If nobody believed in superstition it
would be unable to hurt anyone
MOTHER TERESA OF CALCUTTA
http://www.sfweekly.com/2012-01-11/news/mother-teresa-catholic-church-john-hardon-donald-mcguire-child-abuse-jesuits/5/
Mother Teresa of Calcutta, once the irritating Blessed Teresa of Calcutta as a
result of one of the milestones in the scheme by the late Pope John Paul II to
fast-track her to sainthood, and now the even more annoying St Teresa of
Calcutta, is destined to become one of the most popular saints in the Catholic
Church. It has emerged that she had to be exorcised of demons on her deathbed.
She certainly needed it! And the Vatican ghoulishly used the suffering of Monica
Besra to pretend that Mother who was dead cured her miraculously. That cure was
one of the grounds on which Mother was made a saint.
Writers Professor Serge Larivie and Genevieve Chenard in the journal, Studies in
Religion/Sciences, have made it clear that Mother Teresa deserves severe
criticism for "her rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable
political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she
received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion,
contraception, and divorce."
For example, the 517 missions she had set up for the poor and the sick in many
countries were really just places for the dying to be dumped in. Doctors who
checked out her activities in Calcutta have established this. The places were
found to be needlessly dirty, the inmates were inadequately fed and looked
after. Worse, they had NO PAINKILLERS!
Mother let people think that money was scarce but that was not the case at all.
Incidentally, Susan Shields was once a nun in Mother's
order under the name of Sister Virgin. Of the donations that Mother's
order received, "The money was not misused, but the largest part of it wasn't
used at all. When there was a famine in Ethiopia, many cheques arrived marked
'for the hungry in Ethiopia'. Once I asked the sister who was in charge of
accounts if I should add up all those very many cheques and send the total to
Ethiopia. The sister answered, 'No, we don't send money to Africa.' But I
continued to make receipts to the donors, 'For Ethiopia'."
The writers noted that Mother never gave money to help the victims of natural
disasters in India. But she said prayers for them. And she wasted the money on
sending them medals of the Virgin Mary. Millions of dollars were put by Mother
into many secret accounts.
Thanks also to the work of Christopher Hitchens it is possible to see the truth
about Mother Teresa who nobody dares criticise.
During Mother's 1990 visit to Albania she kindly laid a wreath for monster dictator Enver Hoxha in which she carefully avoided mentioning the violations of human rights under the remarkably oppressive Stalinism of the country. If Stalinism is an example of evil
Mother aided the evil Duvalier family of Haiti and buttered them up
telling them in a speech they loved the poor and the poor loved them. She got a
million dollars from Charles Keating and kept it ignoring requests to her to
return it after she knew he had stolen the money. She provided a character
reference for him in court. She has opposed the human
right to divorce, contraception and abortion and the rights of secular people.
She thought she knew it all. It was okay for her to campaign against these
things for she never needed them. She was an epitome of the reprehensible
selfishness that exists in the worst fundamentalist Christians. She even said
that poverty was a gift from God. She accepted the vicious idea that the purpose
of suffering is for the betterment of character. The atheist refuses to condone
suffering this way and so the atheist should have a greater hatred of the
suffering in the world than the religionist. She refused to use anything in her
clinics to relieve pain for she accepted the Catholic doctrine that suffering is
a good thing. She checked into the best hospitals in the world when she was sick
herself and anything was good enough for the poor she used to create her grand
and glorious image.
Mother stated that dogs were fed on human foetuses. No evidence for this claim
has ever been uncovered. She approved of a film about her, Mother Teresa and her
world, which claimed that there were a quarter of a million lepers in Calcutta
while another film she collaborated in said it was 40,000. She has exaggerated
the number of lepers and has helped them in preference to the even more serious
plague of malaria.
She lied as well that she knew no poor woman in Calcutta who had had an abortion
though Calcuttans regarded abortion as no big deal and all classes used it.
Mother had 50 million dollars in the New York bank alone and yet the order
greedily solicited for money. This was the order that used the same syringe on
many sick patients under the pretext of hard times. The money shouldn’t have
been lying in accounts. Every penny should have been used.
Mother Teresa spoke against Vatican II making any doctrinal or practical changes
in the Roman Catholic Church in the sixties. She supported the old horrific
triumphalist and sectarian Church system that existed before Vatican II. She did
not want the Church to become more human. She has frequently presented Calcutta
as being a worse city than it really was to pull in the donations.
Please look up the sites by Christopher Hitchens and Aroup Chatterjee on the
Internet and do a search in Google. Free Inquiry Winter 97-98 Volume 18 and
Issue 1 ran an article by a former member of the Order Mother Teresa founded the
Missionaries of Charity. She left the Order and exposed the evil and predominant
side of Mother Teresa in the article. The article can be found on page 31. She
testified that |Mother believed that obedience to the Order and to the Church is
God’s will and that it is good to choose to suffer for it makes God give more
graces out to the Church. Attachment to people and friendship was forbidden.
This is so that Christ’s command that God alone be loved and other things loved
for his sake meaning not for themselves but for him and not for yourself but for
him may be observed. The effect of all this was the nuns telling lies and
refusing to commit the sin of thinking independently. Mother Teresa caused a lot
of destruction among the nuns. Mother Teresa amassed huge donations for the
order and made no effort to make sure that the nuns used clean needles when they
injected. She wouldn’t supply them. The Order she ran is so much like an extreme
religious cult.
The Lancet, a respected medical journal, gave a negative appraisal of Mother
Teresa's methods of looking after people. She refused to listen. She had the
money to improve the substandard care.
