Page < 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 >
The
Politics of Mother Teresa
Mother
Teresa issued thousands of disclaimers about any knowledge of politics, but even
a casual look at her career would make one wonder if she "doth protest too
much."
On an international level, Mother Teresa's political agenda were
narrow -- the "politics" of human reproductive intervention, and,
Catholicism. In India however, she often involved herself with less subtle and
more earthly politics.
On
the issues of abortion, contraception and Catholicism, she found her political
allies in a particular spectrum in the political arena, who are most vociferous
in the United States. Indeed, her biggest political allies were also in this
country, as were her most powerful financial backers. Not all her political
friends were Catholics, and some -- like Ronald Reagan -- are sturdy Christians
from other denominations.
Mother Teresa frequently stated that the "happiest day of my
life is when the Holy Father came to Calcutta." It was upon her insistence
that the pope decided to visit this heathen - Marxist city with a virtually
non-existent Catholic population. It is noteworthy that Mother's happiest day
was not when she got the divine revelation that she must leave her cloisters, or
when she founded her order, or her first home, or treated her first resident,
but when she managed to bring the head of an alien order into an Indian city.
Once
Edward Desmond from Time (17) magazine
asked her, "Friends of yours say you are
disappointed that your work has not brought about more conversations in this
great Hindu nation." Her reply had not been very convincing.
Desmond went on to ask, "And should they [Hindus] love Jesus too?", to
which she replied, "Naturally, if they want peace, if they want joy, let
them find Jesus."
Mother
Teresa took a keen interest in the complex political processes of India; she
allied herself with the political party which she felt was friendliest to
Catholicism. This she felt was the Congress party, of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
Mother had a personal relationship with Indira Gandhi, and her ties with the
Gandhi family became stronger after Mrs Gandhi's son Rajiv married the Italian
Catholic Sonia. Even today, in all of Mother's Delhi homes large portraits of
Indira and Rajiv (former Prime Ministers both) hang beside her own picture.
Another
anecdote Datta-Ray tells is one when the head of the British Council in Calcutta
took a titled Englishwoman to see Mother Teresa, but mentioned her title only in
passing. Six months later, Mother telephoned the aristocrat in London from Rome,
calling her by her correct title, and asked her if she could use one of her
houses in a up-market area of London to put up some of her nuns.
Sunanda
K Datta-Ray,
formerly editor of the Calcutta Statesman and editorial adviser to the Singapore
Straits Times, describes Mother Teresa
as anything but publicity shy.
It may come a surprise
to people to know that Mother Teresa used to vote in elections in India in the
1960s and 70s. As the main opponents in West Bengal have always been the
Marxists and Congress, it is not difficult to surmise who she voted for.
(source:
The
Politics of Mother Teresa - http://www.cephasministry.com/catholic_teresa_chapter_10.html).
Watch
Mother
Teresa – Penn and Teller video - Features Dr Arup Chatterji and
Christopher Hitchens
Media hype and medieval superstition?
The Rich Western world has a poor conscious
and needed Mother Teresa to be a missionary to the heathen.
It
is the evangelical zeal of the Church to substitute alien systems of belief and
worship with its own icons and practices that has made it suspect. It is a
mission that seems to spring from the same impulse as globalisation, which rests
on the foisting of a standardised lifestyle and economic model, evolved in the
West, on the rest of the world. Both movements are linked directly with economic
and cultural ascendancy.
Almost a decade ago, British Television's
Channel Four aired a film, titled
Hell's Angel: Mother Teresa, that savaged her
saintly image. If British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge idealised her,
Christopher Hitchens, the investigator in the iconoclastic depiction, tried to
pull her down from her pedestal.
(source:
Of
heroes and hero worship - By Anuradha
Dutt
- dailypioneer.com).
For
more refer to chapter on European
Imperialism and Christian
Aggression.
Mother
Teresa instigated the closing of more than 20,000 Christian schools
across India in November, 1995. She launched the campaign in Delhi. The
"strike" is intended to put pressure on the government to meet demands
that her low-caste (Dalit) followers--Christian converts from Hinduism--be given
government jobs. "Up to 80 percent of India's 25-million Christians are
Dalit," reports ENI Bulletin. Ironically,
these converts had hoped to shed their caste identity, but they were never
accepted as equals by high-caste converts. They continue to face the
same discrimination as Hindu Dalits, perhaps more so now as government jobs
reserved for Dalits are not open to low-caste Christians. Authorities rejected
the demands, citing that since Christians do not recognize caste, they cannot
make caste-based demands. "The very basis of her
religion professes a casteless society," maintained BJP
spokeswoman Sushma Swaraj.
