Debate: Mother Teresa: good or evil?

It has been a long time since my last post and I am very glad I had the time to reflect on my book.

Since my book went out of print in the spring of 2009, I decided to set my efforts on other projects. Most of what needed to be said in blogs or forums was said to interest readers in the book. I still receive daily updates on Mother Teresa but there hasn’t been much worth posting. On reflecting over the past year and an half since my book went out of print I realized then, as I do now, that I was in a no man’s land when it came to the approach I took to the case of Mother Teresa’s cause. I was not the only Catholic in the Church and the world to question or write about their concerns vis-à-vis Mother Teresa holiness. I was, to my knowledge, the only Catholic in the Church and the world to write a book on the subject, send a copy to Rome, and do radio interviews about the book. Though my book is critical of Mother Teresa and is argued in a courtroom fashion, I did work hard to give Mother Teresa a fair hearing and give information about her that I believed even her most devoted followers did not know. When the book was published I quickly was examined by two warring armies:

The Mother Teresa is the devil army

The Mother Teresa is a goddess army

The first army is composed of hardened rationalistic atheists. These individuals in their need to find proofs to justify their faith, a faith of negation, seek to destroy the “Saint” of God. The atheists see the Christian world holding up Mother Teresa as thee modal of Christian purity and believe that if they can destroy her they have added another justification for their faith.

The second army has a mixture of soldiers, some are Catholics and some are from various faiths. These individuals have a hard time seeing that Mother Teresa could do anything wrong, let alone that she would do anything that could diminish the true religious service the world owes Mother Teresa.

You might have guessed that neither army received my position with joy. All they wanted to know was if I was pro or con Mother Teresa. Neither side could bring themselves to read my book because they have been fighting a trench warfare debate about Mother Teresa for such a long time they could no longer see any other way to address their conflict.

Recently, I came across a debate about Mother Teresa that I found interesting. This debate well demonstrates what happens when these two armies confront each other. I found myself watching the bifurcation and realizing why my book fell on so many deaf ears. Both sides are doomed to never discover the truth about Mother Teresa until they can look past their present presuppositions about her and judge her using the scales in which she believed her life was weighted.

Just click on Debate: Mother Teresa: good or evil? Make sure you see both parts.

Mother Teresa's relic heads for Europe

23 Jan 2009, 0225 hrs IST, Indrani Bagchi, TNN

NEW DELHI: Mother Teresa, who as the saint of Kolkata's slums, epitomized campassion and charity, is not only a treasure that Kolkata cherishes. Far away in Europe, Macedonia, wants a part of her too.

And it will get it. The foreign minister of Macedonia, Antonio Milososki, was in India last week for a couple of important things -- certainly to bond with India on a diplomatic level, but more important, to oversee the transfer of a Mother Teresa
relic.

A part of Mother Teresa -- some say her hand -- will be transported to Macedonia to be placed in her birthplace, Skopje, as a relic in a commemorative house that the government there has just built for her, said Milososki. The transfer has been done under established traditions closely supervised by the Roman Catholic Church, Milososki said.

Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje on August 27, 1910, when Macedonia was still under the Ottoman Empire. But at 18, she left home to join the Loreto Sisters and in 1931 she arrived in Calcutta. By 1948, she took special permission to work in the slums of Calcutta and lived and worked there till her death on September 5, 1997. She started her own order in 1980, Missionaries of Charity.

She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and the Bharat Ratna in 1980. She was one of two persons to become an honorary citizen of the US in her lifetime as well as featuring on a postage stamp while still alive.

But with a part of her body to be taken to Macedonia soon, in her birthplace, the government there hopes to turn Skopje into a place of pilgrimage. Mother Teresa is already on what is being called a fast track to sainthood in the Catholic Church. If she attains sainthood, it's likely that other churches would also want a part of her body in their reliquaries.

In a way it's like having the embalmed body of St Francis Xavier, whose body is embalmed in the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Goa and is a huge draw for tourists and pilgrims alike. The right forearm, which Xavier used to bless and baptize his converts, was detached in 1614 and is displayed since in a silver reliquary at a Jesuit church in Rome.