Children tied to beds, nuns who flogged themselves, filthy homes: Was Mother Teresa a cult leader?
The Missionaries of Charity was a hive of psychological abuse, say former members
Johnson spent 20 years in Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity before leaving through official channels in 1997. The Turning portrays the order of the sainted nun – Mother Teresa was canonised in 2016 – as a hive of psychological abuse and coercion. It raises the question of whether the difference between a strict monastic community and a cult lies simply in the social acceptability of the operative faith.
A Calcutta-born physician named Aroup Chatterjee made a second career lambasting the cruelty and filth in the homes for the poor that Mother Teresa ran in his city.
They and other critics argued that Mother Teresa fetishised suffering rather than seeking to alleviate it. Chatterjee described children tied to beds in a Missionaries of Charity orphanage and patients in its Home for the Dying given nothing but aspirin for their pain. “He and others said that Mother Teresa took her adherence to frugality and simplicity in her work to extremes, allowing practices like the reuse of hypodermic needles and tolerating primitive facilities that required patients to defecate in front of one another,” the New York Times reported. (Hygiene practices reportedly improved after Mother Teresa’s death, and Chatterjee told the Times that the reuse of needles was eliminated.)
The former sisters describe an obsession with chastity so intense that any physical human contact or friendship was prohibited; according to Johnson, Mother Teresa even told them not to touch the babies they cared for more than necessary. They were expected to flog themselves regularly – a practice called “the discipline” – and were allowed to leave to visit their families only once every 10 years.
Viewed through a contemporary, secular lens, a community built around a charismatic founder and dedicated to the lionisation of suffering and the annihilation of female selfhood doesn't seem blessed and ethereal. It seems sinister.
One sister quotes Mother Teresa saying, "Love, to be real, has to hurt." If you heard the same words from any other guru, you'd know where the story was going."
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-styl...-1.4573449
The Missionaries of Charity was a hive of psychological abuse, say former members
Johnson spent 20 years in Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity before leaving through official channels in 1997. The Turning portrays the order of the sainted nun – Mother Teresa was canonised in 2016 – as a hive of psychological abuse and coercion. It raises the question of whether the difference between a strict monastic community and a cult lies simply in the social acceptability of the operative faith.
A Calcutta-born physician named Aroup Chatterjee made a second career lambasting the cruelty and filth in the homes for the poor that Mother Teresa ran in his city.
They and other critics argued that Mother Teresa fetishised suffering rather than seeking to alleviate it. Chatterjee described children tied to beds in a Missionaries of Charity orphanage and patients in its Home for the Dying given nothing but aspirin for their pain. “He and others said that Mother Teresa took her adherence to frugality and simplicity in her work to extremes, allowing practices like the reuse of hypodermic needles and tolerating primitive facilities that required patients to defecate in front of one another,” the New York Times reported. (Hygiene practices reportedly improved after Mother Teresa’s death, and Chatterjee told the Times that the reuse of needles was eliminated.)
The former sisters describe an obsession with chastity so intense that any physical human contact or friendship was prohibited; according to Johnson, Mother Teresa even told them not to touch the babies they cared for more than necessary. They were expected to flog themselves regularly – a practice called “the discipline” – and were allowed to leave to visit their families only once every 10 years.
Viewed through a contemporary, secular lens, a community built around a charismatic founder and dedicated to the lionisation of suffering and the annihilation of female selfhood doesn't seem blessed and ethereal. It seems sinister.
One sister quotes Mother Teresa saying, "Love, to be real, has to hurt." If you heard the same words from any other guru, you'd know where the story was going."
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-styl...-1.4573449
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"