Any response to criticisms of Mother Theresa?

[MarcoPolo]

If she cannot use the money? If she cannot use it? She accepted huge donations from anyone who will would give them. If she could not use it, or if she refused to use it, then here’s a good idea…give the money to someone who will!

Accepting it if you can’t (or won’t) use it is perverse.

According to sources cited in the First Things article linked above:*Charges of financial impropriety are equally unfounded ; in fact, Blessed Teresa helped raise, and spent, “enormous sums of money” on the poor, and she donated funds to the Holy See, which in turn distributed them to Catholic hospitals and other good works.*I think it may be difficult for a person to understand that Mother Teresa’s primary ministry seems to be to show love to persons who had never experienced love. Catholics run a number of high quality hospitals. As an analogy, consider a facility such as a college campus nurse’s office. They don’t have every medical treatment available there, even if the school is making a lot of money. They aren’t intending the nurse’s office to be a high-tech, full-blown medical facility. In a similar vein, Mother Teresa’s ministry seems to have a focus on touching and even speaking to people who otherwise are shunned by the rest of society. The world might like to focus strictly on physical/medical ministry as the only thing of value. But the Church has a different understanding of the human person and runs hospitals as well as ministries of “love,” as I might put it, where persons who are not treated as persons in the world could find that among the sisters. Their particular ministry doesn’t have to focus on “everything” in order to be a worthy ministry, especially if they helped fund hospitals with those dollars as the article states. It would be like criticizing a profitable dentist for not hiring staff and resources to perform knee and heart surgery too.

Now, I don’t have acute documentation of where every dollar donated to the sisters went––the reasons for this could range anywhere from malicious if you’re a cynic (although I’m not aware of witnesses stating that the sisters are living lavishly) to not bothering to accommodate skeptics who have every intention of spinning the flow of money negatively no matter where it flows. We do have quotes such as above that speak of much money going to hospitals in “enormous sums.” If that is true, then the counter-criticisms that the skeptics are acting in poor faith would be true.

 

[ericc]

If she cannot use the money? If she cannot use it? She accepted huge donations from anyone who will would give them. If she could not use it, or if she refused to use it, then here’s a good idea…give the money to someone who will!

Accepting it if you can’t (or won’t) use it is perverse.

May be she did. May be she need to accumulate more funds for the funding of a project. May be is in the process of identifying which projects to allocate to and a possible million options. A snapshot at a certain point in time will always show some “Cash in the bank”. Doesn’t mean it is unencumbered. Doesn’t automatically mean it is available for use. Doesn’t mean every single dollar need to go out of their Balance Sheet the instant it gets in there. For example, our Church is accumulating funds to build a Catholic Center. The funds accumulate slowly over the weeks, months , years. You will see it as Cash in Bank. But that is not free unencumbered cash.

A friend who helps out at a charity once told me, sometimes it is not the shortage of funds, it is the shortage of manpower. Funds in the bank with no one to plan and suggest good use can happen. Many people volunteer their cash but not their time. Even selecting appropriate and deserving projects take time.

Based upon the little writeup, we don’t have enough details to judge. Do you have the details? If you don’t, then don’t you think your criticisms came too swift before fully understanding the whole situation? And instead of criticising, do you bring any value add to the table? Don’t just criticise, help. Help them to help themselves. They are doing good deeds. Help them maximize their potential. Help them where they are weak. Arm chair criticisms really don’t help much.

 

[weller2]

Medical care is as best as one knows how, may be not good enough for you, but that is a separate point. There is always a trade off between quality vs quantity. If she opts for maximum headcount to be helped, quality will have to take back seat.

Sorry, I cannot plausibly imagine a situation in long-term care which would justify exposing the patient to AIDS etc. by reusing needles over doing nothing.

Besides, an injection needle costs around $1. Since we know that MT’s operation in India gets a yearly cash influx of $10M, that’s 10M needles per year, or 27K injections per day. At 3 needles per patient, works out to seeing 9K patients per day, or 375 patients per hour, assuming 24-hour operation. At 20 minutes per patient per doctor/nurse/nun, that would require 125 medical professionals on duty, which in turn means a total medical staff of 500. This means a total head count of 1500 once you add support personnel.

Next, qualified nurse salary in India is $125 per month. Again, $10M per year would net 80000 nurse person-months which is enough to employ 6666 nurses in parallel. With 24-hour operation and a 4-brigade system, that gives you 1666 nurses on duty at any time.

That would be a quite respectable hospital, which is nowhere to be seen.

 

[weller2]

May be she did. May be she need to accumulate more funds for the funding of a project.

$10M influx year-after-year with no visible outlay? What are they stockpiling for, a space program?