Two thirds of the patients who went to Mother Teresa's facilities were looking
for a doctor and there was none available for them. Patients then died because
they only had custodial care.
SF Weekly make it clear that Mother Teresa knew that her priest friend, Donald
McGuire, abused a Bay Area boy in 1993. The Church, for a change, dismissed him
from his ministry. She didn't care and made efforts to have him put back into
active ministry. She stated this must be done as soon as humanly possible. In a
letter she referred to the abuses as sad events and that he was guilty of
imprudence. In other words, he made a mistake. She was close to excusing his
behaviour. She got her wish for his reinstatement and the McGuire attacked more
boys. He ended up arrested in 2005.
She wrote, "I understand how grave is the scandal touching the priesthood in the
U.S.A. and how careful we must be to guard the purity and reputation of that
priesthood". She lied that she considered his crime grave but she stated that
the reputation of the Church took priority.
Again she implied the crime was not serious and made no difference to her, "I
must say, however, that I have confidence and trust in Fr. McGuire and wish to
see his vital ministry resume as soon as possible." There was no empathy for the
victim.
The letter was used as evidence in litigation against McGuire's order, the
Jesuits.
Teresa was a metaphysical terrorist. She loved a God who sends women to hell for
all eternity if they have an abortion of their own free will and never repent.
Mother then thinks that is right so if she were God for a day that is what she
would be doing to those women. The fact is that accusing women who have
abortions of murder is extreme hate speech and must be legally stopped.
According to Hope Endures by a former nun from Mother Teresa's order, The
Missionaries of Charity, Collete Livermore, the order though it had sufficient
money donated to it for the purpose of buying books to help with the medical
work this was not done (page 115). As a result, the health of the sisters was at
risk. The book explains how the nuns were not provided with medical advice, the
use of mosquito repellents, information about malaria and vaccinations (page
115). It attributes this to the idea that God would look after the nuns.
The book recounts how Colette, then called Sister Tobit, got into trouble with
the order for helping a man with dysentery who was in danger of dying (page
163). The order cared more about obedience than doing the right thing. Mother
Teresa declared according to page 168, that she recognised 1 Peter 2:18-23 as
being correct. This text ordered slaves to obey their masters even if they were
abusive and difficult. It said that it is great to be beaten for doing wrong
when one is innocent and that such patience pleases God. Peter also says that
this has to be the right attitude for Jesus gave us an example to follow. Mother
Teresa used this text to urge her nuns to obey superiors without question (page
168). Sister Tobit decided to leave the order. She didn't like the way she was
expected to let the poor suffer rather than disobey orders and she made that
clear to Mother Teresa (page 172). Mother Teresa was "not sympathetic" and told
Tobit that her feelings were sourced in temptation and pride (page 172). In
other words, Tobit was bad for seeing sense. Mother was judging her despite
forbidding Tobit to judge those who acted as dictators in the order over her
(page 224).
Later Colette recounted the tale of what happened in Manila when she tried to
help a sick boy called Alex. Sister Valerie who was in charge of her forbade her
to help him though Colette told her there was no reason why they couldn't.
Mother Teresa wouldn't let the nuns have a washing machine (page 194). This
forced the nuns to wash the underwear of the incontinent with brushes. The order
was more concerned about inflicting hardship on the nuns than on helping the
sick. A washing machine would have freed up their time to help people. Mother
was definitely misusing the funds so kindly donated to her from all over the
world. It was the struggle to help not the helping that mattered in her
Christian philosophy.
Sister Tobit applied for a dispensation from her vows (page 224) because she was
expected to do things like sending dying children away when commanded to do so
and because she was not allowed to have a mind of her own. She wrote that she
felt that "the order whose raison detre was to show compassion, chronically
failed to do so, both to its own members and to the poor." "The Society demanded
that I have no mind of my own and censored everything I read, a form of
brainwashing that almost turned me into an automaton". These quotes can be read
on page 224. On page 213 we read that Mother Teresa held that if an event
happened, it was either willed by God or allowed by him to happen. We read that
it led her to conclude that what the religious superior commands is either
willed by God or at least allowed by him to be made meaning the commands no
matter how silly or harsh they are are from God's authority. To disobey them is
to disobey God.
When Tobit came Colette again she began to suspect that the gospel commands
given by Christ to give to all who ask and thought that attempts to love
unconditionally and forgive unconditionally really made one a doormat (page
287).
he book proves that Mother Teresa cannot be called a good woman. It proves that
living the gospels properly is bad for you. The Missionaries of Charity
experienced the damaging power of the gospels and yet they lived their lives as
an example to those who they helped and those who knew them - ultimately to see
them take on the same torments. Some charity!
Just to add something to the Mother Teresa debate. The worst thing she ever did
was to hoard up millions while her nuns were forced to use the same syringe over
and over again on the patients. I have googled and there is no refutation of
that at all. We need hard evidence to refute such a terrible deed. The excuse
that Teresa and her nuns were doing all they could do under the circumstances is
just an excuse. There is no excuse for spreading disease that way. The believers
are blinded by faith. Real faith in God should be based on reality and
determination to get rid of bias. Any faith that does not care enough about
truth is an idol. As Bonhoeffer said we need to be careful that our religious
faith in God does not become an idol. The fundamental problem with idolatry is
that it cuts you off the real God if there is one. When a saintly person shows
terrible serious flaws you can be sure the God they are a saint for is the one
they have created in their heads. Jesus made that very point about the
Pharisees.
It is startling how people on the internet are dismissing Colette Livermore a
good woman without reading her book which exposed Teresa. That is bias pure and
simple. As for calling her disgruntled and dishonest that is a biased judgement.