(source:
Hinduism
Today).
Mother Teresa,
John Paul II, and the Fast-Track Saints
During his 26-year papacy, John Paul II elevated 483 individuals to sainthood,
reportedly more saints than any previous pope. One personage he beatified but
did not live long enough to canonize was Mother Teresa, the Roman Catholic nun
of Albanian origin who had been wined and dined by the world’s rich and famous
while hailed as a champion of the poor. The darling of the corporate media and
western officialdom, and an object of celebrity adoration, Teresa was for many
years the most revered woman on earth, showered with kudos and awarded a Nobel
Peace Prize in 1979 for her “humanitarian work” and “spiritual inspiration.”
What usually went unreported were the vast sums she received from wealthy and
sometimes tainted sources, including a million dollars from convicted
savings & loan swindler Catholic fundamentalist and
anti-abortionist Charles Keating, on whose behalf she sent a personal
plea for clemency to the presiding judge. She was asked by the prosecutor in
that case to return Keating’s gift because it was money he had stolen. She never
did. She also accepted substantial sums given by the
brutal Doc Duvalier dictatorship that regularly stole from the
Haitian public treasury.
(Note:
Keating, a “Catholic
fundamentalist”, gave Mother Teresa one and a quarter
million dollars and “the use of his private jet.” During the course
of Keating’s trial, Mother Teresa wrote Judge Ito asking clemency and asked Ito
“to do what Jesus would do.”).
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. Their ailments usually went undiagnosed. The food was nutritionally
lacking and sanitary conditions were deplorable. There were few medical
personnel on the premises, mostly untrained nuns and brothers.
When tending to her own ailments, however, Teresa checked into some of the
costliest hospitals and recovery care units in the world for state-of-the-art
treatment.
Teresa journeyed the globe to wage campaigns against divorce, abortion, and
birth control. At her Nobel award ceremony,
she announced that “the greatest destroyer of peace is
abortion.” And she once suggested that AIDS
might be a just retribution for improper sexual conduct.
Teresa emitted a continual flow of promotional misinformation about herself. She
claimed that her mission in Calcutta fed over a thousand people daily. On other
occasions she jumped the number to 4000, 7000, and 9000. Actually her soup
kitchens fed not more than 150 people (six days a week), and this included her
retinue of nuns, novices, and brothers. She claimed that her school in the
Calcutta slum contained five thousand children when it actually enrolled less
than one hundred.
Teresa claimed to have 102 family assistance centers in Calcutta, but longtime
Calcutta resident, Aroup Chatterjee, who did
an extensive on-the-scene investigation of her mission, could not find a single
such center.
As one of her devotees explained, “Mother Teresa is among those who least worry
about statistics. She has repeatedly expressed that what matters is not how much
work is accomplished but how much love is put into the work.” Was Teresa really
unconcerned about statistics? Quite the contrary, her numerical inaccuracies
went consistently and self-servingly in only
one direction, greatly exaggerating her accomplishments.
Over the many years that her mission was in Calcutta, there were about a dozen
floods and numerous cholera epidemics in or near the city, with thousands
perishing. Various relief agencies responded to each disaster, but Teresa and
her crew were nowhere in sight, except briefly on one occasion.
When someone asked Teresa how people without money or power can make the world a
better place, she replied, “They should smile more,” a response that charmed
some listeners. During a press conference in Washington DC, when asked “Do you
teach the poor to endure their lot?” she said “I think
it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the
passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of
the poor people.”
But she herself lived
lavishly well, enjoying luxurious accommodations in
her travels abroad. It seems to have gone
unnoticed that as a world celebrity she spent most of her time away from
Calcutta, with protracted stays at opulent residences in Europe and the United
States, jetting from Rome to London to New York in
private planes.
Mother Teresa is a paramount example of the kind of acceptably conservative icon
propagated by an elite-dominated culture, a “saint” who uttered not a critical
word against social injustice, and maintained cozy relations with the rich,
corrupt, and powerful.
She claimed to be above politics when in fact she was pronouncedly hostile
toward any kind of progressive reform. Teresa was a friend of Ronald Reagan, and
an admiring guest of the Haitian dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier. She also had the
support and admiration of a number of Central and South American dictators.
