मदर तेरेसाचे असली रूप

लंडन, २ मार्च - मदर तेरेसा यांनी त्यांच्या जीवनात कार्य केले असले, तरी त्या संत नव्हत्या. त्यांनी केलेली गोरगरिबांची सेवा संशयास्पद होती. प्रसारमाध्यमांनी तेरेसा यांचा उदो उदो केल्यामुळे त्यांना संत घोषित करण्यात आले. व्हॅटिकनने चर्चपासून दूर जाणार्‍या ख्रिस्त्यांना पुन्हा चर्चकडे वळवण्यासाठी त्यांना संत म्हणून घोषित केले, असे निष्कर्ष कॅनडा येथील संशोधकांनी काढले आहेत. कॅनडाच्या ‘युनिव्हर्सिटी ऑफ मॉन्ट्रीयल’चे सर्गे लेरिवी आणि जेनविएव, तसेच ‘युनिव्हर्सिटी ऑफ ओटावा’चे करोल यांनी हे संशोधन केले आहे. 

   धर्म आणि विज्ञान यांवर आधारित असणार्‍या ‘रिलिजस’ या नियतकालिकामध्ये या संशोधकांचा अहवाल प्रसिद्ध करण्यात आला आहे.
    या निष्कर्षात म्हटले आहे,
१. व्हॅटिकनने तेरेसा याच्या अमानवी कृत्याकडे दुर्लक्ष केले.
२. रुग्णांना होणार्‍या त्रासांची माहिती अतिशयोक्तीने सांगण्यात येत होती.
३. रुग्णांना बरे करण्याचा कोणताही चमत्कार तेरेसा यांनी केला नाही, तर रुग्ण औषधामुळे बरे झाले होते. ४. तेरेसा यांचे व्यक्तीमत्त्व सत्यावर आधारित नव्हेत. 
५. व्हॅटिकनने त्यांना संत घोषित करतांना त्यांच्या संस्थेला मिळणार्‍या पैशांच्या हिशोबाकडे आणि राजकीय संबंधांकडे लक्ष दिले नाही.
Mother Teresa 'saint of the media', controversial study says

LONDON: A study conducted by Canadian researchers has called Mother Teresa "anything but a saint", a creation of an orchestrated and effective media campaign who was generous with her prayers but miserly with her foundation's millions when it came to humanity's suffering.

 The controversial study, to be published this month in the journal of studies in religion/sciences called Religieuses, says that Teresa — known across the world as the apostle of the dying and the downtrodden — actually felt it was beautiful to see the poor suffer.

According to the study, the Vatican overlooked the crucial human side of Teresa — her dubious way of caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it.

Instead, the Vatican went ahead with her beatification followed by canonization "to revitalize the Church and inspire the faithful especially at a time when churches are empty and the Roman authority is in decline".

Researchers Serge Larivee and Genevieve Chenard from the University of Montreal's department of psychoeducation, and Carole Senechal of the University of Ottawa's faculty of education, analysed published writings about Mother Teresa and concluded that her hallowed image, "which does not stand up to analysis of the facts, was constructed, and that her beatification was orchestrated by an effective media campaign".

According to Larivee, facts debunk Teresa's myth. He says that the Vatican, before deciding on Teresa's beatification, did not take into account "her rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding ... abortion, contraception, and divorce."

At the time of her death, Teresa had 517 missions or "homes for the dying" as described by doctors visiting several of these establishments in Kolkata. They welcomed the poor and sick in more than 100 countries. Two-thirds of the people coming to these missions hoped to a find a doctor to treat them, while the other third lay dying without receiving apt care.

'Miracle of medicine'

According to the study, the doctors observed a significant lack of hygiene, even unfit conditions and a shortage of actual care, food and painkillers. They say that the problem was not a paucity of funds as the Order of the Missionaries of Charity successfully raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Researchers said that when it came to her own treatment, "she received it in a modern American hospital".

The three researchers also dug into records of her meeting in London in 1968 with the BBC's Malcom Muggeridge who had strong views against abortion and shared Mother Teresa's right-wing Catholic values.

The researchers say Muggeridge had decided to promote Teresa. In 1969, he made a eulogistic film on the missionary, promoting her by attributing to her the "first photographic miracle", when it should have been attributed to the new film stock being marketed by Kodak.

Following her death, the Vatican decided to waive the usual five-year waiting period to open the beatification process. According to the researchers, one of the miracles attributed to Mother Theresa is the healing of Monica Besra, who suffered from intense abdominal pain, after a medallion blessed by her was placed on Besra's abdomen.

Larivee said, "Her doctors thought otherwise: the ovarian cyst and the tuberculosis from which she suffered were healed by the drugs they had given her. The Vatican, nevertheless, concluded that it was a miracle. Mother Teresa's popularity was such that she had become untouchable for the population, which had already declared her a saint."

