I won't go into all the reasons why I DISrespect the catholic boys club and its minions of men in brocade dresses and tap shoes (where in the Bible did Jesus say "go forth and wear tall hats"?) making rules for the rest of the world. What really pissed me off about Theresa all those years was that she was a big part of the MESS ... overpopulation, disease, tragedy ... she taught catholic rules about birth control to MUSLIM WOMEN IN INDIA! Then she was praised for cleaning up her mess.

Ptooey.

"Mother Teresa's "hospitals" for the indigent in India and elsewhere turned out to be hardly more than human warehouses in which seriously ill persons lay on mats, sometimes fifty to sixty in a room without benefit of adequate medical attention."

Im no fan of Mother Teresa but this statement above by Parenti belies a serious lack of knowledge of street life in certain parts of India especially Calcutta. Parenti comes across as another deluded white man sitting in his ivory tower and passing judgement with no actual knowledge of existing conditions. As long as this story fits into his construct, facts can die a slow death. While I admire a lot of Parenti's work in his criticism of U.S. foreign policy etc, he still comes across as an elitist academician who cannot understand why people dont get it !

As long as we are part of this fascist corporate culture here in the U.S. (Parenti included) we cannot accuse anybody of using 'dirty' corporate money to begin with. Secondly the conditions in the streets of Calcutta are far worse than those that existed in Teresas hospitals (i can attest to that).
I did hate the proseltyzing aspect of Teresa and her fellow nuns but you cannot deny the time and effort they put in to help the poor. You could also argue that there are hundreds of other Indians (non-white!!) who have done a lot more than Teresa (which is true) but you cannot fault Teresa for taking money from wherever she can get it to scoop the poor and destitute of the streets.

Calling all NeoCommies; it's the NeoCommie thing to hate all Catholics.

not sure what the point of article is except restating the obvious, part of which is that catholics have no lock on hypocrisy.

When conservatives don't have an argument, they resort to baseless accusations and name-calling. It works on the less highly evolved.

"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist." Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara (Roman Catholic Archbishop of Olinda & Recife, Brazil)

"Saints are dead sinners, revised and edited." Ambrose Bierce (American Writer, Journalist and Editor, 1842-1914)

The point of the article is that we must constantly keep an eye on the Catholic Church and its grand pretensions to having moral superiority over all others based on just what...?

The Catholics promote false idols like Mother Teresa even as their church is over run by pedophiles and fascist leaning thugs. So it is certainly important to take a look at just who Mother Teresa really was, and who exactly were, and still are, her benefactors even after her death.

The Catholic Church needs a Right Wing vision of a Catholic heroine to keep the women from leaving their church as many men have done. The idolatry of Mother Teresa is meant to be a modern day follow up to the idolatry they promote around the 'Virgin Mary'.

Divide divide and divide again.
It is no wonder that the neocons and warmongers can call up so much victory.
The "left" of which I am one, never ceases to disparage those who are actually working for many of the same things.
Attack a Mother Teresa, attack Cindy Sheehan, attack John Edwards. Anyone who doesn't fit what we THINK they should do or be. Diversity is not really welcome if you aren't exactly with us.
I am really sad by this.
Mother Teresa was a human woman who worked hard for those NO ONE else was caring for. They died in the gutter. She made a bed for them. She gave them water. She held their hands as they died. Have any of you taken any one human from the street into your home and held them as they died?

She had doubts? Great! Better than the "fer sure" belief of our president. Every good person I know has had personal doubts and spiritual dryness, but they kept on doing their work knowing that at least one person at a time was helped.

What or who does this article serve? Does it help one dying person to bring up MT's doubt, her inaccuracies, her "lavish lifestyle?"

Yeh, she did it all as a scam! Conning everyone into being good to the least important. Because she was gonna make it big and rich!!! Wow, she flew first class - what should she have done, levitated? And who is going to really take that old little woman and not give her a place of honor? You think she demanded it diva style?

Sometimes, I lose my faith in the people altogether. I want a better future for my kids, for the world, for the least of us. I want America to honor its ideals and Constitution. I want an end to war and to slow global warming and the press of corporatist consumerism to stop. I want justice and peace for all. But, since I am a Catholic and have a deep affection for Mother Teresa and John Paul II, I am to be scorned?

I say you shall know them by their fruits. What are the results of their work, their faith, their lives? Have they inspired any to give their handiwork for the common good and to help the unfortunate? Well, they have inspired many; and while I'm not a Mother Teresa or JPII, I do at least a little to feed the poor, to treat the sick, to clothe the naked, to stop the war, to get out the Current Occupant and the minions. But I won't condemn a gay couple or a woman who's had an abortion, or an evolutionist Or even a "saint" who isn't quite holy. I have my own share of sins to struggle with and don't have time for someone else's. (by the way, pedophilia and thuggery are not any of my sins nor are they really rampant anywhere I've been...)

Peace, Justice, and Hope!

Well, after all, the Roman Catholic Church is practically the archetype of a top-down authoritarian organization, aka a benevolent dictatorship. Whether or not to put "benevolent" in ironic quotes depends on whether you're outside looking in or inside looking out.

Such organizations rely on dogma, doctrine, and propaganda to persist; the ritual of "canonization", fast-track or not, is simply a pathetic fraud to astonish the credulous-- like getting a star on Hollywood Boulevard, or being admitted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: showbiz. Which, incidentally, also applies to the US Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Naturally, Mother Theresa has to be sanitized in order to compel iconic status; they'd do the same for Ike Turner, or Phil Spector. And one can confidently expect appropriate "miracles" to be reported and allegedly thoroughly vetted to grease the wheels of this ecclesiastical merry-go-round.

JPII clipped his fingernails in my back yard, and now lilies-of-the-valley have sprung up! I fell asleep with a newspaper over my face containing a story and photo of the late Pope, and when I woke up my acne was gone!

Other than that, it is regrettably true that, with rare exceptions like John XXIII, the Big Bosses tend to promote orthodoxy, conformity, and faith in the institution [the religious equivalent of "patriotism"] in their membership. Like "folk masses", the theology of liberation quickly became passé, and the horizontal peer relationships formed by progressive clergy were discouraged. The liberal Congressman Robert Drinan, SJ, retired from politics at the behest of the papacy. Back to your beads, and maybe a miracle will happen to you!