 

[weller2]

According to sources cited in the First Things article linked above:Charges of financial impropriety are equally unfounded ; in fact, Blessed Teresa helped raise, and spent, “enormous sums of money” on the poor, and she donated funds to the Holy See, which in turn distributed them to Catholic hospitals and other good works.

I do management of projects involving taxpayer funds, and in my situation this would constitute at least a misuse of funds. Generally, funds received for a specific purpose can be neither used for another purpose, nor transferred to another organization. AFAIK charity law is very similar in spirit, if not the letter.

Now, I don’t have acute documentation of where every dollar donated to the sisters went

I happen to donate to a Catholic charity which provides an end-of-life care. Each December I get a nice letter outlaying how the funds were spent (numbers and all), plus, the books are reviewed every year by an external auditor.

MT’s order is at minimum violating best practice in the area.

 

[weller2]

Bottom line is, if you want to donate to MT’s order, buy a pack of needles (*) with direct shipment to the address where they are providing care.

That will at least be used to actually help people.

(*) or soap, or food, or whatever

 

[fhansen]

Hello all,

I am wondering if there is any response from, say, well-known Catholic apologists, regarding secular criticisms of Mother Theresa. In particular those coming from Christopher Hitchens.

Have you read Hitchens book? It’s almost embarrassing to see the way he struggled to find a few paltry, sloppily supported, and otherwise unimpressive examples of MT’s wickedness to fit into his little hatchet-job project.

 

[Bradski]

Bottom line is, if you want to donate to MT’s order, buy a pack of needles (*) with direct shipment to the address where they are providing care.

That will at least be used to actually help people.

(*) or soap, or food, or whatever

Now that is a very good idea. I’ll write to them and ask if that is possible.

 

[ericc]

Since we know that MT’s operation in India gets a yearly cash influx of $10M.

Can you share where you get this information? Do you know how many people yearly need to be care for by them? Do you have data on the infrastructure/headcount the charity need to maintain? Without more data, we are only outsiders trying our best to discern how that organization is being run.

Another poster has repeated many times. She wasn’t running a hospital. Why is MT being compared to the running of a hospital? She wouldn’t be licensed to handle many of the drugs and medication anyway. If the hospitals are charitable enough, MT wouldn’t have to do what the hospitals have rejected. Dying people, unwanted people. Even the government have rejected these.

 

[weller2]

Can you share where you get this information?

Official document of the Indian government, page 24. Note that these are international money transfers only, donations from within India, or material donations, are not included.

Do you know how many people yearly need to be care for by them?

That’s a very interesting question because people who live in Calcutta say that numbers given by MT are completely unrealistic:

The figure ‘5,000’ has a particular fascination for Mother, no doubt because of its Biblical connotation. She once said, 'Today there is a modern school in that place [in Motijheel slum] with over 5000 children in it.'10 This appears in a book published in 1986. Earlier, in 1969-70, she had told Malcolm Muggeridge, '…if we didn’t have our schools in the slums - they are nothing, they are just little primary schools where we teach the children to love the school and be clean and so on – if we didn’t have these little schools, those children, those thousands of children, would be left in the streets.'11

In 1969-70, Mother Teresa’s primary schools catered for not more that 200 (a generous overestimate) in Calcutta - the figure is not much more today. Nonetheless, I was prepared to overlook her ‘thousands of children’ as a figure of speech - saints are allowed to get carried away, like the rest of us. But ‘5000 children’ was a calculated lie, especially as the school in Motijheel has less than 100 pupils. I do not think that there is any school in the world which caters to 5,000 children from a single site - Calcutta is of course, extra worldly.

The largest school in India is Calcutta’s South Point - my own alma mater - which, with 11,000 (fee paying) students, was at one time the largest school in the world, but is run from six sites. The largest site at Mandeville Gardens is seven storeys high and caters for 3,000 students - numerically speaking, it is far and away Calcutta’s largest school premises.

Do you have data on the infrastructure/headcount the charity need to maintain?

Again, we know for sure that the Indian branch gets $10M per year in foreign donations.
Per Wikipedia, the total headcount is ~4500 in ~500 missions. That works out to 9 sisters per facility. The same source says that there are 19 facilities in Calcutta, so this would be 171 nuns. Rounding up to 200, you get US$50K per nun per year. That’s a huge amount, but if you read up on the subject, you will quickly discover that nuns eat only donated food… The disconnect between the cash influx and the living conditions of the nuns and those they are caring for is shocking.

Infrastructure maintenance? What infrastructure? We’re talking about an organization which does not use washing machines.Or elevators.

And I have a better question: what was the last time you have heard that MT’s order has purchased something?

Without more data, we are only outsiders trying our best to discern how that organization is being run.

Sure, but the fact that the organization is hiding the financials does not exactly work in its favor.

