Mother Teresa - Truth?

[FarhnamDrunk]

This was hit on in the locked demon thread. Now, i always thought she was into altruism and sacrifice. Others says its an outright deception. With no attacking each other, can we have a discussion?

Just one clip post quote to start:

Quote:Book Uncovers a Lonely, Spiritually Desolate Mother Teresa
"There is no God in me," she wrote.
Shona Crabtree, Religion News

Ten years after her death, a new book of Mother Teresa's personal letters illustrates a profound and private spiritual struggle— much of it unknown to the world that would come to embrace her as a living saint.

Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, to be released Sept. 4, is a collection of Teresa's personal letters to her spiritual advisers. For the most part, they are letters she never intended to become public and, in fact, had asked to be destroyed.

In one letter from 1962, Teresa even mused about how her sense of spiritual desolation might impact the bid—now under way at the Vatican—to make her a saint.

"If I ever become a Saint—I will surely be one of 'darkness,'" she wrote. "I will continually be absent from Heaven—to (light) the light of those in darkness on earth."

The book will likely challenge the characterization many people had of Teresa as a simple, pious woman, said the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest who wrote the best-selling My Life With the Saints.

"I think that this is a real treasure for not only believers, but even doubters and skeptics," Martin said. "I think it also makes her much more accessible to the everyday believer. It shows that even the saints struggle in their spiritual lives and that they don't have it easier than we do. They sometimes have it harder than we do."

The book was edited by the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, who directs the Mother Teresa Center from Tijuana, Mexico, and oversees her cause for sainthood; she was beatified by the late Pope John Paul II in 2003.

As part of the bid for sainthood, Kolodiejchuk read through 6,000 of Teresa's letters. For the book, he included letters pertaining to three aspects of her life: her vow to God, what she called "the inspiration" and also "the darkness."

In 1942, Mother Teresa made a vow not to refuse Jesus anything. Starting in 1946, she experienced several mystical encounters with Jesus, whom she called "the Voice," asking her to serve "the poorest of the poor." The "darkness" was her term for feelings of loneliness and abandonment when her communion with Jesus ended.

Prior to 1946, Kolodiejchuk said little was known about Teresa's spiritual life. "She says in a letter, 'I came to India with the desire to love Jesus as he has never been loved before,'" he said. "She was a woman passionately in love with Jesus."

Yet no sooner did Teresa start her work in the slums of Calcutta than she began to feel the intense absence of Jesus—a state that lasted until her death, according to her letters.

"The paradox is that for her to be a light, she was to be in darkness," Kolodiejchuk said.

In a letter estimated to be from 1961, Teresa wrote: "Darkness is such that I really do not see—neither with my mind nor with my reason—the place of God in my soul is blank—There is no God in me—when the pain of longing is so great—I just long & long for God. … The torture and pain I can't explain."

Over time, the Rev. Joseph Neuner, a spiritual adviser, helped Teresa realize her feelings of abandonment only increased her understanding of the people she helped, Kolodiejchuk said. Ultimately, she identified her suffering with that of Jesus, which helped her to accept it.

Catholic saints typically experience a "dark night of the soul" in the words of 16th-century priest St. John of the Cross, Martin said, but never as long as the "whole working life" Teresa experienced.

"She moves into the ranks of the greatest saints," Martin said. "There are very few who have suffered such an extended dark night."

But Martin stressed that Teresa's belief in God never wavered—just her feeling of connection to Jesus, especially after her intense mystical experiences.

"It's one thing to feel that God is not with you. It's another thing to believe that God doesn't exist," he said.

How all this may affect her bid for sainthood remains unclear. Some say it makes her even more impressive. While her spiritual loneliness became known during the canonization process, Kolodiejchuk said this is the first time the arc of her inner spiritual life is compiled in one place in her own words.

Gezim Alpion, the author of Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity? who teaches at the University of Birmingham in England, wondered whether the Catholic Church was trying to capitalize on Teresa's popularity by releasing her private confessions.

"It's atrocious to think that whatever you tell these people in confidence becomes popular," he said.

Despite Mother Teresa's requests for privacy, publication of her private thoughts should be expected, said the Rev. Richard McBrien, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame and author of Lives of the Saints.

"Nothing," he said, "is private in a canonization procedure."

Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

---

One of many opposing articles:

Quote:WORLDPOST
Mother Teresa Was No Saint
Mar 15, 2016 | Updated Mar 18, 2016
Krithika Varagur Associate Editor, What’s Working

DIBYANGSHU SARKAR VIA GETTY IMAGES
On September 4 of this year, Mother Teresa will become Saint Teresa. This is unsurprising; she was beatified in 2003, which is sort of a one-way road to canonization. But it’s the last thing we need. She was no saint.

To canonize Mother Teresa would be to seal the lid on her problematic legacy, which includes forced conversion, questionable relations with dictators, gross mismanagement, and actually, pretty bad medical care. Worst of all, she was the quintessential white person expending her charity on the third world — the entire reason for her public image, and the source of immeasurable scarring to the postcolonial psyche of India and its diaspora.

A 2013 study from the University of Ottawa dispelled the “myth of altruism and generosity” surrounding Mother Teresa, concluding that her hallowed image did not stand up to the facts, and was basically the result of a forceful media campaign from an ailing Catholic Church.

Although she had 517 missions in 100 countries at the time of her death, the study found that hardly anyone who came seeking medical care found it there. Doctors observed unhygienic, “even unfit,” conditions, inadequate food, and no painkillers — not for lack of funding, in which Mother Theresa’s world-famous order was swimming, but what the study authors call her “particular conception of suffering and death.”