The Church is always more comfortable with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes because they have much in common.

Thank you. Finally someone is pointing out the fact that Mother Theresa is not an icon the left should support.

To gyptian and TLCS. I think you are both flat out wrong. It is completely obvious that Mother Theresa did not want to help the poor. She wanted to convert them to Catholicism. That was her mission. She made them live in pain and suffering because she saw suffering as a purifying thing. Sometimes kids are chained to their beds. Nuns that worked with her have come out against her. She is nothing more than a religious zealot attempting to further her own agenda straight out of the dark ages. She wanted to take away a woman's right to choose, or their right to get out of an abusive marriage.

Her organization squanders their donations and does not spend the money to help the poor. She wouldn't ever even let on how much money she actually had.. it was all squirreled away in secret bank accounts. Check out Missionary Position by Christopher Hitchens.

Mother Theresa didn't give a flying fuck about the pain of those she "cared" for. All she wanted to do was make sure the believed in Christ before they died. She was a missionary plain and simple.

She sometimes wouldn't even let the dying have human contact. So much for "holding their hands" while they died.

Wake up. The reason the first world has idealized Mother Theresa is because it makes them feel alright about not doing anything to help the poor themselves, because someone else is doing it. It alleviates their guilt about their consumerism and how it affects the poor. It's just like the commercials on TV where you can sponsor starving kids.

Another good book "The Road to Hell" talks about the corruption of the foreign aid industry.

Missionaries are engaged in the annihilation of "heathen" cultures. We should never celebrate them. They are delusional and want to spread their delusion to others, especially to others in vulnerable situations.

People are always just people, and many times they have their own agendas. Let's stop elevating people to superhuman status. Even Gandhi denied his wife lifesaving medication, which resulted in her death, but when his own life was on the line he took drugs and got better. MLK Jr. cheated on his wife.

Who does this article serve? All of us, because it points out that we have all been conned into elevating a conservative arch-witch to some kind of holy status she hardly deserves.

MOTHER THERESA DIDN'T CARE ABOUT THE POOR. SHE THOUGHT POVERTY WAS A GOOD THING. READ UP ON IT. All the stuff about the lavish lifestyle just further points out her hypocrisy. She could have afforded, and her organization still can afford, to provide medicine and humane care to the poor in India. Instead she PROMOTED their suffering. They treat them like animals. This is from the mouth of the nuns that worked with her. Don't you think they would know?

The truth is the truth, whether we want to admit it or not. To give Mother Theresa her due for the things she did that were wonderful, doesn't mean that one can't acknowledge the things she may have done that weren't. Now if what is stated in the article is correct (I don't know -- I've always believed Mother Theresa to be a Saint from what I've been told, without the Catholic church's permission) then so be it. Frankly I'm shocked, even if just a fraction is true.

Wow, Perception experiment.
Slam Dunk!!

As sanity goes nowadays, Catholics do seem to be the saner (or should I say more Human) of the lot western monotheists. I am talking about the average person who we meet in the street, not the nut-job catholic. Although I might have to right several paragraphs to delineate the difference, I believe it is true. Maybe the fact that I went to a Catholic school had something to do with it.

I think there are two sides to every coin.
But one must look at the other side, Wilsha.

I think our perceptions of Being and Time are becoming more wholesome, and we are not the toddlers of the earth anymore. Those of us that have grown up see things for what they are.
Now if only we could find a paddle for those Neo-cons.

Kudos to MLK, for finding his muses and exercising his prowess.
I admire Gandhi a lot, and follow some of his principles - I think some of his paradigms do make you a better person. But we have always known of his hypocrisy, and some Indians I know detest the actions he took to bring about Indpendence. Is'nt that why he was assasinated?

Glide: I looked at the few comments prior to yours (one being mine) and don't see anything about hatred toward Catholics. Perhaps you should calm down, do a little critical thinking, and THEN come online and call people "neocommies" (that made no sense at all).

Who is Michael Parenti and why is he grinding an axe?

As a former Catholic priest (I am now an Orthodox priest - with the "privilege" to marry) and one who has actually worked with Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta and elsewhere, I can say that contrary to what is being said of her in the above article is inaccurate, to say the least. Mother Teresa is far from perfect and she is the first to admit it but the attempts to show that she is "hypocritical" is simply not true. I travelled with her on flights in coach on many occasions when first class tickets were offered to her - she made sure we changed them and used the balance to support the missions. She personally declined exorbitant costs to house her, insisting instead that the money be used for her poor. I actually slept with her on the floor with nothing but a blanket on many occasions. So as someone who has actually been with her during her life, I can say that the depictions of her are false. Yes, she is conservative in the sense that she will never say or do anything contrary to what she perceives as the Church's "Magisterium" but to imply that she is like an American Republican conservative with fascistic tendencies is false. In my eyes, her doubts about her faith makes her even more a saint in my eyes. She was an authentic person, despite what those who prefer hearsay to fact continue to insist.

"rightwing British media tycoon Malcolm Muggerridge"

On a point of information, Muggeridge was a newspaper and television journalist, one of many who started off left-wing and drifted rightwards as they aged. He was no tycoon, and not even especially influential in his lifetime. He's barely remembered today, 17 years after his death, except maybe for a few Monty Python fans who relish his debate with John Cleese and Michael Palin over the "blasphemous" Life of Brian.

I'm not a fan of Mother T, but I find Parenti's article sloppy, and far below Commondreams' usual standard.

Beatification means nothing except to those who let it do so. It is the opinion of men and not The Almighty. Scripture teaches that none are perfect and all are sinners in God's sight. Therefore all this article is doing is revealing hypocrisy of all mankind.

For those like JOLeary 16 who wonder, "Who is Michael Parenti?", he is an American Marxist historian and political theorist whose writings make many good points tracing the rise, agenda, and dominance of fascism and class warfare in the US throughout its histroy.

He is also a passionate and persuasive advocate for what he believes and any opportunity to hear him speak is an opportunity not to be missed. You can get a fair sampling of some of his speeches at:

TUCradio.org

Just click on the current programs button.

Being Italian he was most likely raised a Roman Catholic, being Marxist he is most likely an atheist. These facts would also color his analysis in the above matter.