Did they walk in her shoes? As for Christopher Hitchens, though he was correct,
he should have been a little more methodical in his refutation of Mother
Teresa's humanitarianism. But the argument does not depend on Hitchens - there
are many testimonies and investigations that support his thesis and those are
carried out by people more qualified than those armchair religionists who
despise the findings and want them forgotten.
The case against Teresa being truly good is conclusive. This wily Pope who has
made her a saint can ignore facts if he wants but he cannot make them wrong. And
I would ask people what is the best risk to take: "What comes first? Upholding
Mothers good name or risking condoning the spiritual and physical suffering she
enabled and caused and did? Do the poor matter as much to me as her?!"
An interview with Christopher Hitchens on Mother Teresa: http://www.SecularHumanism.org/library/fi/hitchens_16_4.html
Defending Mother Teresa: http://www.thehappyheretic.com/3-98.htm
Mother Teresa's House Of Illusions: http://www.SecularHumanism.org/library/fi/shields_18_1.html
The Illusory Vs. The Real Mother Teresa: http://www.ffrf.org/fttoday/august96/hakeem.html
The Mother of All Myths: http://website.lineone.net/~bajuu/
THE WWW
The following two sites show just what a liar Mother Teresa was and her callous
heart is laid bare. They show the deceit of Pope John Paul II who was eager to
make a saint of her.
OPEN LETTER TO MOTHER TERESA, Aroup Chaterjee
http://website.lineone.net/~bajuu/chatlet.htm
MOTHER TERESA THE FINAL VERDICT Aroup Chaterjee
http://www.meteorbooks.com/index.html
This fascinating book reveals shockers such as that the pope has beatified
Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb who stood idly by as Jews and Communists were
hounded to their deaths and the notorious fascist Cardinal Schuster of Milan.
Hope Endures, Colette Livermore, William Heinemann, North Sydney, Australia,
2008
Mother Teresa Bad Role Model: http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/eamonn-mccann-mother-teresa-not-such-a-good-role-model-1.2476467?utm_source=Secular
Sunday&utm_campaign=fd2cea3ebf-198_copy_01_10_16_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_09cfdc0dd4-fd2cea3ebf-79937429
Eamonn McCann: Mother Teresa not such a good role model
Canonisation an exercise in propaganda – which is, of course, the salutary point
Thu, Dec 24, 2015, 01:00
It’s not the fact that Mother Teresa has been credited with cures for which
there is no known disease that renders the plan for her canonisation ridiculous.
The ridiculousness lies in canonisation itself.
Not even the pope is authorised to hand out ceremonial passes to paradise. To
qualify for canonisation, you have to have made the cut and be resident in
heaven already. If you’re not in, you can’t win. All of which renders the
elaborate ceremony planned for next year redundant – apart from its propaganda
value, which is, of course, the point.
Propaganda has always been the name of the canonisation game. The main reason
medieval popes came up with the idea was so the church could take control of the
selection of role-models for society at large. It’s about shaping the world the
way you want it to be, about power and influence, not holiness and prayer.
What model of society does the Albanian nun exemplify? Twenty years ago, in
January 1996, writing for Hot Press, I phoned the Los Angeles district
attorney’s office to check whether there had been progress in persuading Mother
Teresa to hand back a million dollars stolen from the poor. Not a lot, assistant
district attorney Paul Turley told me.
Front for fraud
The money had been filched from the pockets of pensioners and small savers by
the notorious conman, Charles Keating, head of what turned out to be a front for
fraud, Lincoln Savings and Loan.
Keating had siphoned $225 million from the accounts of thousands of victims, and
had bunged a million of this loot to Mother Teresa. (The closest Irish
equivalents of US savings and loan associations are credit unions.)
Four years earlier, in 1992, Turley had appealed to Teresa: “If you contact me,
I will put you in direct contact with the rightful owners of the property now in
your possession.” Any developments since, I wondered?
“She has ignored us,” Turley told me. “We have honestly given up on this. It is
obvious she is determined to keep it.”
Sentenced to 10 years, Keating may have taken comfort from contemplation of the
crucifix on the wall of his cell personally blessed by Pope John Paul and
delivered by a messenger from Mother Teresa.
It has commonly been suggested, including in recent days by commentators
sceptical about Mother Teresa’s sanctity, that in this and similar matters she
had been blinded by intense religiosity, her mode of thought too other-worldly
to appreciate mundane stuff like money.
As an excuse for the criminal offence of knowingly receiving stolen property,
this would be laughed out of any court in the land. Thomas “Slab” Murphy had a
better defence.
A more subtle argument advanced by Catholic traditionalists is that what matters
most at a time of ideological turmoil and creeping secularisation within the
church is the unwavering adherence and global witness she gave to the teachings
of the church now most under siege, on contraception, divorce, abortion etc. It
is this, they suggest, which, despite all, makes her a suitable role model for
the times we live in.
But this won’t wash either. The journalist Daphne Barak quoted Mother Teresa in
April 1996 in Ladies’ Home Journal, commenting on the break-up of the marriage
of Princess Diana and Prince Charles. “I think it is such a sad story. Diana is
such a sad soul . . . You know what? It is good that it is over. Nobody was
happy. I know I should preach for family love and unity, but in their case . . .
” Then her voice “trailed off.”
The masses are told under pain of hellfire that they must unquestioningly obey
the rules of the church, but when it comes to the useful rich and glamorous,
immutable laws of God can be amended on the instant.