“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,” Mother Teresa once told the unamused Christopher Hitchens.

Even within the bounds of Christian notions of blessed meekness, what kind of perverse logic underlies such thinking?

The answer, unsurprisingly, given the locale of her work, is racist colonialism. Despite the 100 countries’ missions, and her Albanian birthplace, Mother Teresa is of India and India begat Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. And there, she became what the historian Vijay Prashad dubbed “the quintessential image of the white woman in the colonies, working to save the dark bodies from their own temptations and failures. “

Her image is entirely circumscribed by colonial logic: that of the white savior shining a light on the world’s poorest brown people.

Mother Teresa was a martyr — not for India’s and the global South’s poor — but for white, bourgeois guilt. (As Prashad says, it functioned as this instead of, not on top of, a “genuine challenge to those forces that produce and maintain poverty.”)

And how did she even help said brown people? Dubiously if at all. She had a persistent “ulterior motive” to convert some of India’s most vulnerable and sick to Christianity, as the chief of a Hindu nationalist NGO said last year. There are even a number of accounts that she and her nuns tried to baptize the dying.

The cross-examination of the nun’s legacy would seem petty were it not for the Church’s breathless campaign to make her into something more.

This campaign started during her own life, when the anti-abortion British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge made Mother Teresa’s public image his singular cross to bear, first through a hagiographic 1969 documentary and then with a 1971 book. He set into motion a public resolve to situate her in the “realm of myth” rather than of history.

Her posthumous beatification was undertaken with the ardency of someone who doesn’t want to get caught. Pope John Paul II waived the normal five-year waiting period after her death for her beatification process to begin and launched it just a year after she died.

You would think that a woman who called for such extraordinary measures was singularly reproachless. Yet Mother Teresa hobnobbed, during her lifetime, with notorious despots like Haiti’s Jean-Claude Duvalier (from whom she accepted the Legion d’Honneur in 1981) and Albania’s Enver Hoxha.

Look, none of this is particularly new. Much of it surfaced in 2003, when she was beatified, and in Christopher Hitchens’s polemic, and in Tariq Ali’s documentary, “Hell’s Angel.” This is not to speak ill of the dead.

But Mother Teresa’s imminent sainthood is freshly infuriating. We make god in our image and we see holiness in those who resemble us. In this, Mother Teresa’s image is a relic of white, Western supremacy. Her glorification comes at the expense of the Indian psyche . And of a billion Indians and diaspora who were force-fed the notion that it’s different, and better, when white people help us. Who learned that forced conversion is no big deal. Who grew up learning the egregious fact that one of the five five “Indian” Nobel laureates was a woman who let sick people die. Poverty is not beautiful, it’s terrible. Mother Teresa will be the patron saint of white people on gap years, but not of any actual brown person.

[Mider2009]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=65JxnUW7Wk4

This is a good documentary on her. But there's other stuff like her spending money on a gold chalice instead of for the poor, telling her nuns to dress dirty so they'd get donations.

Ive read by church standards a saint has to have performed at least two miracles yet one of her "miracles" is being in a picture that's shiny...most photographers would say it's just a glitch.

[Emperor Time]

I agree she doesn't deserve sainthood since that only belongs to the worthy like Joan of Arc or Thomas Aquinas and the like.

[FarhnamDrunk]

I smell something dirty tbh. In the short, i think she was being used by the heads of the church. Nuns, probably dont handle the finances of the church.

Lets take the dictator donations. The dictator wants to loon like more of a philanthropist in the eyes of the world. Mother teresa wants the poor to benefit. The church wants the money overall. Mother teresa is a perfect scapegoat.

1, shes a woman.
2. Shes easily used to get the goal
3. Simple to blame in the end.

Churches have lied all throughout time. I doubt they're godly now.

[ganeshankh]

Wow! Don't know what to say. Only know the real person only after they're dead!

[HBG14]

Money hungry like everybody else in the church, a good book about this stuff is Gods Bankers.

[Mider2009]

1. She went to Haiti and praised the government. This was when papa doc was running things yet critisized America for its stance on abortion.
2. She was given stolen money by a huckster and later asked the judge to give him a light sentence. The judge told her she should return the money....which she didn't.
3. She recieved the best possible care when she was sick yet let people suffer in agony in her shit hole poor houses with nothing better then Tylenol.
4. She let people die under her card who could have been saved.

[Santamuerte]

(09-13-2016 05:00 AM)Emperor Time Wrote:  I agree she doesn't deserve sainthood since that only belongs to the worthy like Joan of Arc or Thomas Aquinas and the like.

Good examples of St. joan and St. thomas aquinas, there.

Most any famous catholic becomes a saint eventually. I am actually studying for the jesuit priesthood and have done much research on the saints. I have found that most famous or significant catholics become labeled saints or get beatified eventually. Father augustine tolton for instance. He never performed any miracles, or was particularly holy. He was, from what I can gather, an incredibly average priest, aside from the significance of being the first african american priest. Despite that distinction, it is still not worthy of sainthood, yet there are dozens of people asking for him to be canonized. No disrespect to tolton, though. I'm sure he served the church well.

[FarhnamDrunk]

God's Bankers

I still think she went in innocent and lost faith. I think she became used. Whether she meant full malignant intent i have no idea. Hearsay wont quench any absolute truth.

That said..... Church of all kinds are corrupt havens of hypocrisy. Time sees to it that such will happen. So onset or eventually.

Doesnt matter to me. Shes dead and i can care less about glorication of any hero. Behind each is an agenda of the state.

[The Artis Magistra]

Is there no one here capable of interviewing this ghost?