The problem is catholic, but in the universal sense. Part of the human condition is the perceived need to mark off "eternal" time from "ordinary" time.
(Please excuse me msr Eliade) Imposed hero worship is a poor lowly form, regardless of politics. It is not the only way, and indeed consiousness does need raising. It isn't an inter- subjective thing. Posing a false icon is anti-social, but I guess they're against civilized medicine too anyway.

Thanks, "poet." Because of you I looked him up on Wikipia and found out Parenti is brilliant and formidable which makes me wonder all the more why a person such as he is would go out of his way to slam the Catholic Church, which I would consider to be his natural ally in his own crusade to make the world a beter place, especially for the poor. It was and is the Catholic Church which is the most convincing defender of human rights in the world. The reason why so many people don't like the Church is because the Church, like Mother Teresa, isn't perfect. It gets lots of things wrong, as the Orthodox priest writing above must know. But it gets enough things right more often than any other institution I know of to be a force for good in the world.

That's right, Juliann, with all the vile people in the world, agree with this bigot, Parenti, about someone who died with years of suffering the pain of others etched in her face.

The both of you are pathetic.

JOLeary16--You wrote:

"I looked him up on Wikipia and found out Parenti is brilliant and formidable which makes me wonder all the more why a person such as he is would go out of his way to slam the Catholic Church, which I would consider to be his natural ally in his own crusade to make the world a beter place, especially for the poor. It was and is the Catholic Church which is the most convincing defender of human rights in the world." The roman catholic church has been up to its ears in evil even though many roman catholics are not of that bent.

***************

JoLeary16 you have asked the correct question. Why should someone defending human rights oppose the roman catholic church?

Without getting into a long disertation, let me suggest that saying "the Roman catholic church' uisn't perfect is a little like President Bush saying "mistakes were made" in Iraq.

From the Crusades to the Inquisition, to the Conquistadores, to collaboration with Nazi's in places like Italy (Concordat), France (Vichey), Hungary(a signatory to the Axis pact), and of course the Reich where they through their diplomatic status helped ferry war crimjnals out of allied hands and safely to South America at the end of WWII (a priest named Ratzinger who just happend to be elected Pope recently).

Please don't make generalizations about the Church. There have ALWAYS been two factions within the Church - the Conservatives and the Progressives, within the Church just as there have always been in any kind of government. To lump everything from the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Conquistadores and the Concordat with the entire Catholic Church from 2,000 years till today is like saying that the US with its Indian Wars of extermination, its illegal takeover of the Kingdom of Hawaii, its bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, its Vietnam and now the disaster that is Bush makes ALL Americans guilty of war crimes. Had Progressives like John XXIII and John Paul I been alive long enough to lead the Church, who knows what progressive areas the Church could have achieved with its international reach and its enormous wealth and power? Unfortunately, we will never know because of the conservative stranglehold on power. The world would also have been a different place had Gore been president. But we will never know. So please don't make prejudiced generalizations. Tens of thousands of priests and nuns died during the Second World War defending and protecting Jews and allied soldiers. The Chief Rabbi of Rome himself became Catholic after the war thanks to the Christian charity he witnessed from the Catholic community secretly led from the Vatican or which he himself a part during that era. Is that the action of someone who would witness "collaboration" on the part of the Church? Taking at face value the prejudiced speculations and assumptions of a few people is something I thought I would witness only from the Right. Apparently, I am sadly mistaken.

This is just unbelievable....why in God's name is a progressive website like Common Dreams hosting an article that attacks the integrity of a woman who was arguably the greatest woman of the twentieth century. Mother Teresa was an angel, a saint of compassion whose work provided hope and inspiration to millions of destitute people as well as people of good conscience the world over.

By allowing such a vicious attack against Mother Teresa, Common Dreams is putting itself in the same catagories as intellectual thugs like Chris Hitchens who probably has never given a damn about a poor person in his entire life, but sits in an armchair and vilifies a woman whose work brought so much comfort to so many desperate people.

So what if Mother Teresa flew First Class and wined and dined with the rich anf famous ? A woman who lives in the gutters giving comfort and hope to people with nothing is entitled, more than entitled to some enjoyment every now and again ! So what if she accepted donations from dictators and ruthless government ? Can a person who accepts donations from another individual be considered responsible for the actions of the individual that gives ? Talk about guilt by association !

This article is a piece of vicious vilification that DOES NOT BELONG on a progressive website and which goes against the very values of the progressive movement. Mother Teresa deserves our respect, and I am going to contact the Common Dreams website to express my outrage - I advise all people of good conscience to do the same -

editor@commondreams.org

Hate is hate.
Whether from the left, the right, from the inside or the outside. It doesn't rely on reason, but uses "reasonability" to divide people into us and them even to the point of everybody else and me.
No human is sinless, nor any human enterprise without corruption. The trick is how to balance the whole thing for the good of all or it all falls down.
To demonize a person, a group of people, a country, is the way wars are sown. It is the way the folks in power right now (and many before them, including all of the "civilized" world's institutions) can get the populace behind them.

As long as one has a view of the "other" - Catholics, Turks, Immigrants, Socialists, The Right, Communists, Japanese, Nazis, Israel, Iran, Muslims, Irish, French, Romans, Samaritans, Gays, Women, the poor, etc; then it is probable that there will be a Power that will exploit that hatred to further its interests. People become enslaved by their hatred and can no longer see people as just that, people.

To attack a woman who was not out to kill anyone, but to take the untouchables out of the gutter and treat them with some dignity they never had is not a bad thing. I think there is a lot of inaccurate smears being peddled as truth.

There is a difference between a nun and a government administration that has its fingers in the wealth of the world as well as more WMD's than any nation ever.

What purpose does it serve to infight, people? There is our nation that is serving up and feeding on lies right now. Corporations, Media moguls, Oil Companies, and Private mercenaries all out for profit who control our government coffers and are out to choose our next president for us. We live in the Fascist state right now. People think it is right to torture for pete's sake! and we quibble about the saintliness of a dead woman.

I hope there is a God who will give us all a big Smack on the butt to wake us up! Division will keep the Fascism growing and we will all be complicit. They have all the money, all the big media, all the power and weaponry. All we have is each other. It's time to honor the best in ourselves and in each other. Find the good and realize the bad is there, but don't feed it. (yup, even I have an "us" and "them"!)

Thanks to the quieter peaceful voices out there.
Reason and truth won't win if they are cloaked in hatred and vitriol.