Teresa was Pope John Paul II’s kind of saint. After her death in 1997, he waived
the five-year waiting period usually observed before beginning the beatification
process that leads to sainthood. The five-year delay is intended to dampen
impulsive enthusiasms and allow for a more sober evaluation. Claims made on
behalf of a candidate are then subjected to critical challenge by an advocatus
diaboli, a “devil’s advocate” assigned to the beatification process. John Paul
brushed aside all this. In 2003, in record time Teresa was beatified, the final
step before canonization.
But in 2007 her canonization confronted a bump in the road, it having been
disclosed that along with her various other contradictions Teresa was not a
citadel of spiritual joy and unswerving faith. Her diaries, investigated by
Catholic authorities in Calcutta, revealed that she had been racked with doubts:
“I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God and that he does not
really exist.” People think “my faith, my hope and my love are overflowing and
that my intimacy with God and union with his will fill my heart. If only they
knew,” she wrote, “Heaven means nothing.”
Through many tormented sleepless nights she shed thoughts like this: “I am told
God loves me—and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so
great that nothing touches my soul.”
Il Messeggero,
Rome's popular daily newspaper, commented: “The real Mother Teresa was one who
for one year had visions and who for the next 50 had doubts---up until her
death.”
(source:
Mother
Teresa, John Paul II, and the Fast-Track Saints
- By
Michael Parenti
- author of the book
God And His Demons).
Lower-caste
villagers who converted to Christianity were barred from a Christmas Mass
Police
guard church after some Christians block others from a Christmas celebration.
The
villagers, known as Dalit Christians after the lower-caste Hindu social group
they once belonged to, were prevented from attending midnight Mass at St.
Ebiben's Church in
Manjakuppam, in southern Tamil Nadu state, about 1,100 miles south of New Delhi,
by high-caste converts, Father
Christopher Rethinasamy
said.
He said he was helpless to do anything because he feared an outbreak of
violence. The Dalit Christians were made to wait an hour and half as Mass was
conducted for the converts from the Vannia community, who were formerly
high-caste Hindus.
They were allowed entry an hour after the ceremony ended, after police
intervened and negotiated with church authorities.
"I know it is against the teachings of Jesus," Rethinasamy said.
"But I had to go along with the decision of the Vannia Christians. I did
not want the situation to deteriorate."
In
the report Last
Among Equals,
veteran broadcaster Mark
Tully OBE reports from India on how caste discrimination in the
Christian church is leading to exploitation, violence, and in some cases murder.
The Christian missionaries came to India preaching
'blessed are the poor'. They converted the poorest of the poor, the low-caste
(actually no-caste) Hindus or 'Untouchables', who were eager to escape the
hardships that the caste system imposed on them. However, as Tully reveals,
these so-called 'Dalit' Christians found themselves treated just as harshly by
their Christian brethren as they had been by the upper-caste Hindus.
Caste
divisions in the church are particularly acute in rural areas like the village
of Tutchoor, 60kms from Madras. Here, the upper caste
Christians live on one side of the hill, nearer the church. Their
religious processions do not pass the Dalits' homes, and they even worship and
are buried separately.
(source: Low-Caste
Converts Barred From Mass in India - LA Times.com).
Mother Teresa: Where are her
millions?
By
Walter Wuellenweber
http://members.lycos.co.uk/bajuu/
French
journalist, Francois Gautier has called her:
"an incarnation of Western post-colonialism and the Nobel prize she got is
their endorsement of her work."
(source:
A
Western journalist on India : The Ferengi's Columns
- By Francois Gautier p. 114).
MOTHER TERESA -
Some Little Known Facts - By G. P. Srivastava
http://www.vhp.org/englishsite/g.Challenges/dConversion%20to%20Christianity/mother_teresa.htm).
Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel
***
Why Mother Teresa should
Not be a saint - By Christopher Hitchens
"Saints are
dead sinners, revised and edited." -
Ambrose
Bierce
***
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Concocted Miracle? - The beatification
of Mother Teresa
Monica
Besra is a 30-year-old tribal woman from Dulidnapur village. She is illiterate
and speaks her tribal mother tongue only, laced with a few words of broken
Bengali. Until recently she has not been a Christian. Dr. Manju Murshed,
superintendent of the government hospital in Balurghat, informed that Monica
Besra was admitted in the hospital with severe pain. She suffered from
tubercular meningitis and from an ovarian tumor, which was discovered during an
ultra-sound investigation. She was subsequently treated
by Dr. Tarun Kumar Biwas and the gynecologist Dr. Ranjan Mustafi. After
she left the hospital, the treatment was continued in the North
Bengal Medical College and Hospital and
ended successfully in March 1999. A final ultra-sound investigation showed that
the tumor had disappeared.
