Mother Teresa, John Paul II, and the Fast-Track Saints...

[Guest guest]

Dear All,

 

i remember hearing Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi saying that She was not too pleased

with Mother Teresa, but i cannot recall the exact reason. Part of it, i think

was to do with her being a very stern and not so loving character, while working

with the poor. We could even see this 'dourness' in her facial expression in the

newspapers. It was quite severe, like the photographs of our grandparents'

generation, when they were not allowed to smile for photographs. LOL! i know for

sure though, that saints are not dour people, but have a lot to be happy and to

laugh about, and they spread their cheer around and make others happy too!

 

Now i am shocked, but not surprised, that according to Michael Parenti's

research article, Mother Teresa's Charity Work was not all it was cracked up to

be! His article sheds some light on why Shri Mataji might not have been too

pleased with Mother Teresa also. After all, here is what Shri Mataji Nirmala

Devi said about helping the poor or less fortunate:

 

" You need not to be proud that you are doing so much for others. With this same

type of false generosity in social work and so-called doing for the poor, you

develop a kind of a very funny ego and think no end of yourself. And to pamper

it also people give a peace prize, a Nobel Prize... then of course there is a

very hard nut created out of your brains. That is how even this generosity can

be very dangerous, which creates this kind of a feeling that we are something

great and we are doing some great work and we are just looking after so many

people.

 

So then we become another kind of people who are really very miserly. They can

never change. Sometimes whole nations, even those that are supposed to be very

rich, have a miserly nature. They talk of money and there is no decency about

it. There is no culture about it. For example, people go out to eat and ask for

the leftovers to be packed up because they feel that they have paid for them.

This is the greatest curse of being rich. People become absolutely shameless,

indecent, arrogant and above all absolutely irreligious. So one has to fear

those things which are so illusory and look like something being very, very

great to achieve. The rich have no manners or maryadas of any kind, and they

don't care what others are going to say or what they have to be. The kind of an

ego which comes into a rich man is really very stupid, and people would laugh at

them the way they behave. (Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi - Shri Mahalakshmi Puja Talk

Synopsis - Kohlapur, India - 21 December, 1991)

 

Here then, is the research article by Michael Parenti, on " Mother Teresa, John

Paul II, and the Fast-Track Saints " .

 

regards,

 

violet

 

 

 

 

Mother Teresa, John Paul II, and the Fast-Track Saints

 

by Michael Parenti

 

Global Research, October 24, 2007

commondreams.org - 2007-10-22

 

During his 26-year papacy, John Paul II elevated 483 individuals to sainthood,

more saints than all previous popes combined, it is reported. 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

contributors, 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. 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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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. " 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.

 

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. "

 

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.

 

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

a close friend of rightwing British media tycoon Malcolm Muggerridge. She was an

admiring guest of the Haitian dictator " Baby Doc " Duvalier, and 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. "

 

Another example of fast-track sainthood, pushed by Pope John Paul II, occurred

in 1992 when he swiftly beatified the reactionary Msgr. José María Escrivá 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. " Escrivá'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 Escrivá and Teresa—and implicitly on all that they represented. Another of

the ultra-conservatives whom John Paul made into a saint, bizarrely enough, was

the last of the Hapsburg rulers of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Emperor Karl,

who reigned during World War I.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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. 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. Un miracolo! Viva il papa!

 

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

 

Global Research Articles by Michael Parenti

 

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle & code=PAR20071024 & arti\

cleId=7173