Mother Teresa's Prayer Page 1 of 37 ~*~ Mother Teresa's Prayer ~*~ People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered; ...Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; ...Be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; ...Succeed anyway. If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; ...Be honest and frank anyway. What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; ...Build anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous; ...Be happy anyway. The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; ...Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough; ...Give the world the best you've got anyway. You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God; It was never between you and them anyway. MOTHER TERESA The myth created in 1969 by Malcolm Muggeridge has been fiercely protected and amplified by the world’s wealthiest and mightiest—but with not inconsiderable help from Mother Teresa herself. If you want to know about the real Mother Teresa, you may read some sample chapters of my book The Mother of All Myths It is relevant that I am Calcuttan born, bred and educated. Please note that my work is factual and wholly evidence-based. I am neither a leftist nor a Hindu, hence my brief is neither ideological nor religious. But THE CELEBRATION OF UNTRUTH SHOULD NOW STOP You will find some rabble-rousing in my other web page if you have the stomach for more file://G:\geniuscode\library\spiritual library\MotherTeresa.htm 07/08/09 Mother Teresa's Prayer Page 2 of 37 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- E-mail Aroup Chatterjee :[email protected] SUBMISSION BEFORE THE COMMITTEE FOR BEATIFICATION/CANONISATION OF MOTHER TERESA -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Being a lay person not versed in ecclesiastical procedures, I am not eminently suited to make a formal or technical deposition before the Committee. However, I have had a keen interest in Mother Teresa for the last few years and have researched her operations, perhaps more thoroughly than anyone else in the world. And, as somebody born, brought up and educated in Calcutta, I feel I am in a unique situation to offer evidence to the Committee. The Committee may summon me at any time to appear personally before it to offer evidence. I also put my audio visual evidence at the disposal of the Committee should it want to consult them. Over the years I have been dismayed at the discrepancy between Mother Teresa's words and her deeds, and here I present some of them. Mother Teresa had said many thousands of times in her life that she "pick[ed] up" people from the streets of Calcutta. She expounded on it at length in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Her order did (and does) not "pick up" destitutes from Calcutta's streets. They do not provide an ambulance service for the city's poorest of the poor. If one rings the Kalighat home for the dying destitute, one is told curtly to ring 102 (the Calcutta Corporation ambulance line) so that a Corporation vehicle would bring the destitute to Kalighat. I believe that Mother Teresa had deliberately misled the world in her assertions about "picking up" destitutes from the streets of Calcutta in order to bolster her own image and that of her faith. Her failure to provide vehicles (whilst continually claiming to do so) is even more significant because she had been donated a number of ambulance vehicles. These are used mainly (though not solely) as vans to ferry nuns, often to and from places of prayer. I believe that this constitutes an abuse of other people's trust in her. Mother Teresa is on record in various publications (written by her friends and followers) as having said that her order fed 4000, 5000, 7000 or 9000 people in Calcutta everyday (the figures are not chronologically incremental). I do not know what she meant by feeding that number, but the fact remains that her soup kitchens (numbering between two and three) in Calcutta did (does) not feed more than 300 people daily (a generous over-estimate). The Committee should also take into account the "food cards" that poor people must possess to obtain ration in at least one soup kitchen. The Committee should note that such cards are not easy to come by for the poor, and that virtually all Christians in a particular slum have food cards, when hardly any of the poor from the other religions have them. This policy gives the lie to Mother Teresa's assertions that she treated the poor from all faiths equally. On the issue of bias toward Catholicism, I would also like to tell the Committee that worship inside Mother Teresa's homes is solely Catholic, and non-Catholic worship is not at all permitted therein. This practice should be judged in the context of a minute proportion of the residents in her homes in Calcutta being of the Catholic faith. I would like to draw the Committee's attention to Mother Teresa's frequent pronouncement: "I help a Hindu to become a better Hindu, a Muslim to become a better Muslim....." etc. The practice of denying poor people under her care the right to worship their own god(s) can be judged as harsh and demeaning. Mother Teresa once said, "If there are poor on the moon, we will go there." She said many times that she never refused anybody who needed help. In reality however, her order operated strict exclusion criteria in their selection of who to help and who not to. Mother Teresa's order did (does) not help anybody, no matter how poor or helpless, who had a family member of any kind -- what they term a "family case". One of Mother Teresa's slogans had been ,"Bring me that unwanted child." In her Nobel Prize speech she said, "Let us bring the child back. .......What have we done for the child? ...........Have we really made the children wanted?" If the Committee examines what Mother Teresa had done for street children (in Calcutta), it may find that she fell short of optimal standard. Despite her assertions, she did not operate an "open door" policy at her homes for the poor, including for poor children. A very poor and very ill child would not be offered help unless the parents signed (or thumb-printed) a form of renunciation signing over the rights of the child to her organisation. I have video evidence of such a case happening on the doorstep of Mother Teresa's orphanage. file://G:\geniuscode\library\spiritual library\MotherTeresa.htm 07/08/09 Mother Teresa's Prayer Page 3 of 37 The Committee may also want to interview street children from around Mother House who were repeatedly reported to the police by Mother Teresa's nuns for "pestering" foreigners who came to visit the "living saint". I have video interviews with such children, which the Committee may like to consult. In her famous letter written in 1978 to the then Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai in protest against the curbing of Christian missionary activities, Mother Teresa mentioned that she operated "102 centres" of natural family in Calcutta. The Committee should heed that such centres do not exist. The Committee should also note that in her Nobel Prize speech Mother Teresa had said that in 6 years in Calcutta there were "61,273 babies less" born because of her organisation's natural family planning activities. There is no basis whatever for this statistic, and it was disingenuous of Mother Teresa to mention it in her Nobel Prize speech. In the April 1996 issue of the US magazine Ladies Home Journal, Mother Teresa said that she wanted to die like the poor in her home for the dying destitute in Kalighat. This is a very outrageous statement indeed. By then she had had numerous in- patient medical treatments in some of the most expensive clinics around the world. This includes the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California and the Gemelli Hospital in Rome. She also had numerous treatments at Calcutta's Woodlands and Belle Vue Clinics, which are outside the reach of 99% of India's population. She also received (on numerous occasions) sophisticated and expensive cardiac treatments at Calcutta's Birla Heart Institute. When Mother Teresa died, she was surrounded in her bedroom by sophisticated and expensive cardiac equipment, which had been specially fitted for her. Such privilege is usually granted to kings, presidents and dictators. Whether such exclusive facilities befit a future Saint is for the Committee to decide, but I would ask it to take note of the wide discrepancy between Mother Teresa's deeds and her pronouncements. In 1984 Mother Teresa (publicly) declined the offer of cataract surgery from the St Francis Medical Centre in Pittsburgh, USA, telling the media that she could not possibly accept the £5000 treatment; but the very next year she had the same surgery (which cost even more) in St Vincent's Hospital , New York. I think Mother Teresa (or anybody else) should receive the best possible medical treatment, but she utterly failed giving her residents (at least in Calcutta) the minimum dignity and treatment -- despite her vast resources. The residents at Kalighat were denied beds -- they were forced to lie on hammocks, known by her order as "pallets". They were not allowed to get up from their pallets and stretch themselves. They are denied visits from friends and relatives -- indeed they would not be admitted in the first place if they had any relatives.