According
to the Vatican, Monica Besra’s ovarian
tumor was cured by the powers of Teresa’s picture, placed on her abdomen. But
the medical records prove that it was sheer conventional medical treatment that
rescued her life. “In the 21st century how can you
talk about miracle healing?” says West
Bengal Health minister Suyrya Kanta Nishra. The Vatican has approved
the story officially as a first-class miracle.
Dr.
Ranjan Mustaphi is
one of the doubters, questioning the Vatican's belief that Mother Teresa ever
performed a miracle. "I
am really astonished," he
said. "This
is nothing, but a farce."
One doctor who treated Besra told CNN there was no scientific explanation for
her recovery. But the doctor who first diagnosed Besra, says the church should
not push Besra's case because it was medication, not a miracle that cured her.
"It
is scientifically proven that the tumor that she had was linked to
tuberculosis," he said. "And it responded to an anti-tubercular
drug."
The
most important of those bundled paranormal claims is the miracle, which Teresa
has allegedly done on her first death anniversary. At least one proven
after-death-miracle is a must for any saint. Teresa’s managers have offered
the “Healing of Monica Besra” for this purpose and the Vatican has
officially accepted it as a suitable ticket to sainthood. But unexpectedly the
miracle has met with a tough challenge. Stripped off the veil of holiness, it
looks like a rough-cut fake.
If Mother Teresa was a
saint, why could she not heal herself? Christopher
Hitchens notes that Mother Teresa “has checked into some of the finest and
costliest clinics and hospitals in the West during her bouts with heart trouble
and old age.”
Mother Teresa was admitted to Woodlands
Nursing Home at 2:30 am Friday morning for the third time since
August with severe heart problems 1989: Has a second and nearly fatal attack.
Doctors implant a pacemaker.
(source: Indian
Rationalists question mother Teresa’s ovarian miracle - By Sanal
Edamaruku
).
Mother
Teresa - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and
Exposing
Mother Teresa Hitchens’
Book A Devastating Insight - by John Swomley and
Mother
Teresa's miracle in doubt and
What's
Mother Teresa Got to Do with It?
- time.com and Mother
Teresa The Final Verdict - By Aroup Chatterjee
and
On
Mother Teresa - By Atanu Dey and
Medicine
cured 'miracle' woman - not Mother Teresa, say doctors - By David Orr in
Calcutta - telegraph.co.uk - 10/5/03).
Christian
Charity?
"Woman 'cured' by Mother Teresa lives in poverty"
My hut was frequented by nuns of the Missionaries of Charity before
the beatification of Mother Teresa," Besra said.
"They made of lot of promises to me and assured me of financial help for my
livelihood and my children's education," she claimed, adding that she was
also escorted to the
Vatican
for the beatification ceremony.
"After that, they forgot me," said Besra, tears welling up in her
eyes.........................
Every piece of the above conforms to the modus operandi of the Christist
missionaries. After all, what use would they have for this woman after she has
served her purpose in inventing the myth of "gutter saint" around the ghoul
of
Calcutta
?
(source:
"Woman
'cured' by Mother Teresa lives in poverty"
- Mother
Teresa). Refer
to Amen
- an autobiography of a nun and Mote
and the beam - By Sandhya Jain.
The
Saint business - By Rajeev Srinivasan
"The picture that emerges is a little less
than flattering. Mother Teresa makes great copy, though, for the Vatican's
brand-building. Indian taxpayers paid for a grand state
funeral for her, unaware that she single-handedly set back India's own brand
image by ten years by projecting a picture of a prone, impoverished and
criminally negligent country that needed a white missionary to help its
destitute. Since both the Marxists of Calcutta and MT needed to
perpetuate poverty for their own agendas, was there a little tactical alliance
between the Vatican and the Marxists on this front?
And
then there is the small matter of the unseemly hurry to fast-track the godwoman
to sainthood. It appears that the Vatican broke all its guidelines about
'miracle' verification and waiting periods in its haste to get the deed
done.....So if these are the Vatican's 'saints,' we must really hope we are
spared the Vatican's 'sinners.' And now we understand
the reason for the unseemly haste: they had better get the deed done, sealed and
delivered, before further questions crop up about the 'miracles.'