Peace, Justice, and Hope

The Catholic church published the diaries of Mother Theresa against her wishes.With her doubts about the existence of God or heaven,and in the light of her fame and popularity,this was a brave and honest act by the Catholic church.Add to this the reported (by whom?)exclamation of Jesus on the cross "My God,my God,why hast thou forsaken me?"an agnostic like myself and I am sure many believers wonder at the motives of publishing such contradictions.

I know some Indian people who despise Mother Teresa since she was against birth control in one of the most populous countries in the world, a country riddled with poverty.

Plus, it seems she wasn't very nice either.

Anyway, Oscar Romero really wore the fisherman's sandals in that his conversion brought him to the real meaning of the Gospel message, and that message had nothing to do with power and glory but dealt with the poor, the downtrodden, those who suffer. Regardless of what honor the Church does or does not bestow upon him, he was a sainted man as shown by his action. He doesn't need a heart-shaped watch or diploma given out by a wizard of Oz.

Religion aside, if a person takes ANY time at all to enter the streets of a place like Calcutta, where each morning the gutters have bodies of the dead from starvation, and that person helps just ONE other being find a little food and shelter and maybe just some human compassion, then that person deserves much credit.

I wonder, has Parenti done such a deed? Has he gone to a place that wreaks of the dead and starving and offered any assistance? Has he gotten his hands and clothes torn by the grasping hungry, and offered what he had? If so then great! If not, then STFU!

Beatification and canonization should surely be dropped. Jesus NEVER introduced the concept, never left any inference that it should be done, and it's too easy to err with this rite.

The Church itself is very guilty of many grave crimes against totally innocent and defenceless, unwitting people, and the Church has not seen to its religious and moral duty to answer for these crimes. The Church has many lousy priests and other members. Many enough practice idolatry, although often unwittingly, because of being naive, not studying the Scripture, and the Church teaching these unfit beliefs that are contrary to Jesus and Scripture. Many are contrary to what the true Christian faith is, and which Jesus is the founder of, through his mission for God the Father and humanity.

www.hiddenfromhistory.org provides horrifying examples of extreme crimes by the three main Christian churches in Canada, along with their criminal ally Canadian govt, and its mobster organization known as the RCMP.

I've learned of two priests who committed evidently, almost certainly, definitely evident enough for us to feel that it is certainly, satanic murders of nuns and I believe both cases since 2000. One is a story of a priest in Ohio and who was a chaplain at a hospital, where a nun was hospitalized. He somehow took the nun to the chapel, laid her out on the altar, covered her with some white sheet, either a hospital sheet or a religious one, and stabbed her nine or twelve times around and in the heart, in the form of an upside-down cross, which is known to be a satanic symbol. The other case was of a priest at some I believe convent, a RC religious place anyway, in some East European country, and he crucified an innocent nun there. These are only two of many cases of clergical abuse, mistreatment of, condescension against, ... nuns, too.

There's occultism practiced by members of the church, certainly including at the Vatican, as well as to the extreme of satanism.

Yes, yes, yes. There's much BAD within the overall and large church. Yes.

BUT, many other members, clergy, nuns, friars, and lay, are very sound, healthy, ..., excellent members of both the Church and society, the world, TOO. Many of these members personally have witnessed other members of the wrong sort; some have witnessed actual, literal Evil within the church; many are aware of crimes of the church or members of it. And these people feel pain because of these realities, and associate their pain with Jesus, like with him on the Cross. These people know why they are members, due to the faith and brother- and sisterhood with Jesus, and they know what these wrongs of the church mean to him. After all, it's right there in Scripture; he left it very clear how strongly opposed he was about FALSE prophets, so all false members of churches established upon his holy name.

Other members knowing of the wrongs simply leave, cease participating, all while nonetheless retaining their faith(s).

I say, both types of members who are not of the wrong kind are right, that both have the right to choose, according to individual conscience, personal ability, strength, understanding, etc., whether staying or leaving is what fits with him- or her-self. The important thing is to not be of the false Christian kind of character. That is something to definitely NEVER become.

Some will stay and contribute as they can in order to try to help make the church what it should be. Others will not see any point in trying and will instead cease participating. I'm kind of inbetween, pretty much never going, but while I could; although I get very annoyed, impatient and very quickly with immature priests, and many members of the clergy are immature, very inexperienced in life, really unable to relate to the non-comfortably situated people in society, and if they can't relate to the dispossessed, etc., then they make unfit people for priesthood as far as I'm concerned. It's particularly this way for me today, because I am extremely dispossessed; patience wears much more quickly now for me.

Also, NO human is Perfect, no human group, organization, institution, etc., is going to be always without error. So, that there are serious flaws in the Church is NOT something that is unusual; it's like the rest of the world. There are people of good and others of bad will pretty much everywhere. There are intelligent and dumb, and worse, people also everywhere.

As for Mother Teresa, I don't know who she was mother of; she had no children. Among Christians, she's really just sister. But this is getting nitty gritty tight with respect to Scripture, too; and we can allow enough flexibility to permit referring to her as a 'Mother' person, and, after all, she did found her order.

Hence, no real problem with that. But I read over the past few or several years that what she said she wanted was a 'mouroir', a death parlor, and given that it was supposed to be a center for helping lepers, who need medical help, I figured that what she should have wanted was a place to help provide medical help. Well, she did to some extent, by providing people dying from leprosy with a better place than the street to die in; but there is medicine that STOPS leprosy, and this is what lepers need.

Okay, her order may not have had the funds to be able to buy such medicine, except for perhaps relatively few victims of leprosy; but the church is the richest institution in the world, pig Cardinal Law receives, from what I've read anyway, $12,000 a month, tax-exempt too, ON TOP of having his apartment or BIG apartment, whatever, provided, at NO expense or cost to him, etc. The church could surely afford to provide the funds to purchase the medicine needed for or by the lepers in Calcutta, but the elites of the church have their own ideas about what ALL this vast amount of money should be used for, GREAT COMFORT for themselves, lives of luxury, etc.

Mother Teresa evidently did ALL she could; it's the church that failed.

Yes, the Church is majorly sinful, but there are also honourable members.

It wasn't but an hour after my mother died that the priest that had been hovering said to us...