In October 1994, Mother Teresa sent a message to the UN International Conference
on Population and Development in Cairo, pleading for outright rejection of
contraception and abortion. “Every child is a gift from God. If you have a child
you think is unwanted, give that child to me. I will find it a loving home where
it will be cherished as a blessing.”
Dishonest opportunism
The Cairo conference was to hear that up to 40,000 children under 12 were dying
every day of malnutrition or preventable disease. Mother Teresa’s order was not
running any adoption operation anywhere in the world. Her statement was not
off-the-cuff or a flight of holy fantasy. It was a written declaration, widely
distributed. It was dishonest, manipulative opportunism for which it is hard to
find adequate words. “Despicable,” maybe.
In the year before her death in 1997, as a team of doctors flown in from around
the world tried by extraordinary means to bring her back to health, one Irish
newspaper carried the headline, “World Unites in Prayer For ‘Living Saint’”.
We may hope there’ll be a lot less of that sort of thing in 2016.
Tainted Saint: Mother Teresa Defended Pedophile Priest
Peter Jamison
Wednesday, Jan 11 2012 sfweekly
The death of journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens last month gave
those familiar with his work a chance to revisit one of his more
controversial subjects: the Albanian nun Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, better known
to the world as Mother Teresa. In his 1997 book, The Missionary Position:
Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Hitchens argued that the "Saint of
Calcutta," who founded and headed the international Missionaries of Charity
order, enjoyed undeserved esteem.
Despite her humanitarian reputation and 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, Mother
Teresa had set up a worldwide system of "homes for the dying" that routinely
failed to provide adequate care to patients, Hitchens argued — an appraisal
shared by The Lancet, a respected medical journal. Mother Teresa also
associated with, and took large sums of money from, disreputable figures
such as American savings-and-loan swindler Charles Keating and the
dictatorial Duvalier family of Haiti.
Notwithstanding these black marks on an otherwise sterling reputation,
Mother Teresa — who died in 1997 and is now on the fast track to a formal
proclamation of sainthood by the Vatican — was never known to have been
touched by the scandal that would rock the Roman Catholic Church in the
decade after her death: the systematic protection of child-molesting priests
by church officials.
Yet documents obtained by SF Weekly suggest that Mother Teresa knew one of
her favorite priests was removed from ministry for sexually abusing a Bay
Area boy in 1993, and that she nevertheless urged his bosses to return him
to work as soon as possible. The priest resumed active ministry, as well as
his predatory habits. Eight additional complaints were lodged against him in
the coming years by various families, leading to his eventual arrest on
sex-abuse charges in 2005.
The priest was Donald McGuire, a former Jesuit who has been convicted of
molesting boys in federal and state courts and is serving a 25-year federal
prison sentence. McGuire, now 81 years old, taught at the University of San
Francisco in the late 1970s, and held frequent spiritual retreats for
families in San Francisco and Walnut Creek throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
He also ministered extensively to the Missionaries of Charity during that
time.
In a 1994 letter to McGuire's Jesuit superior in Chicago, it appears that
Mother Teresa acknowledged she had learned of the "sad events which took
[McGuire] from his priestly ministry these past seven months," and that
McGuire "admitted imprudence in his behavior," but she wished to see him put
back on the job. The letter was written after McGuire had been sent to a
psychiatric hospital following an abuse complaint to the Jesuits by a family
in Walnut Creek.
"I understand how grave is the scandal touching the priesthood in the U.S.A.
and how careful we must be to guard the purity and reputation of that
priesthood," the letter states. "I must say, however, that I have confidence
and trust in Fr. McGuire and wish to see his vital ministry resume as soon
as possible."
The one-page letter comes from thousands of pages of church records that
have been shared with plaintiffs' attorneys in ongoing litigation against
the Jesuits involving McGuire. (The documents were also shared with
prosecutors who worked on his criminal cases.) It is printed on Missionaries
of Charity letterhead but is unsigned, and thus cannot be verified
absolutely as having been written by Mother Teresa. Officials in the
Missionaries of Charity and the Jesuits did not respond to requests for
comment on its provenance.
Yet statements throughout the letter point to Mother Teresa as the author.
The writer speaks of "my communities throughout the world" and refers by
name to Mother Teresa's four top deputies, calling them "my four
assistants." Rev. Joseph Fessio, a Jesuit and former University of San
Francisco professor who knew Mother Teresa, said the reference to her
assistants is an "authentic" aspect of the letter.
The letter could have an impact on the near-complete process of canonizing
Mother Teresa. In 2003 she was beatified by Pope John Paul II, the
penultimate step to full sainthood.
"What we see here is the same thing we see over and over in regard to the
[priest pedophilia] scandal — the complete lack of empathy for, or interest
in, possible victims of these accused priests," said Anne Rice, the
bestselling author of novels including Interview with the Vampire and a
former Catholic who has been outspoken in her criticism of the church's
handling of the sex-abuse scandal. "In this letter the concern is for the
reputation of the priesthood. This is as disappointing as it is shocking."
Other documents that have emerged in the criminal and civil cases involving
McGuire could affect the sainthood prospects of another deceased religious
leader eyed by the Vatican for sainthood. Among the newly uncovered church
records are letters by Rev. John Hardon, a Jesuit who also worked
extensively with Mother Teresa and died in 2000. He collaborated with
then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, on the Catechism of
the Catholic Church, a landmark summation of contemporary church doctrine.
In 2005, the Vatican opened a formal inquiry into whether Hardon should be
made a saint.
But statements by Hardon in his letters could complicate that process. The
documents reveal McGuire admitted to Hardon that he was taking showers with
the teenage boy from Walnut Creek whose complaint led to McGuire's
psychiatric treatment. He also acknowledged soliciting body massages from
the boy and letting him read pornography in the room they shared on trips
together.