(source: The
Saint business - By Rajeev Srinivasan - rediff.com).
Mommie
Dearest - By
Christopher Hitchens
The
pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.
As
for the "miracle" that had to be attested, what can one say? Surely
any respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the
obviousness of the fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims
that a beam of light emerged from a picture of MT, which she happened to have in
her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor. Her
physician, Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn't have a cancerous tumor in
the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course
of prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican's investigators? No.
MT was not a friend of the
poor. She was a friend of poverty.
She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the
only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the
emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And
she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the
atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from
Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all
the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when
she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got
sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have
her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all
bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?
The
rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own
unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the
poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been
gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a
lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions.
(source:
Mommie
Dearest - By
Christopher Hitchens - slate.com).
Refer
to Former
Catholic Sister Says Even Mother Teresa Is a Fraud
- By By Greg Szymanski
June
6, 2007
Bizarre
Media hype
I
find the whole spectacle of the so-called beatification (coming soon: a
full-fledged canonisation!) of Mother Teresa foolish
and comical. And I find all the hype and media-excitement surrounding the event
absurd and bizarre.
The
second is that as wonderful as Mother Teresa was — and yes, she was pretty
wonderful — many other people and organisations whose work was as
laudable (in Calcutta itself, there’s the example of the Ramakrishna
Mission) were
ignored by the western media because they were brown and it made a much better
story for the international press to focus on a white woman who had given up
everything to work with the poor of the Third World.
why
are we paying so much attention to this ropey, medieval practice of conferring
posthumous magical powers on the poor, old dear? When Sai Baba says he can
perform miracles, rationalists snigger. When Ganesh idols are said to be
drinking milk, a steady stream of debunkers rush to prove that this all a hoax.
And
yet if you look at the reverential way in which the Indian media — press and
those TV channels which even provided live coverage of the beatification! —
have treated this strange conversion of Mother Teresa from missionary to
magician, you begin to wonder: do we have different standards for Indian
miracles and for firangi magic?
(source: Some
Mothers do ’ave ’em - By Vir Singhvi - hindustantimes.com).
Charity to a Missionary
The Leftist West Bengal government, under
pressure from rationalist groups and doctors conducted
an inquiry and rejected the miracle as ridiculous. The doctors who
went into the whole affair have also spoken about the 'approach' by the Vatican
to get a 'favourable' verdict from them. Yet, the rational Commies of Calcutta
themselves have maintained a diplomatic silence on the miracles of Teresa of
Calcutta. In case, their intellect has got corroded, they can always refresh
themselves say, by reading the revelations of Christopher
Hitchens, a secular author at that, who mustered the courage to call
some of the Blessed Bluffs in his seminal book titled The
Missionary Position: Mother Teresa's Crimes Against Humanity. The
author, among other things, makes no bones about the evangelical intent behind
the Mother's acts of charity. And if that is the tendency of a Bharat
Ratna Mother Teresa, who is supposed to be 'selfless service personified' we can
well imagine the disposition of lesser missionaries. The book would make one
shudder, in disgust and worse at having been taken for a jolly, or rather, holy
ride.
(source: Charity
to a Missionary - By T R Jawahar - newstodaynet.com December 26' 2002).
Christian
Slander Campaign
The
rape of four nuns in Jhabua kept figuring in 1999 Christian lists of
"Hindu atrocities on Christians" even when a largely Christian
gang of local tribals pleaded guilty. Apart from the
Jhabua case, there were the alleged rape of one nun in Orissa, but
police investigation showed this to be wholly fictitious, as
documented in the official Justice Wadhwa
Report. In fact, no rape of nuns was committed by any
Hindu militants during the previous year. Yet, the calumny continued
to spread even in supposedly neutral sources.
(source:
Harvesting
Our Souls: Missionaries,
their design, their claims
- By Arun Shourie ASA
pub ISBN:81-900199-9-6).
"Nuns
have been raped", according to the New York based Human
Rights Watch, which blamed "Hindu Nationalism"
in a report presented nearly a year after the Jhabua incident, when
the truth was already well-known. (refer to "India faulted for
Christian attacks, Associated Press, London, 29-9-1999).
Newsweek
magazine cited "rapes of nuns" among the atrocities
committed by Hindu nationalists. The Belgian weekly Le
Vif/L'Express likewise cited "nuns raped" among
the Christian victims of Hindu violence. The leading Dutch quality
daily NRC-Handelsblad claimed to
know that "rapes of nuns" formed part of a "planned
campaign by the Sangh Parivar.
