்பூர்வ ஆவணத்தை உள்ளடக்கியது. 2002-ல், மோனிகா பேஸ்ரா என்ற இந்திய பெண்ணின் வயிற்றில் இருந்த கட்டி அன்னை தெரேசா உருவம் பதிக்கப்பட்ட பேழையை அணிந்ததும் குணமாகிவிட்டதை அற்புதமாக அங்கிகரித்தது. அன்னையின் உருவத்திலிருந்து புறப்பட்ட ஒளிவெள்ளம் புற்றுநோய்க்கட்டியைக் குணப்படுத்தியதாக மோனிகா பேஸ்ரா கூறினார். மோனிகா பேஸ்ராவின் மருத்துவ ஊழியர்கள் சிலரும், தொடக்கத்தில் அவரது கணவரும் கூட வாடிக்கையான மருத்துவ சிகிச்சை கட்டியை அளித்ததாகக் கூறி வந்தனர்.[83] மோனிகாவின் மருத்துவ அறிக்கைகள், மேல்நிலையொலியறிக்கைகளையும், மருந்துச் சீட்டுகளையும், மருத்துவக் குறிப்புகளையும் கொண்டிருப்பதால் அதை வைத்து அவர் குணமானது அற்புதமா இல்லையா என்பதை நிரூபித்து விடலாம் என்பதே எதிரணியினரின் கருத்தாகும். மோனிகா, சாமான்ய மிஷினரீஸ் ஆப் சேரிட்டியின் அங்கத்தினரான அருட்சகோதரி பெட்டா என்பவர் தங்களைப் பற்றிக் கொண்டிருப்பதாகக் கூறினார். இவ்வெளியீடு அருட்சகோதரி பெட்டாவிடமிருந்து, “விளக்கம் எதுவுமில்லை” என்ற கூற்றினைப் பெற்றது. மோனிகா சிகிச்சை பெற்று வந்த பாலர்காட் மருத்துவமனை அதிகாரிகள் அவருக்குக் கிடைத்த சுகத்தை அற்புதமாக அறிவிக்கக் கோரி தங்களுக்கு கத்தோலிக்க சபைகளால் நெருக்கடி கொடுக்கப்பட்டதாகக் குறை கூறியுள்ளனர்.[84]
பாரம்பரியமான நடைமுறையான புனிதத்துவம் கொடுப்பதை எதிர்ப்பவர் பாத்திரத்தை வாடிகன் நீக்கி விட்டதால், கிறிஸ்டோபர் ஹிச்சென்ஸ்மட்டுமே வாடிகனால் அன்னை தெரேசாவின் முக்திபேற்றிற்கும் அர்ச்சிப்பிற்கும் எதிரான ஆதாரங்களைத் தாக்கல் செய்ய வாடிகனால் அழைக்கப்பட்டவர்.[85] ஹிச்சென்ஸ் வாதாடினார், “அவரது நோக்கம் மக்களுக்கு உதவி செய்வதல்ல” என்று. மேலும் அவர் அன்னை தெரேசா கொடையாளர்களிடம் அவர்களது நன்கொடைகளின் உபயோகத்தைப் பற்றி பொய் கூறுபவர் என்று குற்றம் சாட்டுகிறார். அவருடன் பேசிக்கொண்டிருந்த பொழுதுதான் அவரது உறுதியான நிலையை நான் கண்டுபிடிக்க நேர்ந்தது. அவர் ஏழ்மையைப் போக்க பிரயத்தனப்படவில்லை. அவர் கத்தோலிக்கர்களின் எண்ணிக்கையை பெருக்குவதிலேயே குறியாயிருந்தார். அவர் மேலும் கூறினார், “நான் சமூக சேவகி அல்ல”, என்று.நான் சமூகசேவைக்காக இவற்றைச் செய்யவில்லை. கிறிஸ்துவுக்காக இதை செய்கிறேன். சபைக்காக இதை செய்கிறேன்.