"you know, your Mother had a special place in her heart for the church, we talked and she said she would like you to remember the church in her name through a generous gift"

Most priests give me the creeps, as I know what it is like to be raped and tortured. This priest, as most, was full of shit. How do I know this? because my parents had little money. I inherited $650 after my Father died 8 years later. My mother had only been to church about 5 times in the last 20 years, she stopped going when I stopped at 13.

I had a hunch that they(priests) all questioned their faith between there 30's and 40's, they just chase little boys bum's after that.

CathoHOlics.

Old Hindu saying: "When a pickpocket looks at a saint, he sees only her pockets."

Ha-ha. Viva Michael Parenti.

God damn the Pope, the office of supression and exploitation in the globalized west for some 1,700 years.

It's spooky how much evil Jesus' message of ethical reciprocity - "do unto other as you'd want others to do unto you" - has been subverted into. Forever war, in the name of peace.

Now Pope Rat-zinger, Hitler youth and Nazi soldier until 1945. It takes a LOT of superstition to support this one. Still, about a billion people do. Very impressive - it almost makes a believer out of me. Though not saying in what.

It seems to me the point of the article is to keep things real. And the Catholic church has been the underpinning of many evils in the western world.

Oh heck, Perception Experiment said it all! It is a patriarchal, mysogynist lot. And if the Vatican sold a few of its assets, they could feed India. I am not surprised that Mother Teresa was clinically depressed. First of all, she was in a depressing place. Secondly, she had a very pessimistic view of life, and glorified suffering, as though God is some kind of sado-masochist.

I always thought she looked really bitter and angry. Never saw a film of her or photo where she seemed to have any kind of 'light' around her.

perceptionwhatever
--" It is completely obvious that Mother Theresa did not want to help the poor. "

I am an atheist and have no love for Teresa or the pope or any other shmuck but your statement above is indicative of your head-in-your-ass attitude. She was no doubt a catholic and intent on 'converting' the people she came in contact with but have you actually been to Calcutta and have you visited the ashrams ? I didnt think so, but ofcourse you can sit in your armchair and spout your shit. There are no heroes .. not Teresa nor Parenti. Get over it.

To hear you say it she was on a single-minded mission to convert and nothing else. Do you even know the history of Calcutta ? Do you really think the Hindus and Muslims would have allowed forced conversions ? Are you stupid ?

While a lot of what you say is true you end up quoting Hitchens, who is the biggest clusterfuck this side of the atlantic. He has his head buried (like you) deep in neo-con nirvana. Get a grip ..

Its a testament to Indian tolerance that so many religions practiced their creed and still do. While I abhor the conversion mentality of christians/catholics etc some of them actually did help the poor. Maybe if the 'poor' had internet connections and could blog they could have told us what they thought but instead we have to put up with dipshits like you.

Parenti seems to be saying why all the hurry to get certain clergy and nuns who are flawed beatified. A fair question. Indeed why the hurry? It was the practice of the vatican to proceed with all due deliberation and speed was measured in centuries. I don't expect any answers from the vatican, for as you know the vatican can do no wrong.
Someone mentioned that the vatican is the defender of human rights which is a revelation since I recall little said by the vatican for 50 years of my memory about human rights in South America, Asia the Caribbean and Africa.

True, demanding perfection from any human endeavor or person is hypocritical and a waste of positive energy.

But we shouldn't get too sappy about this: there's a big gap between demanding perfection and expecting rudimentary honesty.

The metaphysical dimension of Catholic/Christian doctrine is based on useless lies: Viz: prelates and theologians claiming certainty of Jesus Christ's divinity. They have no such certainty and they know it, and everybody else knows it. Islam and other divinity-grounded religions metaphysically lie in exactly the same way.

It's hard for me to understand how any religion based on pro-active, grounding lies can really help us humans come to grips with worldly reality and behave less insanely than we already do.

In the deepest parts of our psyches, all of us are fearful of existing in a world we can't explain -- so we have to make up god storys to help mentally process our fears.

This is understandable, up to a point.

But what we 'make-up' as an ethical set of behavioral standards, out of religious belief, is what's really important. Catholicism, at least in its now-and-then focus on the Social Gospel (do unto others, etc.), is, I think, virtuous and workable as a theoretical guide to human behavior on the worldly level -- provided you're actually guided by it with reasonable fidelity. (Priests' butt-fugging alter boys is nowhere near 'reasonable fidelity,' obviously.)

It's a sign of how-badly doctrinal metaphysical nonsense can screw up the human head that Mother T. never felt whole enough to tell the world she'd lost her metaphysical faith yet still felt inspired enough to help ease other humans' worldly suffering in certain ways.

And because of her unrepaired metaphysical dishonesty, she also wasn't whole enough to abandon the d facto cruelty of preaching contraception as a 'sin,' for example.

This self-dishonesty could be be seen as a profound psychological dysfunction in her, but I don't think it's fair to equate it with what we generally call conscious moral evil.

If we presume to judge each other that harshly, then all of use who do so are surely firing a gun that's pointed directly at ourselves.

Somehow, we humans have to move away from metaphysical lying about who or what created us and move toward to person-to-person truths about treating our fellow as we wish to be treated.

It's not so simple to do this. But it's less complex than lying about our god storys and compartmentalizing the tiny bit of truth wisdom we've managed to gain as social creatures.

We, all of us, have a long way to go before we can stop lying to ourselves. We didn't make ourselves this way.

I wish I knew what or who did.

I am always amazed how folks can raise up someone like Mother Teresa in order to assuage their own guilt. Just because she was a nun doesn't make her innocent and pure.

I am doubly amazed at how many non-catholics praise Mother Teresa and bow down at her feet.

I think that folks need to stop looking outwordly for "heros".

Mother Teresa was imperfect. I don't know why folks say she was such a good and pure soul... She was naive and her world religous paradigm was focused on Suffering as a good thing. Be careful who you choose to worship.

I think that we should have moved and evolved from that paradigm. It may look all sweet and innocent and "beautifu" to feed bread to a poor person or wipe their brow with a cloth and pray over them as they suffer in pain .. but that doesn't mean you are helping...

Whose soul are you saving? Your's or the persons suffering?

Rich people usually become rich off the backs of the poor, exploiting their labor and their resources.. and when the Rich person has made their BILLIONS.. they then write a fat check, get a Hostpital wing or Charity named after them (for posterity) and look so wonderful in the eyes of others... "See.. rich people can do good things"...