Defamation
of Hindus
For the best proof
of your non-fascism is that you denounce others as fascist, just as
the proof of your "secularism" in India is that you accuse
others of "communalism". All
weapons which can damage Hinduism are welcomed, and no
scruples should stand in the way of the christianization of India, a
vital interest of the Christian Churches. In this war context, the
"fascist" smear is a welcome addition to the arsenal. Now
that demonization in terms of "idolatry" and
"devil-worship" is not very effective anymore, a new demon
is called out to defame Hindus by association.
(source:
The
Saffron Swastika - By Koenraad Elst
Voice of India ISBN 8185990697 p.9-10).
The Mother
of All Myths
When Mother Teresa died, she
was surrounded in her bedroom by sophisticated and expensive cardiac equipment,
which had been specially fitted for her.
Such privilege is usually granted to
kings, presidents and dictators. Whether such exclusive facilities befit a
future Saint is for the Committee to decide, but I would ask it to take note of
the wide discrepancy between Mother Teresa's deeds and her pronouncements.
It
was upon her insistence that the pope decided to visit this heathen
- Marxist city with a virtually non-existent Catholic population
(source: The
Mother of All Myths - by Aroup Chatterjee
- This book is available online - Mother
Teresa The Final Verdict
By Aroup Chatterjee).
Top of Page
Religious
Apartheid
The Pope wants to convert all Hindus. The Southern
Baptist Mission
recently claimed that Hinduism is eternal darkness, and is Satanic. Millions of
Hindus revere Jesus Christ as a great religious leader. Hinduism is a tolerant,
inclusive religion which is not judgmental towards other religions. But this
friendly feeling is not reciprocated by many Christian missionaries, who maliciously demonize the Hindu gods and
portray them as satanic in order to win converts. The chauvinist and intolerant
philosophy of the hard line Christian missionaries - that only Jesus is the real
savior - is religious apartheid. The Christian
Church, it would seem, does not understand that the hegemony's of the West is
over and gone. To suggest that because conversion is basic to Christianity and
should therefore not be challenged is childish.
The Christian
missionaries' attitude - "My God is real,
yours is false and is Devil" - is religious racism.
(Friedrich
Nietzsche,
the great German Philosopher, once said
that the old gods laughed themselves to death when a god proclaimed there was
only one God.) One must practice one's
religion without demonizing and seeking to eliminate other religions. The claims
of Christian missionaries to deliver the poor from oppression and poverty is
false. Had that been so, there would have been no poverty, illiteracy and
dictatorships in the vastly Christian lands of Latin America, Africa,
Philippines etc.
(Note: Hindus
in India were shocked by a controversial report in The
Kansas City Star newspaper that Roman Catholic
priests in the United States are dying from AIDS-related illnesses at a rate
four times higher than the general population. The most likely
explanation--sexual activity on the part of the supposedly celibate
priests--causes less stir in America. Here the Catholic Church has already paid
out hundreds of millions of dollars in court judgments as a result of cases
involving priest misconduct with children under their care.
(source: http://www.hinduism-today.com/2000/5/).
According to the National Catholic Reporter, Reports
of abuse: AIDS exacerbates sexual exploitation of nuns, reports allege - By John
Allen JR. and Pamela Schaeffer. Five
confidential Roman Catholic Church reports written by senior members of women's
religious orders and an American priest over a period of seven years allege
numerous cases of sexual abuse of nuns by priests and a failure by church
leaders to discipline the clerics who were involved. The reports contend that
the abuse has been taking place in 23 countries, including India......
The Church is already reeling from loosing lawsuits involving priests' abuse of
young children.
(source: http://www.natcath.com/NCR_Online/archives/031601/031601a.htm)
There is a calumny
against Hinduism. In 1994, at a conference in Vadodara, Religion
and Society in Contemporary India, Shri Nirmal Verma, the
eminent Hindi writer, said: "The
type of abuses which missionaries hurled against the Indian Gods and
Goddesses, if you read today, would be outrageous to any Hindu
believer. Krishna is lecherous person, Shiva is some demonic force.
All sorts of sexual abuses (are hurled) against Kali Durga."
(source: Rajiv
Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies, Project Nr 14,
1996, p 60.)
Many Christian
researchers have documented the cause of the antipathy of the
missionaries towards the Brahmins. Elizabeth
Susan Alexander wrote,
“For
the missionaries Brahmans (sic) had been in the forefront of the
staunch Hindu opposition to missionary endeavours in Madras
Presidency. They had also been the vanguard of the Indian
nationalist movement that had taken alarmingly extremist
turns.”