The organisation has 6 branches in Germany. Here too financial matters are a strict secret. “It’s nobody’s business how much money we have, I mean to say how little we have,” says Sr Pauline, head of the German operations. Maria Tingelhoff had had handled the organisation’s book-keeping on a voluntary basis until 1981. “We did see 3 million a year,” she remembers. But Mother Teresa never quite trusted the worldly helpers completely. So the sisters took over the financial management themselves in 1981. “Of course I don’t know how much money went in, in the years after that, but it must be many multiples of 3 million,” estimates Mrs Tingelhoff. “Mother was always very pleased with the Germans.”

England is one of the few countries where the sisters allow the authorities at least a quick glance at their accounts. Here the order took in DM5.3 million in 1991. And expenses (including charitable expenses)? — around DM360,000 or less than 7%. Whatever happened to the rest of the money? Sister Teresina, the head for England, defensively states, “Sorry we can’t tell you that.” Every year, according to the returns filed with the British authorities, a portion of the fortune is sent to accounts of the order in other countries. How much to which countries is not declared. One of the recipients is however, always Rome. The fortune of this famous charitable organistaion is controlled from Rome, — from an account at the Vatican bank. And what happens with monies at the Vatican Bank is so secret that even God is not allowed to know about it. One thing is sure however — Mother’s outlets in poor countries do not benefit from largesse of the rich countries. The official biographer of Mother Teresa, Kathryn Spink, writes, “As soon as the sisters became established in a certain country, Mother normally withdrew all financial support.” Branches in very needy countries therefore only receive start-up assistance. Most of the money remains in the Vatican Bank.

From a German newpaper in the 1990s.

Another poster has repeated many times. She wasn’t running a hospital. Why is MT being compared to the running of a hospital?

If you are doing injections, then you are a medical facility.

 

[ericc]

Again, we know for sure that the Indian branch gets $10M per year in foreign donations.
Per Wikipedia, the total headcount is ~4500 in ~500 missions. That works out to 9 sisters per facility. The same source says that there are 19 facilities in Calcutta, so this would be 171 nuns. Rounding up to 200, you get US$50K per nun per year. That’s a huge amount, but if you read up on the subject, you will quickly discover that nuns eat only donated food… The disconnect between the cash influx and the living conditions of the nuns and those they are caring for is shocking.

If you are doing injections, then you are a medical facility.

I just read from one of the posters from wanderingearl.com/volunteering-at-mother-teresas-home-for-the-dying/ who has volunteered recently at MT in Kolkata. Seems to have improved.

*Sean says:
September 8, 2014 at 1:41 am

I’ve just come back from Kolkata (last Tuesday to be exact).

I spent approximately 10 days (2 in Prem Dan and 7 in Nirmal Hirday). When I was there, there were no long-term volunteers anymore. The longest was 2 months and even then, the volunteers rotated between houses. I don’t think anyone (besides the paid workers, sisters and the nurse) was in Nirmal Hirday for more than 2/3 weeks. There was also a lovely local couple doing clerical work for the sisters (book-keeping, accounts etc.)

I really can see changes (I previously volunteered in 2011). Now volunteers are not allowed to perform ANY medical procedures. There is a nurse stationed daily in Nirmal Hirday (to perform dressings, insert IV lines etc.) and a doctor who comes every Friday to assess each patient. The standard of care provided by the nurse is very good, and she is very thorough with each case, ensuring that all the wounds are clean. She once spent over an hour ensuring that a patient’s wound was absolutely clean, before taking a break. In the end, the patient did not have to have his leg amputated. Even the doctor was impressed.

When every patient is admitted, their blood will be drawn and will be sent to a lab for diagnostics and it will be assessed. Thus the sisters will get an accurate picture of what the person they have just picked up and will now have to pump resources into is suffering from.

The sisters also make sure that each patient is treated privately (not publicly as they want their patients to get treatment quickly) and most of the patients, especially those with HIV, or TB will be discriminated against elsewhere. Also, a large amount of their expenditure now consists of purchasing of medical equipment and medication. (No expired drugs used at all anymore). I did not see needles being reused, and all sharps were placed into a makeshift (albeit safe) sharps bin.

Remember, the money you donate will be spread amongst the Missionaries of Charity’s hundreds of houses throughout the world, not just Kolkata. The number of patients and those suffering are relentless. Most of the patients lack the resources to seek medical treatment, and roam the streets until they die or are picked up by the Missionaries of Charity. Decisions are also made in the patient’s best interests and in consultation with medical professionals. Physiotherapists also come regularly to help patients get back on their feet (literally). Also, the care in general is rather third-world, but it is consistent with the current standards in the region. Although if some of my criticisms were looked at.