THe rich and corrupt and powerful lauded Mother Teresa because it assauged their own evilness and guilt.

You can be a jerk 6 days a week and then somehow all your sins are erased just by going to Church on Sunday or writing a big fat check to Mother Teresa or some charity?

I don't think so...
Come on folks.. we have to evolve more than that!

Peace

I am reminded of a really naive childlike bumpersticker at a Catholic Fish Fry I attended (they do do good fish fries)

"How can you say there are too many children in the world.. that is like saying there are too many flowers".

What an absolutely NAIVE and useless statement. Yet that is the kind of naivete about the harse reality of the world that some folks choose to live in.

Sure.. I am a big Peace advocate and I fight and work and believe in Peace... and I believe that our words have power in the world. our words have ACTION...

But to be totally BLIND about the way the world works and hiding yourself behind doors and just pray while the world is raining blood and nuclear waste isn't doing much good!

Jake Jaspers; You have single handedly put it all in perspective. Bravo!

We have been creating our world based on some very childish beliefs that clearly do not work. If they did, we wouldn't be in the frightening mess we are in now. We see the results. It isn't working. Let's face it already.

In my opinion, the part about 'do unto others' can't come until we realize, once and for all, that what we do to others we do to ourselves. Because that is how we are wired, and it is psychologically true. I work with this all the time. It is our organized religions that have separated the 'Sublime' from the 'Human'.

If we humans are connected to something greater than ourselves, then we don't need religious organizations. Spirituality and religion are two very different things. Religions undermine our belief in ourselves and tell us we are sinners. So, we believe we need them to dictate to us. In the case of Catholicism , it teaches human beings to obey authority figures, and not think for themselves. Why? Because they are flawed sinners, and can't trust themselves. I have met innumerable people who are afraid to think too far, because they are Catholic and don't want to question the 'faith'.

How in the world are people who are so indoctrinated going to ever evolve? There is no wisdom in these religions. Just pieties and restrictions for the most part. I think Parenti is probably fed up with this, but this is an assumption on my part.

Becoming clinically depressed is a sign that a person needs to make some changes. Leave it to the church to treat it as a 'spiritual' problem. Yes, it certainly is. But if a person thinks it is wonderful and God is pleased with suffering, you stay depressed. How the heck could you ever know when to change course, if you don't listen to your own state of mind and heart. In Mother Teresa's case, it was telling her she lost her way. Obviously. But the Church doesn't teach that way.

And for all those who feel it isn't the 'religion', it is just that humans don't adhere to them well enough, I would say this: After a few thousand years, maybe we should consider the fact that if these religions truly fed our deepest yearnings and questions, people would be growing and thriving, and we would see a whole different world.

I must add my own story about Teresa, which I believe is very instructive of her true leanings.
In 1988 I became a Team Leader/Social Worker with Healthcare for the Homeless and my team worked in the South Bronx, New York. Teresa's soup kitchen was one of our weekly stops. We worked out of the upstairs bathroom to provide healthcare and did case management, social work stuff in the room outside.
Men and women were always separated when they ate. The site had a handful of beds available for homeless people, but they were only for men and they could only stay 3 nights and then they were out, except for the only white, middle aged alcoholic from a "good" family, who could stay whenever he wanted.

We handed out condoms to everyone. Eventually the head nun - the only white person on the team - came to me and took me aside. She said we must stop giving out condoms in the building. I, foolishly, said, "Sister you know this is not about birth control. We are trying to prevent AIDS." She said, in her beautiful French accent, these ugly words: "You must understand, we WANT these people to get AIDS. This is how we will save them and bring them to Jesus. They will not listen to us unless they are sick. When they get sick they come to us. Then we bring them to Jesus."

I have never forgotten her words or her attitude. Understand, also, that Teresa controlled everything. This was not a rogue nun speaking to me. These nuns peed on schedule - Teresa's schedule. She was not trying to save anyone from their poverty or illness. She was trying to "save" them for Jesus. Every Catholic was taught that to save people would earn you a place in heaven. That's what this was all about.

From day one, Teresa was, as I used to say before this experience, "stumping for Sainthood." And everyone was happy to buy into it. For God's sake, she had public relations people and had better press than the Pope (who hated and feared her at the same time.) There was nothing humble about her, although she got plenty of people to buy that schtick also. She was a little nazi, who was working for the death and destruction of particular people for her own ends - a place in heaven and sainthood.
Christopher Hitchens wrote a book about her while she was still alive. I have it, but had to order it. She did everything she could to stop its publication, but was, I think, only able to limit it's distribution. She was as afraid of the truth as are all of you who actually want to believe she was a saint. If there is a heaven and hell, my bet is she is in the latter. I should add, I was born into a Catholic family, attended Catholic grade school, so I know something of Catholic teachings. Teresa was no true Catholic, nun or otherwise. Believe what you want.

I truly was going to stay out of this fray, but guess I just can't help myself.

At 15, sitting in religion class in a Catholic High School, the good Brother, our teacher said: "All the heathens and unconverted who have not accepted (or even heard) the teachings of Jesus can never attain the kingdom of heaven." Not being sufficiently brainwashed at that early age I raised my hand and asked: "Brother, is that what you really mean to say?" He assured me that he did not mis-speak and that was the absolute teaching of the church. Not realizing what dangerous ground I was treading on I blurted out: "That doesn't sound like a just God to me!"

Shortly thereafter my parents removed me from the Catholic school system. This was during that prior war that should have taught us not to invade Iraq. My brother had just started at John Carrol University and was REQUIRED to participate in the ROTC program. This did not sit well with him at all and so, one fine Sunday morning as the cadets were drilling on the parade ground my brother decided to stage a one-man protest. With carboard signs reading "Do You Pray To Christ The Soldier?" and "Do You Serve The God Of War?" he positioned himself near the parading students/recruits. As they passed by my brother their student cadre ordered the column to spit on and curse my brother. In case you are unaware, John Carrol University is a Catholic institution.

As you can imagine this made the papers, both there and in our hometown and at the next Sunday Mass, with my father and mother and my younger brother and myself sitting obediently in the congregation the good pastor proceeded to call my brother a traitor, a fool, and next of kin to the devil himself.

You could say that the Catholic Church gave me an excellent education. It opened my young eyes to the possible depth and breadth of human hypocrisy. An on it goes.

