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"India has no reason to be grateful to Mother Teresa" Sanal
Edamaruku
"India, especially Calcutta, is seen as the main beneficiary of Mother Teresa's legendary 'good work' for the poor that made her the most famous Catholic of our times, a Nobel Peace Prize Winner and a living saint. Evaluating what she has actually done here, I think, India has no reason to be grateful to her", said Sanal Edamaruku, Secretary General of the Indian Rationalist Association and President of Rationalist International in a statement on the occasion of her beatification today. The statement continues: Mother Teresa has given
a bad name to Calcutta, painting the beautiful,
interesting, lively and culturally rich Indian
metropolis in the colors of dirt, misery,
hopelessness and death. Styled into the big
gutter, it became the famous backdrop for her very
special charitable work. Her order is only one
among more than 200 charitable organizations,
which try to help the slum-dwellers of Calcutta to
build a better future. It is locally not very
visible or active. But tall claims like the
absolutely baseless story of her slum school for
5000 children have brought enormous international
publicity to her institutions. And enormous
donations! Mother Teresa has
collected many, many millions (some say: billions)
of Dollars in the name of India's paupers (and
many, many more in the name of paupers in the
other "gutters" of the world). Where did
all this money go? It is surely not used to
improve the lot of those, for whom it was meant.
The nuns would hand out some bowls of soup to them
and offer shelter and care to some of the sick and
suffering. The richest order in the world is not
very generous, as it wants to teach them the charm
of poverty. "The suffering of the poor is
something very beautiful and the world is being
very much helped by the nobility of this example
of misery and suffering," said Mother Teresa.
Do we have to be grateful for this lecture of an
eccentric billionaire? The legend of her Homes
for the Dying has moved the world to tears.
Reality, however, is scandalous: In the
overcrowded and primitive little homes, many
patients have to share a bed with others. Though
there are many suffering from tuberculosis, AIDS
and other highly infectious illnesses, hygiene is
no concern. The patients are treated with good
words and insufficient (sometimes outdated)
medicines, applied with old needles, washed in
lukewarm water. One can hear the screams of people
having maggots tweezered from their open wounds
without pain relief. On principle, strong
painkillers are even in hard cases not given.
According to Mother Teresa's bizarre philosophy,
it is "the most beautiful gift for a person
that he can participate in the sufferings of
Christ". Once she tried to comfort a
screaming sufferer: "You are suffering, that
means Jesus is kissing you!" The man got
furious and screamed back: "Then tell your
Jesus to stop kissing." When Mother Teresa
received the Nobel Peace Price, she used the
opportunity of her worldwide telecast speech in
Oslo to declare abortion the greatest evil in the
world and to launch a fiery call against
population control. Her charitable work, she
admitted, was only part of her big fight against
abortion and population control. This
fundamentalist position is a slap in the face of
India and other Third World Countries, where
population control is one of the main keys for
development and progress and social
transformation. Do we have to be grateful to
Mother Teresa for leading this worldwide
propagandist fight against us with the money she
collected in our name? Mother Teresa did not serve the poor in Calcutta, she served the rich in the West. She helped them to overcome their bad conscience by taking billions of Dollars from them. Some of her donors were dictators and criminals, who tried to white wash their dirty vests. Mother Teresa revered them for a price. Most of her supporters, however, were honest people with good intentions and a warm heart, who fall for the illusion that the "Saint of the Gutter" was there to wipe away all tears and end all misery and undo all injustice in the world. Those in love with an illusion often refuse to see reality.
More on Mother Teresa in Mukto-mona:
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