Exposing a Saint: The Fraud of Calcutta
Friday, 18 April 2008. Literature.
As a self confessed fan of author Christopher Hitchens, I read his 1995 work The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.
The book was written following the Channel 4 documentary "Hell's Angel", originally broadcast in 1994. You can watch all three parts of the documentary on YouTube.
In the book Hitchens discusses a variety of suspect practices including Mother Teresa's involvement with the former Haiti dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, a man who's dictatorship killed an estimated 60,000 people. Hitchen's goes onto recount the testimonies of many of the volunteers who worked at Mother Teresa's organisation, the?Missionaries of Charity, which was kept deliberately basic and starved of proper medical supplies in a bid to receive more donations.
Susan Shields, formerly a senior nun with the order, recalled that one year there was roughly $50m in the bank account held by the New York office alone. Much of the money, she complained, sat in banks while workers in the homes were obliged to reuse blunt needles. No audit of the donations received by the charity has ever been allowed, the ?34,000 handed over by the Templeton Foundation seems not to have found its way to the needy of Calcutta.
In the 1980s, American lawyer, and politician Charles Keating donated some $1,250,000 to Mother Teresa. When Keating was convicted of fraud as a result of his central involvement in the savings and loan scandal of 1989, Mother Teresa wrote a letter on his behalf to presiding Judge Lance Ito, saying that she was not informed about his business but she knew him as a man who was generous toward the poor. When the man prosecuting the case against Keating, wrote to Mother Teresa pointed out that Keating was on trial for stealing more than $250 million from over 17,000 investors in his business, and suggesting that "no church, no charity, no organization should allow itself to be used as a salve for the conscience of the criminal", the Deputy District Attorney received no reply to his letter. No one has ever accounted for the missing money, and interestingly despite the vast sums of money the Teresa bank-account had amassed, again former volunteers of the Order have stated that conditions never improved. One former nun recalls an occasion where Mother Teresa herself demanded furniture and other supplies destroyed so as to appear more needy.
"Only the absence of scrutiny has allowed her to pass unchallenged as a force for pure goodness, and it is high time that this suspension of our critical faculties was itself suspended." Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position
I really found this book a thoroughly enjoyable scourging of the Teresa cult, written long before the revelation that the woman in question actually had no faith whatsoever. What I found particularly interesting, was the story of how Mother Teresa was launched into the public consciousness, namely a BBC documentary by British political and social pundit Malcolm Muggeridge;
In 1969, he made a very famous film about her life - and later a book called?Something Beautiful for God. Both the book and the film deserve the label hagiography. Muggeridge was so credulous that he actually claimed that a miracle had occurred on camera while he was making the film. He claimed that a mysterious "kindly light" had appeared around Mother Teresa. This claim could easily be exploded by the testimony of the cameraman himself: he had some new film stock produced by Kodak for dark or difficult light conditions. The new stock was used for the interview with Mother Teresa. The light in the film looked rather odd, and the cameraman was just about to say so when Muggeridge broke in and said, "It's a miracle, it's divine light." http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/hitchens_16_4.html
If like me, you've ever been asked who your hero is and the pious individual before you trots out Teresa of Calcutta, this book is for you. I also highly recommend Hitchen's book God is Not Great, which includes one of the most enlightening investigations of the US cult 'The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints', (the Mormons), founded by a gifted opportunist, and self confessed fraud.
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