(source: The
Attitudes of British Protestant Missionaries Towards Nationalism in
India, Konark Publishers, Delhi, 1994, p 67 and Christianity
in India -
By Ashok V. Chowgule).
According to Koenraad Elst "Christianity in India
is not the toothless, softened Christianity, but has retained the aggressiveness
and self-righteousness of the colonial period; and even the European Churches
become a little bit aggressive again when advertising their work among the
wretched Pagans of India."
(source: Indigenous
Indians: Agastya to Ambedkar By Koenraad Elst. For
more refer to chapter on European
Imperialism and Christian
Aggression).
At the Bethany site,
India is divided with scientific precision into 186 individual "people
groups."
A long description is followed by
advice on how to convert each to Christianity. (http://www.bethany.
com/profiles/c_code/india.html ). Notably absent from these sites is "social
service" as an aim in India--contrary to missionaries' claim. The real goal
is conversion of men, which means the destruction of Hinduism.
The Catholic Church believes it is the one and only means to salvation. Priests
such as Father Bede Griffiths,
who dress, act and worship like Hindus do confuse Hindus
and seek to make Catholicism, a foreign faith, appear indigenous. (source: Hinduism Today
June'99). Today, the Indianization of Christianity, known as
'inculturation,'
has become one of the central themes of the Church in India. Pope
John Paul II invites the entire Church to respond to the call of the Holy Spirit
for a renewal of Christian life and mission in the world.
Read between lines -
Christians must be more assertive, a new evangelical zeal inviting Christians to
spread the good word, make more converts. Why is the Christian community in
India so crucial to the Pope? India is the last stronghold of ‘heathenism’. The
Caste system is judged offensive by Christian standards. Hinduism is a growing
menace to the Monotheistic bloc. Gurus are exporting their teachings all over
the world. New Age, also called neopaganism resulting from the teaching of gurus
in the West, is the major threat of the Abrahamic monotheist religions. If the
Pope is calling for a reconciliation of the Churches and asking forgiveness for
the faults of the past, why is he calling for a conversion of India? It is
easier to ask forgiveness for the destruction of Native American cultures when
these have been massively Christianized. It is contradictory to ask pardon for
faults of the past when destruction of native cultures is still called for. The
goal is to establish a strong Christian community that will make more converts.
A call for the emergence of Christian India for the coming millennium.
(An interesting book -
Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit - By Gary Wills
). Religious conversions have another
angle, a political one. As pointed out by the Niyogi Committee, they seem to be
intended to create a State within a State. Foreign missionaries and foreign
funds are suspect from this point of view and so they should be either totally
banned or strictly regulated.
Malachi
Martin, in The
Jesuits : the Society of Jesus and the betrayal of the Roman
Catholic Church, writes: "The subcontinent of
India, in the eyes of the Vatican planners, has a primordial
importance at the one country in Asia where the Church can make huge
headway. The Roman Catholic Church has poured vast resources into
India. Religious orders run 115 colleges with 135,000 students,
1,200 high schools with over 500,000 pupils. 242 technical schools
with over 400,000 students. It is estimated that 60 percent of all
students in India attend Roman Catholic schools and colleges. In
those seats of learning, 50 5 of the teachers are non-Christians.
Jesuits are involved on the local, state and national
level."
Raymond
James Paul, in A Catholic's
Believe It or Not, writes: "More than 7,000
educational institutions have been established by the Catholic
Church in India. "the real figure is much higher as these books
were published in 1987 and 1963 respectively. They do no include
non-Catholic educational institutions which have prolifigated in
recent years with the rapid spread of evangelical Protestant
churches in India. A truer picture of the Christian landscape in
India can be got from the 1992 report of the world Council of
Churches, which say, "Indian churches put together are the
biggest single land owner in India."
(source:
The
Myth of Saint Thomas and The Mylapore Shiva Temple - By Ishwar
Sharan p. 123). Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel
***
The following figures have been declared by the Census Commissioner of India.