Despite these admissions, Hardon concluded that his fellow Jesuit's actions
were "objectively defensible," albeit "highly imprudent," and told McGuire's
bosses that he "should be prudently allowed to engage in priestly ministry."
The postulators, or Vatican-appointed researchers and advocates for
sainthood, assigned to investigate Mother Teresa and Hardon did not respond
to repeated requestsfor comment.
While it is unclear exactly what impact the new documents will have on the
evaluation of both figures for sainthood, the evidence of involvement by two
prominent and internationally respected Catholics in the McGuire sex-abuse
scandal is likely to cause consternation among critics of the church's
handling of predator priests. The situation is aggravated since McGuire went
on to abuse more children after suggestions to return him to ministry were
heeded.
"We're talking about extremely powerful people who could have gotten Father
McGuire off the streets in 1994," said Patrick Wall, a lawyer and former
Benedictine monk who performs investigations on behalf of abuse victims
suing the Catholic Church. "I'm thinking of all those post-'94 kids who
could have been saved."
It is unknown exactly when Hardon, McGuire, and Mother Teresa first crossed
paths. But chances are good that the first time they all found themselves
together in the same place was in San Francisco in 1981. It was the 800th
anniversary of the birth of Saint Francis of Assisi, the city's namesake.
Hardon invited Mother Teresa, who attended celebratory services at which she
was introduced to McGuire, according to Fessio, who was present.
Fessio, who today heads the Ignatius Press, a Catholic publishing house in
the Sunset District, said Mother Teresa was impressed by McGuire's
reputation as an erudite, engaging preacher. She arranged to have him
perform retreats — based on the Spiritual Exercises by Saint Ignatius of
Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order — for her missionaries around the world.
"She was always looking for priests to say mass for the different places in
the world where she had missions," Fessio recalled.
In McGuire, she found a priest whose strict adherence to traditional
Catholic practices matched her own views. Mother Teresa was an extreme
conservative on questions of religious doctrine. She declared during her
speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize that abortion was "the greatest
destroyer of peace" in the modern world. McGuire was likewise stoutly
orthodox in his public persona, requesting that women wear long skirts in
his presence and often assailing other Jesuits for their relatively tolerant
approaches to political and social issues.
Some insight into the reverence the Missionaries of Charity held for McGuire
and his retreats and sermons can be gleaned from letters sent to Wisconsin
Circuit Court Judge James Carlson, who oversaw the trial that resulted in
McGuire's first conviction in 2006.
Sister Nirmala, Mother Teresa's successor as the superior general of the
Missionaries of Charity, wrote, "He was one of the very few priests to whom
... Teresa of Calcutta entrusted the spiritual care of the Missionaries of
Charity through retreats, seminars and spiritual guidance wherever
possible."
Sister Mary Christa, another nun with the Missionaries of Charity, wrote,
"Father's immense love for Jesus Christ radiated brilliantly through his
every word and gesture, and his whole concern was to inspire the Sisters
with a more intense desire for holiness. His wisdom, immense knowledge of
Holy Scripture, and saintly manner of life made a profound impression on all
of us."
But McGuire's holy veneer concealed signs of a dark side that were already
evident to select church officials long before he met Mother Teresa.
Documents that have emerged in the criminal prosecution of McGuire and civil
litigation against the Jesuits over his actions show that suspicions about
the priest were brought to his higher-ups beginning soon after his
ordination in 1961. During his first teaching assignment, at Loyola Academy
in Wilmette, Ill., he molested at least two boys, whose cases led to his
first criminal conviction decades later.
The Jesuits, who have formally apologized to McGuire's victims for failing
to adequately control the priest, have nevertheless asserted in legal
filings that they should not be held liable for the harm he did to children
during his career. In a June 2011 motion in a lawsuit filed against the
Chicago Province of the Society of Jesus, the order's lawyers asserted that
McGuire is "an evil and perverted man who used his substantial intellectual
gifts and his dominating personality to disobey every tenet of his faith and
his vows as a cleric."
(SF Weekly reported on the Jesuits' failure to protect children from McGuire
in a previous cover story, "Let Him Prey" [5/25/11].)
One of the best-documented instances of abuse in McGuire's record is one in
which neither the victim nor his family chose to pursue litigation against
the church. Jesuit records show that in April 1993, a devout Catholic man in
Walnut Creek came forward with the complaint that his 16-year-old son, who
traveled with McGuire as his personal assistant, had looked at pornographic
magazines, showered, and masturbated with the priest.
Following this complaint, McGuire was removed from active ministry and sent
to Saint John Vianney Center, a psychiatric-treatment facility for clerics
in Pennsylvania. It was there that Hardon — whom the victim's family had
requested investigate their allegations — interviewed McGuire and chose to
exonerate him. After six hours of face-to-face talks at the hospital, Hardon
wrote to McGuire in a January 1994 letter, "I firmly expressed my belief in
your innocence of any sexual misbehavior."
McGuire returned to his order at the beginning of 1994, but his future,
including the extent to which he would be allowed to interact with families
and children as a priest, was still unclear. Hardon's letter to McGuire
reveals that the errant Jesuit still worried that the sex-abuse allegations
lodged against him would mar his prospects for continued work with Mother
Teresa, work that considerably enhanced McGuire's prestige among other
Catholics to whom he ministered.
"You expressed your deep fear that despite your proven innocence of all
charges, somehow you would nevertheless not be allowed to continue your
retreat ministry to Mother Teresa's sisters," Hardon wrote. At the
conclusion of his letter, Hardon indicated that the matter would soon be
resolved in direct consultation with the "Saint of Calcutta" herself.