Within the last year PBS ran a piece on the Papal Inquisition that recounted how, during the most explosive period of the Protestant Reformation, the Pope at the time (forgotten his inconsequential name) decided to build a grand palace to celebrate his power and his vanity. This, while much of Europe joyously threw off the corrupt power-elite the Roman Catholic Church had become. This piece would not have been so fascinating to me except that the exact same thing is happening at this very time right in this same town.

While the RCC is experiencing steady declines in their congegrations, and those willing to become celebate priests almost an extinct species, and as journeyman clerics are arrested and jailed for being pedophiles, the diocese here has decided that what it really needs is a grand, new, oppulent cathedral! Believe me, you can't make this stuff up. To accomplish this financial feat of grandeur the Bishop has decreed that most of the humble outlying parishes serving the majority of their faithful must be closed. Most of the faithful will have to travel to this grand ediface of materialism if they want to remain faithful Catholics. And believe me when I say it will be a VERY grand ediface to materialism, as the details that have leaked out have shown.

The Bishop's and the Diocese determination to see this ABORTION built is tearing the local Catholic community here apart. Though I despise the Catholic Church and long for the day that it is torn down, brick by hypocritical brick, I know many wonderful people that happen to be Catholic and are sincere in their compassion, understanding, and progressive hopes. To see the anguish of betrayal they are experiencing tempers my delight knowing the hierarchy has, by their own hand, advanced the work that I long to see accomplished.

I should also mention that there already exists a VERY fine and old Cathedral here with thousands of tons of the finest marble, gold gilt measured by the square foot, and some of the finest wood and woodwork to be had in this town. The few times I have been inside that edifice the thought I couldn't remove from my mind was: "What has this got to do with Jesus?"

"I am doubly amazed at how many non-catholics praise Mother Teresa and bow down at her feet."

Yeah sure .... how about telling this to the woman i saw who was doubled up in pain and couldnt sit leave alone stand, who couldnt afford to get to the govt run hospital. You think she gave a fu^&k about catholicism ? She took help from anyone who was willing to give it to her. Teresa and her ilk exploited this woman for their own purposes ( and i totally agree with all of you that its sick to the bone) , but the bottom line is that she was helped by Teresa's organization and the govt did not , nor any other organization.

So we can sit here and marvel at the subserviance of this particular woman but thats elitism at its worst and despicable. Especially since we are bowing down at the feet of these fascists fucks in the office (bowing down and bending over as well), we cannot pass judgement on the poor who benefited from Teresa's organization.

If someone wishes to learn about Michael Parenti, download "google", type "Michael Parenti biography" and click.

The best one of the many pickings, to me, is brusseltribune.org.

The Wikapedia entry is unbelievably bad.

But compare and contrast for yourself.

Parenti is an internationally published and reknown speaker.

In fact, I used his "Democracy for the Few" as my textbook when teaching US Politics. It has gone through 7 editions.

Last, Parenti is not a member of any faith-based community be it religious, ideological or nationalistic. He comes from a Leftist position and he critiques the MSM and the non-contextualized versions of mainstream definitions of historical events.

Mother Teresa? All I know is that, in Central America of the 1980s, many Church-based activists, priests and nuns who deeply believed in their God and Church were hung out to dry and die without a whimper from the Pope.

The above Church members actually attempted to protect their fellow believers from malnourishment, the oligarchies, army, death squads, violence, self-hatred, etc...and many of them were "martyred" for their efforts.

Of course, none of them ARE considered worthy for the fast track to sainthood. It would give the wrong message to the lowliest of believers.

I think Mother Teresa is likely a woman who did her best--which was probably not much but it was done with caring. And then she got exploited and probably turned into something she never meant to be. She got exploited by the institutional church.

I am not sure any of us understand the depth of poverty and despair in India. I did hear a speaker talk about following Mother Teresa around and she talked about the warehouses with pallets lined up with dying people laying on them. She talked about how Mother Teresa would come in and prayerfully bow to all points in the room and leave. And indeed, I don't think it was what she did with her prayerful bowing. It was an imperfect effort to show love and respect toward dying people. An effort to give them a better place to die than an alley. By American health care standards it surely sounds like a pitiful gesture.

But I am not sure that Parenti's cynical report approximates Mother Teresa any better than the glowing, "quick! let's canonize her" rhetoric of the church.

And I am not going to second guess her intentions.

I will bet that somewhere between the two painted extremes lies the truth.

Jake Jaspers
--"This self-dishonesty could be be seen as a profound psychological dysfunction in her, but I don't think it's fair to equate it with what we generally call conscious moral evil"

If I could put it so eloquently I would ! And mollyJ is correct. You need to be there and experience it first hand to understand what abject poverty is. All our academic grandstanding doesnt mean squat. Our frame of reference vanishes. Luckily India is doing a lot better now but those pockets of poverty still exist. Given this context and given that i would never be able to do something remotely close to what she and her organization did, I think she deserves better than an ultra-leftist bitch-slap !!

Personally, I'm glad to find out that Mother Teresa had her doubts. I feel that the universe is cold and empty and people are mostly automatons. I'm glad that a candidate for sainthood is human like me. Maybe if the would-be masters-of-the-universe had a little self-doubt, they wouldn't cause so much suffering and constantly push us to the brink of disaster.

isn't this the same pope, that stood by and condoned child abuse, until the pressure by the media finally led him kicking and screaming to admit there was a problem? now they want to give him sainthood? makes me wonder what HE was up to, on those long, lonely nights back in poland. he should have been indicted. what a sick organization.

Dr. Parenti, in my opinion, has written an accurate account of Mother Theresa, the Church, and to a lesser extent, the media. Remember one thing folks-the media can demonize someone or glorify them-it all depends on the whim of the ruling class at that particular time in history.

I will not judge Mother Theresa, may her soul rest in peace, but anybody who is against birth control or family planning is causing more harm than good. We all know how easy it is to reproduce, but how difficult it is to take care of the offspring once it is born, especially if the family is poverty stricken.

kathysart and Vince Lawrence; Both stories are interesting and quite believable. I'll add one more which to some people may be shocking, but the facts are the facts.