The last religion-based statistics were published in Census of India 1991, Paper
1 of 1995, overseen by Dr M. Vijayanunni; those exclude Jammu & Kashmir and,
in some cases, Assam. These states are included in the database of the US Bureau
of the Census. The Christian headcount:
(source: http://www.pragna.org/Iss04204.html)
1961: 10,728,086
1971: 14,225,045
1981: 16,165,447
1991: 19,640,284
Did someone say the Christian
population had fallen...? According to The World Evangelism
site,
The
State of World Evangelization "Evangelical
Christians are the fastest growing major religious group in the world today and
it is the only one growing rapidly by conversion." - says Patrick Johnstone.
For obvious reasons, the
missionaries have always been trying to mislead people on the census data.
But certain reports, which they do for their internal consumption, are highly
revealing and equally disturbing. For example the Church Growth Centre reports
that by the end of the 20th century the Christian population will increase 13
times as compared to that at the beginning of the century. It further clarifies
that the increase of the non-Christian population would be only 4.6 times during
the same period. “In 1900 there were 60 non-Christians for one Christian and
by the end of the century there will be only 20 non-Christian to every
Christian. Christians’ estimated population in the year 2000 will be 50
million,” the report says.
According to the report entitled Trends
and Issues in Evangelisation in India by Augustine
Kanjamala SVD, a CBCI Secretary: “In the North-East, conversions
among the tribals continue. During the last 30 years the Catholic population has
increased nine fold to nine lakhs. In Arunachal Pradesh about 10,000 people join
the Church per year, half of them into Catholic Church. In West India more than
45,000 Bhils have joined the Church (source: The Church In’ India: Its
Missions Tomorrow, p. 40).
The same report reveals: “Amri,
Kerbi tribal people in Assam have totally declared to become Christians for the
prosperity of the tribe.” According to it every day 4,000 new Christians are
added to the Church, and 35 new congregations are formed every week. One can
very well imagine the aggressive nature of the “harvesting plan”.
In their “hate and insinuation”
literature, even Sikhs are not spared. A
section of the Sikh community is often compared to thieves and dacoits. (Page
180 of Uttar Bharat tatha Pakistan main Masihi Dharma by Bishop Deendayal and
published by Hindi Theological Literature Committee, Jabalpur). To substantiate
its point the author refers to “historical instance” when Sikh soldiers
allegedly attacked the enemy from behind and indulged in looting.
(source:
Hate
Literature - By Rajendra
Chadha).
Most people targeted for conversion are poor, illiterate and uneducated Hindus
and Tribals. Christian missionaries dare not try to convert the poor and
destitute Muslims for the fear of violent confrontation. The
Christian missionaries have effectively used the 3Ms - Media, Money and
Manipulation.
Recently,
a
140-page document was approved by the Roman
Catholic Church after the meeting of the Catholic bishops held in Delhi under
the guidance of the Pope. The document says: "Just as in the first
millennium the Cross was planted on the soil of Europe and in the second on that
of the Americas and Africa, we can pray that in the third Christian millennium a
great harvest of faith will be reaped in this vast and vital continent of
Asia."
What has this Christian religion
accomplished in Europe? We should remind the Pope and the Bishops that two of
the bloodiest world wars in history were started by European Christians and how
a Christian Germany sent over 5 million Jews to the gas chambers.
In
1929, after the Concordat between Mussolini
and the Holy See, the Pope saluted II Duce as a "man of God" and in
1932 he gave him the Papal blessing at St. Peter's. Four years later, the
Italian clergy were ordered to celebrate the Fascists victory over Ethiopia
with special services for thanksgiving in the churches.
(source: Recovery
of Faith - By Sir Sirvepalli Radhakrishnan. p 30-31.
It
was Fray Diego de Landa, the second
Bishop of Yucatan, reduced
the Maya Library in Yucatan to ashes in 1562.
And today we still see how Christian Catholics and Protestants are still
fighting each other to death in Ireland? (Note: Please refer to an interesting
book online by Avro Manhattan
(1914-1990), called The
Vatican Holocaust).
Many Europeans are realizing that
Christianity is a negative and destructive force and recall its history. Belgian
writer Hughes Henry,
wrote on Pagan renaissance says: " How harsh had been Europe's
conversion to Christianity? They burned temples, smashed statues, massacred the
priests and established extremely harsh laws. By 392 CE, Paganism died. (Source:
Hughes Henry- Hinduism Today July 1999).
The basic problem with Christianity is that the Church actually lacks respect
for other faiths and ways of life.
(Please refer to article - Religions
aren't equal, Vatican says).
What right has Christianity to claim to be the
absolute religion? Why is it not content to be one religion among many?
(For
more information please refer to
Indians
Against Christian Aggression).
Top of Page
Page < 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 >
|