"And so, Don, this is the state of the question on this eve of my departure
for Calcutta, India, where, with your permission, I will be communicating
with Mother Teresa about your situation and your future," he wrote.
A letter written less than a month later, on Feb. 2, 1994, appears to
contain an answer to the questions about his future with the Missionaries of
Charity that dogged McGuire after his release from treatment at Saint John
Vianney. It is addressed to Brad Schaeffer, Provincial, or head, of the
Chicago section of the Jesuits. (While McGuire's ministry took him across
the U.S. and into foreign countries, he was officially under the supervision
of the Jesuits' Chicago Province.)
The letter is not signed, though it begins with a handwritten salutation in
Mother Teresa's characteristic looping script. It is unclear whether
additional pages are missing from the document, or whether the writer simply
failed to attach a signature. Clues throughout the letter, however, indicate
that Mother Teresa is the author. The writer refers to "my communities
throughout the world" and praises McGuire's preaching to "my novices in our
new novitiate in San Francisco" in 1982. (Novices are aspiring nuns who have
not yet taken vows.)
More significantly, the writer refers to "my four assistants, Sisters Mary
Frederick, Priscilla, Monica and Joseph Michael." In 1994, the councilors
general of the Missionaries of Charity — a group of four senior nuns who
directly advised Mother Teresa, and were subordinate to no one else in the
order — were Sisters Frederick, Priscilla, Monica, and Joseph Michael (Upon
taking vows, nuns sometimes assume the names of male religious figures).
"That's authentic, mentioning those people," Fessio said. "Those were
herfour councilors."
(View the original letter, and other documents mentioned in this story in
the "details" box.)
Nuns at the primary U.S. office of the Missionaries of Charity, in New York
City, referred all questions related to McGuire to the Mother Teresa Center
in San Ysidro, Calif. Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, postulator for the sainthood
cause of Mother Teresa and director of the center, did not respond to calls
and e-mails seeking comment.
Schaeffer, the letter's recipient, is now the rector of a Jesuit community
in Brighton, Mass., and serves on the board of trustees of Boston College.
He did not respond to phone messages. The Chicago Province of the Jesuits
also did not respond to requests for comment.
If Mother Teresa did write the letter to Schaeffer, it is unclear how much
she learned about the circumstances under which McGuire was disciplined. The
letter states, "During his recent visit to Calcutta in the past month, Fr.
John Hardon, S.J., brought a letter to me from Fr. McGuire, describing the
sad events which took him from his priestly ministry these past seven
months. Fr. Hardon explained ... how he had established Father's innocence
of the allegations against him. Father Hardon said that Fr. McGuire admitted
imprudence in his behavior."
SF Weekly could not obtain the letter written by McGuire that is mentioned,
or find anyone who had seen it. Following the exhortation that McGuire be
returned to active ministry, the Missionaries of Charity letter concludes,
"We, in the Missionaries of Charity, will do all in our power, to protect
him and the Priesthood of Jesus Christ which he bears, when he once more
takes up his mission with us."
Tariq Ali, the British intellectual who produced and co-wrote with Hitchens
the sharply critical 1994 documentary film on Mother Teresa, Hell's Angel,
said the letter fit with what he described as the nun's pattern of
consorting with dubious personalities.
Among the problems chronicled in Hell's Angel were substandard care for the
poor who filled her hospitals, and her willingness to accept money from
notorious figures such as Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier of Haiti, who
presided over a brutally repressive regime under which most Haitians lived
in abject poverty. Duvalier's own lifestyle was luxurious, thanks to revenue
from his participation in the drug trade and practice of selling dead
Haitian citizens' cadavers overseas. Mother Teresa once posed for a
photograph holding hands with Duvalier's wife, Michèle.
"When Christopher Hitchens and I made the film on her, the research was
impeccable," Ali said. "She was close to dictators. She took money wherever
she could. The care in her hospitals was poor. It was just one nightmare
after another. From that time on, I saw her as a total fake," Ali said. The
letter, he added, "would only be surprising if one saw her as a moral
person, and I don't."
Anne Sebba, a biographer of Mother Teresa, said the founder of the
Missionaries of Charity had never before been tainted by knowing involvement
with a pedophile priest. However, she said the nun's response to criticism
of her coziness with figures such as the Duvaliers and savings-and-loan
scamster Charles Keating — for whom she pleaded for leniency during his
trial and eventual conviction on fraud charges — was that she was practicing
forgiveness in line with Christian ideals.
"Her answer was always that any miserable sinner deserved to be given a
chance to do good," Sebba said. "She argued that Jesus always offered
redemption, and no sinner was beyond redemption."
In McGuire, Mother Teresa encountered a challenge to that belief. After his
return to ministry in 1994, McGuire would see eight new abuse allegations
lodged against him by boys' families. In 2006, he was found guilty of
molesting two boys decades earlier at the Loyola Academy. In 2008, he was
convicted in federal court of taking a boy across state lines for the
purpose of sexually abusing him. According to federal prosecutors, McGuire
probed the boy's anus with his fingers during "massages," examined his penis
with a magnifying glass, and looked at pornography with him.
McGuire has maintained his innocence of the charges against him, asserting
that his victims fabricated stories to secure financial settlements from the
Jesuits. His Chicago-based lawyer, Stephen Komie, said that McGuire's
appeals of his state and federal convictions were unsuccessful, however.
"He's going to die in prison, absent a pardon, and I don't think that's in
the cards," Komie said.
