Mother Teresa's House of Illusions
How She Harmed Her Helpers As Well As Those They 'Helped'
by Susan Shields
The following article is from Free
Inquiry magazine, Volume 18, Number 1.
Some years after I became a Catholic, I joined Mother Teresa's congregation, the
Missionaries of Charity. I was one of her sisters for nine and a half years, living in the
Bronx, Rome, and San Francisco, until I became disillusioned and left in May 1989. As I
reentered the world, I slowly began to unravel the tangle of lies in which I had lived. I
wondered how I could have believed them for so long.
Three of Mother Teresa's teachings that are fundamental to her religious congregation
are all the more dangerous because they are believed so sincerely by her sisters. Most
basic is the belief that as long as a sister obeys she is doing God's will. Another is the
belief that the sisters have leverage over God by choosing to suffer. Their suffering
makes God very happy. He then dispenses more graces to humanity. The third is the belief
that any attachment to human beings, even the poor being served, supposedly interferes
with love of God and must be vigilantly avoided or immediately uprooted. The efforts to
prevent any attachments cause continual chaos and confusion, movement and change in the
congregation. Mother Teresa did not invent these beliefs - they were prevalent in
religious congregations before Vatican II - but she did everything in her power (which was
great) to enforce them.
Once a sister has accepted these fallacies she will do almost anything. She can allow
her health to be destroyed, neglect those she vowed to serve, and switch off her feelings
and independent thought. She can turn a blind eye to suffering, inform on her fellow
sisters, tell lies with ease, and ignore public laws and regulations.
Women from many nations joined Mother Teresa in the expectation that they would help
the poor and come closer to God themselves. When I left, there were more than 3,000
sisters in approximately 400 houses scattered throughout the world. Many of these sisters
who trusted Mother Teresa to guide them have become broken people. In the face of
overwhelming evidence, some of them have finally admitted that their trust has been
betrayed, that God could not possibly be giving the orders they hear. It is difficult for
them to decide to leave - their self-confidence has been destroyed, and they have no
education beyond what they brought with them when they joined. I was one of the lucky ones
who mustered enough courage to walk away.
It is in the hope that others may see the fallacy of this purported way to holiness
that I tell a little of what I know. Although there are relatively few tempted to join
Mother Teresa's congregation of sisters, there are many who generously have supported her
work because they do not realize how her twisted premises strangle efforts to alleviate
misery. Unaware that most of the donations sit unused in her bank accounts, they too are
deceived into thinking they are helping the poor.
As a Missionary of Charity, I was assigned to record donations and write the thank-you
letters. The money arrived at a frantic rate. The mail carrier often delivered the letters
in sacks. We wrote receipts for checks of $50,000 and more on a regular basis. Sometimes a
donor would call up and ask if we had received his check, expecting us to remember it
readily because it was so large. How could we say that we could not recall it because we
had received so many that were even larger?
When Mother spoke publicly, she never asked for money, but she did encourage people to
make sacrifices for the poor, to "give until it hurts." Many people did - and
they gave it to her. We received touching letters from people, sometimes apparently poor
themselves, who were making sacrifices to send us a little money for the starving people
in Africa, the flood victims in Bangladesh, or the poor children in India. Most of the
money sat in our bank accounts.
The flood of donations was considered to be a sign of God's approval of Mother Teresa's
congregation. We were told by our superiors that we received more gifts than other
religious congregations because God was pleased with Mother, and because the Missionaries
of Charity were the sisters who were faithful to the true spirit of religious life.
Most of the sisters had no idea how much money the congregation was amassing. After
all, we were taught not to collect anything. One summer the sisters living on the
outskirts of Rome were given more crates of tomatoes than they could distribute. None of
their neighbors wanted them because the crop had been so prolific that year. The sisters
decided to can the tomatoes rather than let them spoil, but when Mother found out what
they had done she was very displeased. Storing things showed lack of trust in Divine
Providence.
The donations rolled in and were deposited in the bank, but they had no effect on our
ascetic lives and very little effect on the lives of the poor we were trying to help. We
lived a simple life, bare of all superfluities. We had three sets of clothes, which we
mended until the material was too rotten to patch anymore. We washed our own clothes by
hand. The never-ending piles of sheets and towels from our night shelter for the homeless
we washed by hand, too. Our bathing was accomplished with only one bucket of water. Dental
and medical checkups were seen as an unnecessary luxury.
Mother was very concerned that we preserve our spirit of poverty. Spending money would
destroy that poverty. She seemed obsessed with using only the simplest of means for our
work. Was this in the best interests of the people we were trying to help, or were we in
fact using them as a tool to advance our own "sanctity?" In Haiti, to keep the
spirit of poverty, the sisters reused needles until they became blunt. Seeing the pain
caused by the blunt needles, some of the volunteers offered to procure more needles, but
the sisters refused.
We begged for food and supplies from local merchants as though we had no resources. On
one of the rare occasions when we ran out of donated bread, we went begging at the local
store. When our request was turned down, our superior decreed that the soup kitchen could
do without bread for the day.
It was not only merchants who were offered a chance to be generous. Airlines were
requested to fly sisters and air cargo free of charge. Hospitals and doctors were expected
to absorb the costs of medical treatment for the sisters or to draw on funds designated
for the religious. Workmen were encouraged to labor without payment or at reduced rates.
We relied heavily on volunteers who worked long hours in our soup kitchens, shelters, and
day camps.
A hard-working farmer devoted many of his waking hours to collecting and delivering
food for our soup kitchens and shelters. "If I didn't come, what would you eat?"
he asked.
Our Constitution forbade us to beg for more than we needed, but, when it came to
begging, the millions of dollars accumulating in the bank were treated as if they did not
exist.
For years I had to write thousands of letters to donors, telling them that their entire
gift would be used to bring God's loving compassion to the poorest of the poor. I was able
to keep my complaining conscience in check because we had been taught that the Holy Spirit
was guiding Mother. To doubt her was a sign that we were lacking in trust and, even worse,
guilty of the sin of pride. I shelved my objections and hoped that one day I would
understand why Mother wanted to gather so much money, when she herself had taught us that
even storing tomato sauce showed lack of trust in Divine Providence.
For nearly a decade, Susan Shields was a Missionaries of Charity sister. She played a
key role in Mother Teresa's organization until she resigned.
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