During the 1930's not only was the 'Great Depression' in the United States, but in Europe as well. Many humanitarians and progressive thinkers here and abroad were socialists, anarchists, and communists. They were much stronger and organized in Europe than in America, and the wealthy rulling class felt threatened by men and women advocating an egalitarian philosophy.

In the Soviet Union, religion was denounced and atheism was the state religion. The Vatican's 'nuncio' to Germany was told to rally the Catholics and vote and support Hitler, who wanted to destroy all the leftists mentioned above. Hitler told the Vatican he would leave the Catholic Church alone as he started his version of Nazi Christianity. His 'Blackwater' of the day were the brownshirts who began a reign of terror against freemasons, Jehovah's Witnesses, mystics, and anyone not on tune to Nazi doctrine. Some of the Zionists and wealthy Jewish people in Germany and other parts of Europe were supportive of Hitler's fascist agenda against the left, and were not detained and extraordinarily renditioned to the slave labor camps, and later on, for many, the 'final solution'.

The point is, the church, be it Catholic or Protestant, is full of contradictions and hypocrasies, and Michael Parenti has seperated fact from fiction in 'de-cannonizing' Mother Thersea.

For sure Parenti has presented us with an alternative view of Mother Theresa that I haven't read anywhere else. While I value expository journalism, I find this article to be on par with what we have come to know as "Swift Boat" journalism. It is a character assassination piece and I find it about as attractive as other similiar pieces that come from folks like Rush Limbaugh and others. Can't see how it is helpful at all. Oh well.

Articles like this one make me embarrassed to be a progressive. For all the peace that we preach, we sure espouse a lot of hate.

Ooops. I take my words back about Mother Teresa evidently having done all she could; or maybe not entirely back. Now that I've read the article, all of it, she did not do all she could to help the lepers, obviously not; she did all she could to NOT help, to any really measurable, meaningful extent. She very clearly PROFITED like the elites do, by ROBBING others. Accepting the donations she received and not using them for what her so-called mission was supposed to represent [is] THIEVERY. It's charlatanism.

Her enterprise was evidently one of FRAUD. I don't see how there can be any doubt about this, now; well, as far as she was individually concerned anyway. And her nuns, who du-fously obeyed her were what? Dumb sheep or lemmings? To work as one of the nuns but without obeying her, except when supervised by her enforcers, to avoid being canned, so as to be able to stay and do as much [real] good as possible without being canned for it, this is good; but to really obey her, this would be dumb, blind, wrongful.

I don't know where the athiest defending her strongly, trying to do so strongly anyway, in these comments is "coming from", but I'm not athiest, am officially RC, even if I rarely attend, but then I have my reasons for not attending, and I do believe in Jesus, his teachings and way, therefore also in God and the Holy Spirit; and Mother Teresa clearly was NO Christian, she was a very false one. Athiest enough she was, but there are athiests of good will, and she lacked that quality.

Words Parenti quotes from what she said and/or wrote about her faith, serious absence of it, religiously offencive vis-a-vis God, these will be quite revealing for or to someone who's seriously Christian, and in a way that surely most athiests, and others, will easily not perceive.

Athiests also are not in a position to say what is the true Christian faith, for while much of what Scripture says of the teachings and way of Jesus are quite universally understandable, religious and spiritual meditation or contemplation is needed in order to go deeper in this direction. That's something MANY Christians do not do, including many if not most secular priests. The contemplative are more often found among the monk-like orders, not the secular; and monks, f.e., always or often have a requirement for setting aside like two or three hours a day for dedicated contemplation, which is very helpful. Not that all in the monk orders are sane or correct people, for they have their bad "apples" too.

Parenti strikes this Christian and RC as VERY right, and I definitely appreciate his article. To someone like myself, he reveals [important] things about the church. I already knew, as previously indicated, that there's a lot of bad even evil in the church, but I had no details on Mother Teresa and particularly JP II. I say particularly him, for Mother Teresa has already stirred my anger when she said that what she wanted was a mouroir or mourroir (spelling?), which is quite contrary to Jesus' way. Of course if he had nothing better to contribute to help the fatally ill except to help them have somewhat better days during their remaining ones, then he would've done this; not being able to do anything else. But he was healer and said to look after the people who are ill and in need of care, the dispossessed, prisoners, esp. the wrongfully or too harshly punished, etc. That was, is his goal, and Mother Teresa, very obviously too, chose the very opposite; living her life of luxury and associating with the elites, and many if not all of these people she associated with were, if not still are (depending on whether they have died or not) extremely criminal.

VERY contrary to Jesus was her example.

That others like the athiest trying to defend her here find something to appreciate in her, so be it; and I do not disregard that athiest's words about how bad the situation is in Calcutta. I've never been there, but have read about it, and knew someone who had worked for a year at Mother Teresa's place or center in Calcutta. His words were to the effect that he could not endure that suffering context any longer; he had to leave, as if he would've otherwise had a serious breakdown.

Surely not everyone is capable of enduring the level of suffering there, but Mother Teresa clearly did a hellishly lot more for her-self, and her rich "friends' than for the lepers and poor, who she clearly treated as if they were sacrificial lambs.

Jesus never treated anyone, Christian or otherwise, as if sacrificial; well, besides having accepted the path of the Cross for himself, anyway.

JP II is someone I already knew to have messed up now and then, and in some respects that made me particularly angry, but what Parenti reveals, now this seriously is re-enforcement.

They were both and very clearly FASCISTS or pro-fascism. They were rather fascists in terms of the religions they claimed to be true to, and pro-fascists with respect to seriously supporting state fascism.

It's sad, for all of the evil, wrongness in the church is a real burden to the members who are true to the true faith, the faith in the teachings and way of Jesus. For them, the church is a Cross; except when associating with other members who are also and really true. When that happens, then there's some real relief, enough to be re-energizing for ... some anyway. Others aren't re-energized and just leave and don't return.

It's ever more a 'no wonder' matter that MANY have been leaving the church, ceasing to participate, wanting to forget about this humanly instituted religious organization; many more than those who've remained true to the faith and stayed.

I think participative membership is now down to something like around 5% in the province of Quebec, Canada, where the number probably once was, and not all that many decades ago, around 90%; but then a lot of those people were not ... necessarily true believers. Still, many enough likely were true and just came to wake up and got fed up.

To err is human; to err too many times and expect people to put up with us, now this is dreaming, infantile. People who are unable to think for themselves will be slaves.