The father of the Walnut Creek boy whose abuse allegation prompted McGuire's
psychiatric treatment in 1993 said the information in the new documents is
unfortunate, but not shocking. "That McGuire fooled Father Hardon and Mother
Teresa like he did so many others is disappointing, but not a surprise," he
said. "It shows that a person doesn't have to be a mind-reader in order to
be a saint."
A second Walnut Creek man who says McGuire abused him as a child, and who is
participating in a lawsuit against the Jesuits, reacted to the letter that
might be from Mother Teresa more strongly.
"I was totally blown away by it," said the man, who is identified in court
records only as John Doe 129 and whom SF Weekly is not identifying by name
because he is an alleged victim of childhood sexual abuse. "I just don't
know how somebody supposedly so saintly, supposedly such a protector of the
weak and the poor, could be so indifferent to it," he said.
Hardon's letter to McGuire, as well as the letter that appears to have been
written by Mother Teresa, indicate it was Hardon who personally carried news
of McGuire's situation to Calcutta. It is thus important to understand how
much Hardon knew when he visited Mother Teresa in January 1994. On this
front, newly uncovered documents show the Jesuit in an unflattering light,
and may have a serious impact on his prospects for sainthood.
In addition to his January 1994 letter to McGuire, Hardon wrote a detailed
explication of his knowledge of and involvement in McGuire's case to
Schaeffer, the Jesuits' Chicago provincial, in November 1993. The father of
the alleged abuse victim from Walnut Creek had requested that Hardon
personally intercede to assess exactly what McGuire had done to the teenage
boy. At the time, Hardon was an internationally known and beloved priest who
had staked his reputation on championing a conservative strain of
Catholicism, not dissimilar to McGuire's, that was often at odds with the
beliefs of his more liberal-minded fellow Jesuits.
During a visit to Saint John Vianney, Hardon had a frank conversation with
McGuire in which the latter admitted to taking showers with his alleged
victim, asking the boy to massage his body, and allowing him to possess
pornography in the room they shared while traveling. McGuire denied
additional allegations that he had touched the boy's genitals and watched
him masturbate.
Hardon was apparently satisfied with what he heard. As he wrote to
Schaeffer, "Regarding showering, Fr. Don said that it was true, but the
picture is not one of a lingering sensual experience. It was rather the
picture of two firemen, responding to an emergency, one of whom was
seriously handicapped and in need of support and care from the other."
On the body rubs: "Regarding the massages, Fr. Don said they were done with
attention to modesty and were necessary to relieve spasm at the 4th-5th
lumbar disc and the right leg, involving the sciatic nerve." (The fourth and
fifth lumbar vertebrae are at the bottom of the spine, just above the
buttocks.)
And the dirty magazines: "Regarding pornography Fr. Don said that there were
Playboy and Penthouse magazines, which he neither got nor threw away."
Hardon concluded in the letter, "I do not believe there was any conscious
and deliberate sexual perversity." He added, "I do believe Fr. McGuire was
acting on principles which, though objectively defensible, were highly
imprudent." He also concluded that another serious charge against McGuire,
that the priest had violated the seal of confession by disclosing private
information about the boy during an argument with his father, was unfounded.
The 1993 victim's family did not respond to requests for comment regarding
the revelations in the letters. Other observers, noting the blasé manner in
which Hardon speaks of a priest showering with a teenage boy and his
unconcern with a supposedly orthodox cleric's tolerance for porn, say the
letter will cast a shadow on the late Jesuit's reputation.
"I will never look at John Hardon the same way again," said Wall, the former
Benedictine monk.
Phil Lawler, editor of Catholic World News, said the letter could be a
stumbling block for the sainthood cause of Hardon, who is still in the early
stages of being investigated by Vatican deputies. The most rigorous review
of a candidate's life typically comes prior to the first milestone in the
process, called veneration. Following that are beatification and
canonization.
Lawler described Hardon's statements about McGuire as "shocking."
"What will it do for his cause? It will slow it down," Lawler said.
Rev. Robert McDermott, a priest in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and
postulator for Hardon's cause, initially agreed to review Hardon's letter
about McGuire and comment on it. After receiving it, he did not respond to
subsequent calls and e-mails from SF Weekly.
Lawler said the letter apparently written by Mother Teresa, by contrast, is
unlikely to stop her from clearing the final hurdle of canonization.
"I think her reputation is safe," Lawler said. "It doesn't fluster me that
she would try to help a friend, and didn't know what was going on. Her
reputation is so safe that, even if this is a negative, it doesn't much
weighon it."
The extent to which the new documents will influence the canonization of
either Hardon or Mother Teresa should, ideally, only be assessed after a
thorough investigation of what both figures knew about McGuire, and how much
influence their advocacy on his behalf had in the disastrous decision to
return him to ministry in 1994. But in light of the church's past lack of
diligence in dealing with priestly abuse, that might be a lot to hope for.
Mother Teresa is perhaps the most famous and popular Catholic religious
leader of the second half of the 20th century, rivaled only by the late Pope
John Paul II. Hardon's cause is likewise dear to senior officials in the
Vatican. The investigation into his potential sainthood was initiated by
Raymond Burke, the cardinal and former archbishop of St. Louis who is now
prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura — a position that
could be described as the chief justice of the Catholic Church's supreme
court.
Lawler pointed out that dozens of American bishops who protected known child
molesters in the clergy remain on the job today. Will similar efforts to
shield a predator by figures of possibly saintly stature haveany fallout?
