As the world awaits Mother
Teresa’s canonization Sunday, one mystery remains: why the international Left
still harbors such hatred for a diminutive religious sister who spent her
entire life serving the poorest of the poor.
After all, with her inexhaustible dedication to alleviating poverty and
assisting the needy, Mother Teresa should be an icon of liberals the world
over. Instead, we find that the Left showers her not with affection and praise,
but with scorn and disdain.
On September 1 The Washington Post
published an article titled “Why
Mother Teresa Is Still No Saint to Many of Her Critics,” citing harsh
condemnations of the nun by Hindu nationalists and cataloguing the complaints
lodged against the missionary’s work through the decades.
Earlier this year, Salon called Mother Teresa “repugnant,” accusing her
of glorifying suffering instead of relieving it. “Judged by any metric of
medical standards,” the piece stated, “it is difficult to remember her legacy
as anything other than an inefficient, sanctimonious and wholly ideological franchise.”
Last weekend, The New York Times
showcased “one of the
most vocal critics” of Mother Teresa, an Indian physician named Aroup
Chatterjee who has made a career out of casting aspersions on the work of the
Albanian nun.
Chatterjee calls Teresa’s work “an imperialist venture of the Catholic
Church against an Eastern population.” “I just thought that this myth had to be challenged,” he added.
In 1994, Dr. Chatterjee teamed up with professional atheist Christopher
Hitchens to produce a documentary trashing Mother Teresa and her
missionaries, called “Hell’s Angel.” Shortly afterward, Hitchens cashed in on Mother Teresa’s immense popularity
by writing his own bestselling book excoriating
the sister, irreverently titled The
Missionary Position.
In this “exposé,” Hitchens calls Mother Teresa “a religious fundamentalist,
a political operative, a primitive sermonizer, and an accomplice of worldly
secular powers,” as well as asserting that the secret ulterior motive behind
all her work was “furthering Catholic doctrine.”
So the questions again present themselves: Why so much hatred? Why so
much deep-seated anger against this woman?
Sifting through the literature dedicated to smearing the legacy of Mother
Teresa, one discovers that all the arguments against her really boil down to
two, which the Left can never forgive: her vocal and intransigent opposition to
abortion and her overtly Christian spirituality that moved her to pour herself
out for her fellow man.
All the other reasons given—that she provided inferior health care, that
she was occasionally irritable with coworkers, that she accepted donations from
morally ambiguous characters are really just a cover for the two that irked the
Left to the point of hysteria.
And hysteria it has been. In a noteworthy 1986 essay published by the international
abortion giant Planned Parenthood, titled “Mother Teresa, the Woman of My
Nightmares,” one gets a taste of the profound odium stirred up by this simple
religious sister.
“This very successful old and withered person, who doesn’t look in the
least like a woman, especially when she raises her clenched fists in prayer,
and who, for us, is a very suspect holder of the Nobel Prize,” Planned
Parenthood wrote in its official publication Sexual
pedagogik, “has become for us the symbol of all that is
bad in motherhood and womanhood, an image with which we do not wish to be
associated.”
“You, you nightmare of women! You unliberated, enslaved wives, mothers,
nuns and aunts, what do you want from us, who have finally decided that we are
going to take control of our bodies, our children, and our destiny into our own
hands?” it ran.
Abortion, in fact, formed the centerpiece of Mother Teresa’s definition of
poverty and all that is wrong with the world. The three most public speeches of
her career—her acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, her Harvard Commencement
address, and her words at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C.—all
focused on abortion as the greatest social injustice in the world today.
For Mother Teresa, the voiceless unborn child was truly the “poorest of the
poor,” who deserves our undying respect and protection. In her acceptance speech for the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, for instance, she dared to say, “I feel the greatest
destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct
killing – direct murder by the mother herself.”
At the National Prayer Breakfast in 1994, the politically incorrect sister
told then-President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary that abortion is a “war against the child.”
“And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we
tell other people not to kill one another?” the nun continued. “By abortion, the
mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her
problems,” she said. “Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its
people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want.”
But opposition to abortion was not the only crime that earned Mother Teresa
the undying ire of the Left. She was also irritatingly… religious. Instead of
secular philanthropy, she engaged in old-school Christian charity, picking
the dying up off the street and holding them in her arms as they passed away,
for the love of God.
Mother Teresa was guilty, in fact, of the great modern sin of political
incorrectness. She freely and unapologetically invoked her love for Jesus
Christ as the reason behind everything she did, a practice that is anathema to
a world antiseptically cleansed from the grime of religious piety.
“I see Jesus in every human being,”
she said. “I say to
myself, this is hungry Jesus, I must feed him. This is sick Jesus. This one has
leprosy or gangrene; I must wash him and tend to him. I serve because I love
Jesus.”
Despite her spiritual motivations, however, Mother Teresa was an avowed
enemy of proselytism in her work with the poor. She offered love and assistance
to all, without ever making conversion a condition or even an aim of her care.
“We never try to convert those
whom we receive to Christianity,” she said, “but in our work we bear witness to
the love of God’s presence, and if Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, or
agnostics become for this better men—simply better—we will be satisfied.”
Teresa believed that those who find love find God, and that the best way to
bring people to God is by sharing our love with them. “Let no one ever come to
you without leaving better and happier,” she said. “Be the living expression of God’s kindness:
kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile.”
As Pope Francis canonizes Mother Teresa of Calcutta Sunday morning, one
group will not be standing by to join the applause: the disaffected Left who
cannot forgive the Albanian nun for her deeply Christian charity or her staunch
opposition to abortion. Even in this “year of mercy,” some sins can never be
forgiven.
Comments
Before
Mother Theresa’s work with the poor, starving and dying in the streets of
Calcutta India, the Indian government was strangling their private sector in a
mass of regulations that prevented businesses from being started.
Mother
Theresa didn’t fuss with the Indian government about this, but she accelerated
her mission to expose the plight of the poor in India and therein lies the
genius of her success and its impact on the world.
Almost
immediately after this embarrassment the Indian government began to cut red
tape and allow businesses to be established in their private sector. Shortly thereafter, India began to emerge as
a highly technical, global economic powerhouse.
Sure,
there are still probably a large population of poor in Calcutta, but it’s a lot
smaller and better cared for because of Mother Theresa’s obedience to God’s
directions.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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