Some criticisms of the current standards of care:
There were no personal protective equipment used by either the sisters or the volunteers. Most of the patients had either latent or active Tuberculosis. Without personal protective equipment, the volunteers and the sisters themselves would be susceptible to contracting tuberculosis.
There was a general lack of protective equipment. (masks, gloves, hand wash) Gloves were only used by the nurse and the sister assisting her. Gloves were not worn during patient contact. Volunteers also did not bring much to donate, especially medical equipment but instead used most of the medical equipment on-site. This makes replenishing personal protective equipment a very expensive proposition indeed. (Volunteers should be asked to bring at least one box of masks, a box of gloves, and a bottle of hand wash each).

Hand washing contaminated clothes were also done by the volunteers and the paid workers. This I believe was dangerous, I think they should be able to afford a washing machine at least.

Overall, I would return to volunteer in Nirmal Hirday, but I will now bring significantly more personal protective equipment to donate.

TL;DR:
If you want to volunteer in Nirmal Hirday, please do. It really does brighten the days of the patients there. Please bring boxes of surgical masks, gloves and hand sanitiser if you do. Wear the masks and gloves as much as possible.

Source: Me, a Medical Student.*

So personal protection gear would be a great item to donate other than needles. And $10mil doesn’t seems a lot if spread worldwide. I don’t know how Sean got that bit of info though, may be through his visit there.

I did a quick rough count through the Yellow Pages and MT is in at least 13 different locations (at least those with a telephone number). Another article says they are at least in 22 Indian cities. encyclopedia.com/topic/Mother_Teresa.aspx. No matter how you divide the money, it won’t be a lot if you spread it over many cities and many headcount. The number of headcount cared for per month will go through that money pretty quickly in any case. Even with no washing machines or elevators, each house still need utilities, repair and maintenance.

 

[paperwight66]

My understanding is that the lack of washing-machines isn’t due to shortage of money, but a requirement in the Sisters’ constitution that they have to live as the poor do.

My neighbour worked for a while as a volunteer some years ago in one of their houses in India, and there were four brand-new Ariston washing-machines in the basement. still wrapped in plastic. When she queried this, as nappies weren’t being changed as often as she thought necessary for the children’s comfort because it was such hard work doing everything by hand, this was the explanation she was given.

 

[Rosebud77]

Bottom line is, if you want to donate to MT’s order, buy a pack of needles (*) with direct shipment to the address where they are providing care.

That will at least be used to actually help people.

(*) or soap, or food, or whatever

It will not get where it is needed. Please see my post later

 

[Rosebud77]

One thing no one seems to have mentioned is that the Process has stopped ie no sainthood and there will not be as so many issues that some have raised here. Please excuse lack of paras; old machine… At one time I was very deeply involved in many ways with the Order, very deeply involved. I did not read the Hitchens book but read the review on Amazon. A Canadian dr had visited one of the orphanages and seen dire poverty, No diapers, babies 2 to a crib, little food. She and some other drs raised a lot of money and sent it for that home and went back later… to find conditions worse than ever and while they were there a baby died of starvation. I did not want to belive this and as I know a lot of relief workers around the world started asking questions and the pattern was the same. Houses were set up helped by other charities then a year later, squalor and utter poverty. I found the newspaper item already quoted, srai.org/mother-teresa-where-are-her-millions/ Money poured in. She counted it a virtue to “give until it hurt”, but it seems that the concept of poverty gripped her too far? Hence the total lack of any real physical care for those she took responsibility for…as she did …dirty needles, not even basic painkillers as she told one man" Jesus is kissing you!" Out of date vaccines for children, all to save and avoid spending the money that was given by so many for that purpose. It is impossible to believe even now that the order is short of money as Nirmala her successor admitted that they owned and still own millions which is all now in the Vatican Bank. Love and compassion are not emotions. They are actions. There was always abundant money for food, medicines, diapers, cots. If you care you give the best you can afford. she gave nothing except words.What we see are the publicity photos, the fame she sought. Fine IF babies are being saved and nurtured but they were not and still are not. I have family who work in the same area and still the same and it is the volunteers who do the real work. No sainthood in the offing and a tragedy for all she could and should have saved and solaced. I give and fund raise for those who give every cent to babies, and seek no fame.It fair broke my heart learning truth. And she could afford the best of care… still she has faced her Maker now.

 

[Ignatius]

Have you read Hitchens book? It’s almost embarrassing to see the way he struggled to find a few paltry, sloppily supported, and otherwise unimpressive examples to fit into his little hatchet-job project.

Almost?

 

[MarcoPolo]

As promised.

• Mother Teresa and Her Critics by William Doino Jr. at First Things
• The Saint & The Sceptic
• Reflections of Sam Pierre
• Life Magazine July 1980 “Teresa of the Slums”
• Excerpt from ‘Mother Teresa’s Lesson of Love and Secrets of Sanctity’ from the book by Susan Conroy

Just adding this other article from April 2016 in Aleteia:
5 Responses to the Ridiculous Rancor of Some Toward Mother Teresa