"You asked me whether this matter could affect the progress of Father
Hardon's cause [for canonization], and I said that it definitely would. It
might have been more accurate if I had said it definitely should," Lawler
said. "I hope that people would recognize this as a serious issue that
demands attention. But this is an issue on which the record of the American
Catholic hierarchy is still not good."
APPENDIX
Nun spurns Mother Teresa's rule to become an author
from: The Courier-Mail
By Mike O'Connor
December 16, 2008
SHE looks nothing like the nuns who taught me at St Joachim's, those good
sisters who would all but fall to their knees at the approach of a priest.
Colette Livermore, however, spent 11 years within the physical and mental
cloisters of religious life and discovered therein the shadows and demons
which still torment her.
A gifted student who won a university scholarship to study medicine, she
chose instead to follow Mother Teresa and joined the Sisters of Charity.
She now lives in coastal New South Wales and is in town for the day. We meet
in the brasserie at the Stamford Hotel and she relates why she became a nun.
"When I was a kid, the Biafran famine was in the news. Kids were dying on
the television set in front of you. I thought to myself that this couldn't
be right and then I saw a Mother Teresa film and thought: 'That's the way to
go! Get out there and do something!' I was very naive. I didn't appreciate
the implications," she says.
It was not long before she realised that there were two sides to the saintly
persona of Mother Teresa which the media had spun.
"Any organisation that demands you stick to a rigid timetable and do exactly
what you're told is on the road to inhumanity, and I think and that was the
problem," she says.
"Mother Teresa asked you to give up your brain, your will, everything. She
asked for total surrender of the person.
"I grew up in Mossvale on the southern highlands of New South Wales and when
I joined the order I went to Melbourne to the novitiate straight from
school. I was just 18. It was a big change in life.
"Once you're within that sort of organisation, it's hard to get your
bearings. You're off balance because Mother Teresa is a saintly person and
the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and all that sort of thing so you think
that if you disagree with things, there must be something wrong with you
rather than the organisation.
"We did our training and then I was sent to the Gulf province of New Guinea
without any warning or preparation and nearly died of cerebral malaria.
"I was there for a few years and then transferred to Manila and worked in a
garbage dump looking after people with tuberculosis. I wasn't even trained
to the level of a barefoot doctor."
From Manila, Livermore was sent to Calcutta and it was there she tried and
failed to leave the order. "You're always told that you're sinful and proud
and all that sort of thing. It played with my mind. I realised things
weren't right but I couldn't get any external bearings.
"You're cut off. You can't listen to the radio or read the newspapers or
talk to friends. You have very little contact with your family. Your mind is
only hearing one opinion. There's only one voice speaking. It's difficult to
leave when Mother Teresa is telling you that it's to do with the devil."
Livermore's disaffection with Mother Teresa peaked when she clashed with her
superiors over a decision not to treat sick children on a holy day.
"A ruling was made that on this recollection day, this day of prayer,
children were not to be admitted to the Home for the Children.
"This really sick child came in with stick arms, breathing really fast and
dehydrated and I was told he couldn't stay. I had this internal conflict and
eventually the child was admitted but only after I'd had a big fight.
"These sorts of things happened time and time again because there was this
rigid obedience and timetable, so I wrote to Calcutta and said: 'This can't
be right.'
Mother Teresa's reply was not the one Livermore had hoped for. "She said
that just as Our Lady watched Jesus die, I should be able to accept the
death of a child if obedience asked it of me.
"Then I said: 'That's against the gospel' and they said that even the devil
could quote scripture."
Livermore's portrait of Mother Teresa is of a woman tortured by her own
spirituality.
"It led her to some pretty dark places," she says. "She talked about her
inner emptiness and misery. She said 'Empty yourself of all that's not God.'
She just felt depleted and that's what happened to all of us too."
Livermore's mother, who had been opposed to her joining the order, knew
nothing of this. "My family wasn't aware because you weren't supposed to
tell anyone. It was a secret.
"Mum was disappointed I'd thrown away the chance to do medicine because our
family struggled. My father had left us and she was struggling to support
four kids and for her eldest to take off was hard."
Livermore eventually wrote to Mother Teresa telling her she could no longer
cope.
"She said she thought it was the devil, the Father of Lies, trying to rob me
of my vocation and get me off the track but I couldn't do it any more. It
was screwing my head around. I was 30 and I'd been in there 11 years."
Livermore describes the order as a sect and has written a book, Hope
Endures, chronicling her experiences.
Mother Teresa's mistake, says Livermore, was in thinking that obedience was
more important than compassion.
"That's not something that's widely known and not part of what the media
says about her. It was dictatorial. I should have got out sooner," she says,
shaking her head.
When she finally left, she turned to the medical degree she had spurned when
she joined the sisters and became a doctor, working in Timor, the Northern
Territory, the Congo, Sudan and Darfur.
One casualty of her time with Mother Teresa was her religion.
" I ended up an agnostic," she says. "I just couldn't believe it any more
but if, as when I was in Timor from 2000-2003, you can do something for the
kids, then for some people at least, you can make a difference."
Livermore blames no one but herself for what happened.
"After all," she says, smiling, "no one handcuffed me. It was my own silly
choice. My mother told me I was a drongo but once I was in there, I couldn't
get free.
"That's part of the reason I wrote the book - to tell religious people not
to give up that inner compass that they have. You can't live your life with
all these excluding rules."
She says the problems within the order are exemplified by the nuns' practice
of self-flagellation, whipping themselves to try to imitate Christ's
suffering.
"Suffering comes your way and you have to put up with it but," she says,
"but it's sort of warped to go looking for it."
Hope Endures by Colette Livermore, William Heinemann Australia, $34.95