Thread by @ruchirsharma_1

"Mother Theresa 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" - Christopher Hitchens

slate.com/news-and-polit…

Hell's Angel (1994) is a documentary about Mother Teresa by Christopher Hitchens, a precursor to his book, The Missionary Position. The film claims that she urged the poor to accept their fate, while the rich are portrayed as being favored by God.

"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 they have been conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted".

"When doctors visited her missions, they reportedly discovered that one-third of patients "lay dying without receiving appropriate care."

The same paper claims that doctors found a shortage of care, food, and painkillers, although #MotherTeresa had raised millions of dollars."

"When confronted about these allegations, according to Christopher Hitchens, #MotherTeresa said,

"There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.""

vice.com/en_us/article/…

"One journalist compared [Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata] to the photographs she had seen of Nazi Germany’s Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and Hitchens rallied against what he called the “cult of death and suffering.”"

#MotherTeresa

washingtonpost.com/news/worldview…

"As Bruno Maddox put it in a review for the New York Times, Hitchens concluded that #MotherTeresa was “less interested in helping the poor than in using them as an indefatigable source of wretchedness on which to fuel the expansion of her fundamentalist Roman Catholic beliefs.”"

Working as a leftist party cadre in the 1970s and 1980s, Dr Aroup Chatterjee said, “I never even saw any nuns in those slums that I worked in. I think it’s an imperialist venture of the Catholic Church against an Eastern population, an Eastern city".
nytimes.com/2016/08/27/wor…

"Over hundreds of hours of research cataloged in a book he published in 2003, Dr Chatterjee said he found a “cult of suffering” in homes run by #MotherTeresa’s organisation, the Missionaries of Charity, with children tied to beds and little to comfort dying patients but aspirin."

"He and others said that Mother Teresa took her adherence to frugality and simplicity in her work to extremes, allowing practices like the reuse of hypodermic needles and tolerating primitive facilities that required patients to defecate in front of one another."

"Over the years, as Dr. Chatterjee tried to make his case, campaigning for changes in the charity’s facilities, he said he began to feel Kolkatans turning against him.

Part of this protection of Mother Teresa, Dr. Chatterjee believes, can be attributed to the Nobel Peace Prize."

"“Calcuttans have got this fascination with Nobel Prizes,” he said, adding that the city’s celebrated poet Rabindranath Tagore won Asia’s first Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Others, he said, were simply afraid to speak out."

"But Dr. Chatterjee said that Mother Teresa’s place in the Western canon was enough for some Indians to lionise her as part of an ingrained colonialist mind-set. “The West is saying she’s good, so she must be good,” he said." 🤡

nytimes.com/2016/08/27/wor…

"When Indians have challenged aspects of Mother Teresa’s career, he said, it has often been to safeguard what some see as the progressiveness of her work, playing down the miracles and myths surrounding her."

“Because Calcuttans think that #MotherTeresa is Western and she’s a Western icon, she’s very progressive,” he said. “And they do not associate her with miracles and mumbo jumbo and black magic just as they do not associate her with opposition to contraception and abortion.”

"She presented to the West a perfect role model: a do-gooder who didn’t threaten to challenge the status-quo. As Mihir Bose said, “She’s part of the western agenda, it makes the West feel better; ‘this is one of us, once again rescuing the third world.’"

salon.com/2016/01/03/the…

"Researchers estimate that Missionaries of Charity was receiving up to USD 72 million in annual donations by the end of #MotherTeresa’s life. A 1991 investigation by the German news magazine Stern found that only 7 per cent of this money was being used for charitable activity."

After the 1984 Union Carbide disaster (conveniently called the "Bhopal Gas Tragedy" by the craven Indian state and servile press to shift the blame away from their white masters), #MotherTeresa gave Virgin Mary idols to victims and told them to "forgive".

magazine.outlookindia.com/story/the-sain…

"#MotherTeresa accepted a donation of more than a million dollars from financier Charles Keating, who later went to prison for defrauding investors. Mother Teresa wrote to the court asking clemency for Keating without explaining their relationship."

nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/09/m…

"#MotherTeresa took money from and praised right-wing dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, who later was accused of allowing the torture and murder of thousands of Haitians during his regime."

nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/09/m…

"#MotherTeresa taught nuns to secretly baptise the dying.After asking the person if they wanted a “ticket to heaven” the nun would then “pretend she was just cooling the person’s forehead with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptising him, saying quietly the necessary words.”"

"The editor of the Lancet medical journal ... found that the sisters did not seek medical diagnoses for patients and administered only the most rudimentary painkillers and antibiotics.

Mother Teresa often [said] that suffering brought one closer to God."

latimes.com/world/la-fg-in…