Larivee however signs off on a surprisingly positive note and says there could also be a positive effect of the Mother Teresa myth. "If the extraordinary image of Mother Teresa conveyed in the collective imagination has encouraged humanitarian initiatives that are genuinely engaged with those crushed by poverty, we can only rejoice," they signed off.
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Christopher Hitchens

In the good old/bad old days, the procedure for making a former human
being into a saint was well understood. There had to be an interval of
at least seven years after the death before beatification - the first
stage in the process - could even be proposed. (This was to insure
against any gusts of popular enthusiasm for a local figure who might
later prove to be a phoney.) There had to be proof of two miracles,
attributable to the intercession of the deceased.

And there had to be a hearing, at which the advocatus Diaboli, or
Devil's Advocate, would be appointed by the Church to make the
strongest possible case against the nominee.

I am not a Roman Catholic and the saint-making procedures of the
Vatican are really none of my business. But it strikes me as odd that
none of the above rules have been followed in the case of the
newly-beatified woman who called herself "Mother" Teresa of Calcutta.
She was first put forward for beatification only four years after her
death. Only one miracle has been required of her, and duly found to
have been performed.

And, instead of appointing a Devil's Advocate, the Vatican invited me
to be a witness for the Evil One, and expected me to do the job pro
bono.

Their reason for asking was that I made a documentary called Hell's
Angel, and wrote a short book entitled The Missionary Position, in
which I reviewed Mother Teresa's career as if she had been an
ordinary person.

I discovered that she had taken money from rich dictators like the
Duvalier gang in Haiti, had been a friend of poverty rather than a
friend of the poor, had never given any account of the huge sums of
money donated to her, had railed against birth-control in the most
overpopulated city on the planet and had been the spokeswoman for the
most extreme dogmas of religious fundamentalism. Actually, it's
boasting to say that I "discovered" any of this. It was all there in
plain sight for anyone to notice. But in the age of celebrity, nobody
had troubled to ask if such a global reputation was truly earned or
was simply the result of brilliant public relations.

"Wait a minute," said a TV host in Washington a few nights ago, when I
debated all this with Mr John Donahue of the Catholic Defence League.
"She built hospitals." No, sir, you wait a minute. Mother Teresa was
given, to our certain knowledge, many tens of millions of pounds. But
she never built any hospitals. She claimed to have built almost 150
convents, for nuns joining her own order,
in several countries. Was this where ordinary donors thought their
money was going?

Furthermore, she received some of this money from the Duvaliers, and
from Mr Charles Keating of the notorious Lincoln Savings and Loan of
California, and both these sources had acquired the money by - how
shall I put it? - borrowing money from the poor and failing to give it
back.

How could this possibly be true? Doesn't everyone know that she spent
her time kissing the sores of lepers and healing the sick? Ah, but
what everyone knows isn't always true. You were more likely to run
into Mother Teresa being photographed with Nancy Reagan, or posing
with Princess Diana, or in the first-class cabin of Air India (where
she had a permanent reservation).

You could see her in Ireland, campaigning against a law which would
permit civil divorce and remarriage (though she publicly defended
Princess Diana's right to be divorced).

You could encounter her on the podium in Stockholm, accepting yet
another huge cheque and telling the Nobel audience that the greatest
threat to world peace was... abortion. (Since she added that
contraception was morally as bad as abortion, she essentially held the
view that condoms and coils were a deadly threat to world peace. The
Church does not insist on that degree of fundamentalism.) And when she
got sick, she would check herself into the Mayo Clinic or some other
temple of American medicine. As one who has visited her primitive
"hospice" for the dying in Calcutta, I should call that a wise
decision. Nobody would go there except to check out, in one way or
another.

"Give a man a reputation as an early riser," said Mark Twain "and that
man can sleep till noon." Give a woman a reputation for holiness and
compassion and apparently nothing she does can cause
her to lose it.

Of Albanian descent and a keen nationalist, she visited the country
when it was still a brutal dictatorship and "the world's first atheist
state" to pay tribute to its grim Stalinist leader. She fawned upon
her shrewd protector Indira Gandhi at a time when the Indian
government was imposing forced sterilisations. Above all, she urged
the poor to think of their sufferings as a gift from God. And she
opposed the only thing that has ever been known to cure poverty - the
empowerment of women in poor countries by giving them some say in
their own reproduction.

Now, so they tell us, a woman in Bengal has recovered from a tumour
after praying to Mother Teresa. I have received information from both
the family and the physicians that says it was good medical treatment
that did the job. Who knows?

I must say that I don't believe in miracles but if they do exist there
are deserving cases which don't, in spite of fervent prayers, ever
benefit from them.

When Mr Donahue was asked if he believed the statutory second miracle
would occur, he said that he thought it would. I said that I thought
so, too.

But I have already seen a collective hallucination occur as regards
Mother Teresa, though it was produced by the less supernatural methods
of modern, uncritical mass media.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?

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