In keeping with the tone set by my earlier article I decided to do some research into Mother Theresa again (I remembered some of this from her canonization proceedings) and was disgusted anew by one of history’s most celebrated hypocrites. These folks give religion a bad name.

“This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT 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 and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?”

- Chistopher Hitchens (one of Mother Teresa’s harshest critics in this article)

“Hitchens's account of Mother T's alliance with Charles Keating is particularly illuminating. In the early 1980s Keating ran a bogus thrift institution -- Lincoln Savings and Loan -- and specialized in swindling small investors. During the heyday of that operation, Keating gave more than $1 million to Mother T her and organization, while Mother T, in return, allowed Keating to exploit her fame and prestige in his public-relations maneuvers.

Lincoln Savings and Loan eventually collapsed, and in 1992 Keating was brought to trial in Los Angeles. Mother T then sent to the trial judge a letter in which she sought clemency for Keating and exhorted the judge to "do what Jesus would do." The judge didn't reply, but a deputy district attorney, Paul Turley, did. After Keating was convicted of fraud, Turley wrote to Mother T and pointed out that the money which she had received from Keating was, in fact, money that Keating had stolen. Turley then urged Mother T to ask herself what Jesus would do in such a situation, and he offered to help her return the money to its rightful owners. He never got an answer. “

- From Hitchen’s book on the topic.

Finally (and most damning in my opinion) a former follower of Mother Theresa (a10 year veteran follower at that) gives a look behind the façade :

“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. “

…

“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.”

…

“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. “

…

“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.”

Read the whole sordid thing.

For the record: I like nuns. My mother was a nun. My sister is a nun. Heck, a significant percentage of my extended family members are in fact clergy! I do however despise hypocrites and those who exploit the true faith of well-intentioned donors. Theresa was no saint and was not even a good person (in my opinion).

(Note that Hitchens is no saint either but his findings are undisputed and publicly sourced and the second contributor was a nun in Theresa's own order)