[86] முக்திப்பேற்றை அடையச் செய்வதற்கும், புனிதராக்குவதற்கும், ரோமானிய நீதிபதிகளின் குழு (வாடிகன்)அவரது வாழ்க்கையைக் குறித்தும் பணிகளைக் குறித்தும் எழுந்த வெளியிடப்பட்ட மற்றும் வெளியிடப்படாத எண்ணிறந்த விமர்சனங்களுக்கான ஆவணங்களைப் பரிசீலித்தது. ஹிச்சன்ஸின் குற்றச்சாட்டுகள் புனிதர்களுக்கான குழுமம் எனும் அதற்கென நியமிக்கப்பட்டிருக்கும் நிறுவனத்தால் விசாரிக்கப்பட்டதாகவும் அன்னைதெரேசாவின் முக்திப்பேற்றிற்கு எவ்வித தடையும் இல்லையெனும் முடிவுக்கு அவர்கள் வந்ததாகவும் வாடிகனின் அதிகாரிகள் கூறுகின்றனர். அவர்மீதான தாக்குதல்களினிமித்தம் சில கத்தோலிக்க எழுத்தாளர்கள் அவரை முரண்பாடுகளின் அடையாளம் என அழைத்திருக்கின்றனர்.[87] அக்டோபர் 19,2003 ல் மாதர் தெரேசாவிற்கு முக்திப்பேறு அளிக்கப்பட்டு, அவருக்கு ஆசீர்வதிக்கப்பட்டவர் என்ற பட்டம் அளிக்கப்பட்டது.[88]அவர் புனிதர் பட்டம் பெற இரண்டாவது அற்புதம் ஒன்று நிகழ்த்தப்பெற வேண்டும்.
பல புதிய கருத்துக்கள் அன்னை தெரேசாவின் எழுத்துக்களை விசுவாசத்தின் இக்கட்டின் அடையாளமாகக் குறிப்பிடுகின்றன.[78] கிறிஸ்டோபர் ஹிச்சென்ஸ் போன்ற அன்னை தெரேசாவின் விமர்சகர்கள், அன்னை தெரேசாவின் எழுத்துக்களை, அவரது தனிப்பட்ட நம்பிக்கைகளுக்கும் செயல்களுக்கும் மாறாக விளம்பரத்துக்காக உருவாக்கப்பட்ட பொய்யான வெளித்தோற்றத்திற்கான ஆதாரங்கள் எனக் கருதினார். ஹிச்சன்ஸ் இவ்வாறு எழுதுகிறார், “இப்படியாக எது நிதர்சனமானது: தங்கள் கதாநயகிகளுள் ஒருவர் தனது விசுவாசத்தின் சுவடுகளை இழந்துவிட்டார் எனும் உண்மையை விசுவாசிகள் தைரியமாக எதிர்கொள்வதா அல்லது விசுவசிப்பதை நிறுத்திவிட்ட ஒரு குழம்பிய மூதாட்டியை விளம்பர முத்திரையாக தொடர்ந்து சபை நிறுத்துவதா?”[76] ஆனால் கம் பி மை லைட் -ன் பதிப்பாசிரியர் பிரையன் கொலோடிச்சக் போன்றவர்கள், 16 ஆம் நூற்றாண்டு ஆன்மீகவாதியான புனித சிலுவை அருளப்பர் “ஆன்மாவின் இருண்ட காலத்தை” சில ஆன்மீகவாதிகளின் வளர்ச்சியின் குறிப்பிட்டதொரு நிலையாகக் கருதியதுடன் ஒப்பிட்டுப் பார்க்கிறார்.[56] இக்கடிதங்கள் அவரது புனிதத்துவத்தை எட்டும் பிரயாசத்திற்குத் தடையாக இருக்கப்போவதில்லை என வாடிகன் தெரிவித்துள்ளது.[79] உண்மையில் அவரது புனிதத்துவத்துக்காகப் பிரயாசைப்படும் அருட்சகோதரர் பிரையன் கொலோடிச்சக் என்பவரே இப்புத்தகத்தின் பதிப்பாசிரியராவார்.[56]