The Fraudulent Sainthood of Mother Theresa – How a Modern Myth was Created

Mother Theresa:  Friend of the Rich and Powerful, Papa Doc and Reagan

St Theresa with the Reagans - who unleashed the Contras on Nicaragua and supported the death squads of Central America

The elaborate pageant that surrounds the canonisation of Saint Theresa of Calcutta has nothing to do with her ‘saintly’ qualities and everything to do with a propaganda exercise by an institution that is in desperate need of a public relations makeover.

An Indian worker at Bhopal where thousands died and thousands were injured by the US multinational Union Carbide

I am no admirer of Christopher Hitchens, who infamously defended the Iraq War and George Bush’s ‘war on terror’.  An ex-Trotskyite he panicked with 9/11 and fell for the flattery of the neo-conservative Right.  He took the path that many on the Left took before him when he bestowed his talents on the very war mongers and mass murderers that he himself had castigated.

Baby Doc - tyrant of Haiti and friend of Saint Theresa

But despite his eventual failings, Christopher Hitchens produced a remarkable film and a book Mother Theresa, ‘The Missionary Position.  In 2001, Hitchens testified in opposition before the body of the Washington Archdiocese that was considering the cause of Mother Teresa's sainthood. He described his role as that of the traditional devil's advocate charged with casting doubt on the candidate's sanctity.^[11] Mother Teresa was beatified in October 2003.^[12] Hitchens marked the occasion by questioning the speed of the modern beatification process and describing "the obviousness of the fakery" of the miracle attributed to her. He repeated his thesis succinctly: she "was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty" and "a friend to the worst of the rich". He wrote that the press was to blame for its "soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda" on her behalf.

When receiving the Nobel Peace Prize St. Theresa singled out abortion as the greatest evil in the world

Mother Theresa’s House of the Dying in Calcutta had no proper beds, gave no medical attention or succour to the dying, had an open toilet.  Yet millions of dollars were raised on account of this shabby building, for which no accounts have been produced.  Watch the film and see for yourself how the Catholic Church has consciously used the myth of the dictator’s friend Mother Theresa to rehabilitate its image in the wake of the continuing scandal of its child abuse.

Father Bernard Aristide - popularly elected President of Haiti who the Catholic Church forbade to say mass and who was expelled from his Order

Mother Theresa represented the most reactionary strand of Roman Catholicism.  Her advice to the poor was to accept their sufferings and to glory in it.  Their kingdom was in the next world.  Hence she flattered the oppressors and the torturers of this world.  Her friends included the rulers of Guatemala and El Salvador, where the Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero was murdered in his own church by the death squads whilst giving mass.  She preferred to befriend his killers.

St Theresa urged Thatcher to repeal the 1967 Abortion Act

In Haiti she was the friend of the Papa Doc regime which terrorised the populace with their Tonton Macoutes killers.  The Vatican was the only state to recognise Du Valier's regime, but the popularly elected President Father Aristide was stripped of his right to celebrate mass.

Her advice to the thousands of Indian workers injured and killed by Union Carbide at the Bhopal chemical plant was to 'forgive'.  

Mother Theresa's 'sainthood' should be seen for what it is - a fraud.

Tony Greenstein 

Haitian military that St Theresa supported