Tag: “Mother” Teresa

Annie Laurie Gaylor on Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu:

The pompous and self-congratulatory pageantry over the canonization of Mother Teresa (Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu), positively wallowing in credulity, has dominated TV news and social media all week. Sainthood is dependent on supposedly proving that Bojaxhiu was involved in posthumous “miracles.” How ironic the Church requires superstitious claims to supposedly be backed up by “scientific evidence” before it will accept their validity.

My primary objection to the fawning adulation Bojaxhiu received during her lifetime and after her death is rooted in her opportunistic use of almost every public occasion — notably including her acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize — to attack women’s rights. She not only went after abortion, but, in the time-honored tradition of Catholic bishops, contraception. I’ll never forget her gratuitous tirade against abortion during her Nobel acceptance:

Many people are very, very concerned with the children in India, with the children in Africa where quite a number die, maybe of malnutrition, of hunger and so on, but millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today.

So much for compassion. What a minimization of human suffering by someone credited as the apotheosis of saintliness!

It appears the “saint” wanted those babies to be born so that they could really experience dying of malnutrition and hunger.

The Statesman, India, on another view of “Mother” Teresa:

As the Vatican conferred sainthood on Mother Teresa, an organisation promoting scientific thinking on Sunday ridiculed Indian politicians for attending the canonisation ceremony that “promoted superstition” and asked them to distribute her pictures instead of opening hospitals.

The city-based Science and Rationalists’ Association of India (SRAI), on the day held a meet opposing Teresa’s canonisation at the Vatican City which was attended by host of leaders from across the globe including Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

“By attending the canonisation ceremony our leaders have certified that they believe in miracles and hocus-pocus. So now, instead of spending tax payers money on hospitals, the government should start distributing Teresa’s pictures for curing people,” said SRAI general secretary Prabir Ghosh.

Or just pray for them. Or just think about praying for them. It’s all much the same thing.

Ten years ago Walter Wuellenweber asked in Stern where “Mother” Teresa’s millions were. The Science and Rationalists’ Association of India republished it.

It quotes some people who have found MT’s putative saintliness not all that generous or useful.

In Calcutta, one meets many doubters.

For example, Samity, a man of around 30 with no teeth, who lives in the slums. He is one of the “poorest of the poor” to whom Mother Teresa was supposed to have dedicated her life. With a plastic bag in hand, he stands in a kilometre long queue in Calcutta’s Park Street. The poor wait patiently, until the helpers shovel some rice and lentils into their bags. But Samity does not get his grub from Mother Teresa’s institution, but instead from the Assembly of God, an American charity, that serves 18000 meals here daily.

“Mother Teresa?”says Samity, “We have not received anything from her here. Ask in the slums — who has received anything from the sisters here — you will find hardly anybody.”

Serving meals wasn’t her thing. Her thing was “caring for the dying” – which can mean anything or nothing, and in her case it meant mostly nothing – a minimal bed and some aspirin now and then. It wasn’t medical care and it wasn’t genuine comfort – it was parsimonious shelter and lashings of piety.

Pannalal Manik also has doubts. “I don’t understand why you educated people in the West have made this woman into such a goddess!” Manik was born some 56 years ago in the Rambagan slum, which at about 300 years of age, is Calcutta’s oldest. What Manik has achieved, can well be called a “miracle”. He has built 16 apartment buildings in the midst of the slum — living space for 4000 people. Money for the building materials — equivalent to DM 10000 per apartment building — was begged for by Manik from the Ramakrishna Mission [a Indian/Hindu charity], the largest assistance-organisation in India. The slum-dwellers built the buildings themselves. It has become a model for the whole of India. But what about Mother Teresa? “I went to her place 3 times,” said Manik. “She did not even listen to what I had to say. Everyone on earth knows that the sisters have a lot of money. But no one knows what they do with it!”

What they don’t do with it, however, is share it with the poor or afflicted. That’s apparently too worldly for their taste.

Compared to other charitable organisations in Calcutta, the nuns with the 3 blue stripes are ahead in two respects: they are world famous, and, they have the most money. But how much exactly, has always been a closely guarded secret of the organisation. Indian law requires charitable organisations to publish their accounts. Mother Teresa’s organisation ignores this prescription! It is not known if the Finance Ministry in Delhi who would be responsible for charities’ accounts, have the actual figures. Upon STERN’s inquiry, the Ministry informed us that this particular query was listed as “classified information”.

That’s all wrong. Charities should be on the record. Charities should be accountable.

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.”

It’s not true that it’s no one’s business how much money they have. They solicit and accept donations; that makes it everyone’s business how much money they have and what they do with it.

Perhaps the most lucrative branch of the organisation is the “Holy Ghost” House in New York’s Bronx. Susan Shields served the order there for a total of nine and a half years as Sister Virgin. “We spent a large part of each day writing thank you letters and processing cheques,” she says. “Every night around 25 sisters had to spend many hours preparing receipts for donations. It was a conveyor belt process: some sisters typed, others made lists of the amounts, stuffed letters into envelopes, or sorted the cheques. Values were between $5 and $100.000. Donors often dropped their envelopes filled with money at the door. Before Christmas the flow of donations was often totally out of control. The postman brought sackfuls of letters — cheques for $50000 were no rarity.” Sister Virgin remebers that one year there was about $50 million in a New York bank account. $50 million in one year! — in a predominantly non-Catholic country. How much then, were they collecting in Europe or the world? It is estimated that worldwide they collected at least $100 million per year — and that has been going on for many many years.

While the people they were supposedly “helping” went without medical care, privacy, clean bedding – nearly everything they needed.

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.

No wonder they made her a saint – she increased their fortune by perhaps billions.

The millions that are donated to the order have a similar fate. Susan Shields (formerly Sr Virgin) says, “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’.”

And people in Ethiopia continued to starve, while that money – which the donors had intended for famine relief in Ethiopia – went to the Vatican Bank.

By the accounts of former sisters, the finances are a one way street. “We were always told, the fact that we receive more than other orders, shows that God loves Mother Teresa more. ,” says Susan Shields. Donations and hefty bank balances are a measure of God’s love. Taking is holier than giving.

The sufferers are the ones for whom the donations were originally intended. The nuns run a soup kitchen in New York’s Bronx. Or, to put in straight, they have it run for them, since volunteer helpers organise everything, including food. The sisters might distribute it. Once, Shields remembers, the helpers made an organisational mistake, so they could not deliver bread with their meals. The sisters asked their superior if they could buy the bread. “Out of the question — we are a poor organisation.” came the reply. “In the end, the poor did not get their bread,” says Shields.

This is, to put it plainly, fraud. “Mother” Teresa defrauded millions of people who gave what they thought was money for relief of poverty and illness but in fact was just more wealth and power and influence for the Catholic church. She wasn’t just not a saint, she was a crook. Probably not a conscious crook, but a crook all the same.

Because of the tightfistedness of the rich order, the “poorest of the poor” — orphans in India — suffer the most. The nuns run a home in Delhi, in which the orphans wait to be adopted by, in many cases, by foreigners. As usual, the costs of running the home are borne not by the order, but by the future adoptive parents. In Germany the organisation called Pro Infante has the monopoly of mediation role for these children. The head, Carla Wiedeking, a personal friend of Mother Teresa’s, wrote a letter to Donors, Supporters and Friends which ran:

“On my September visit I had to witness 2 or 3 children lying in the same cot, in totally overcrowded rooms with not a square inch of playing space. The behavioural problems arising as a result cannot be overlooked.” Mrs Wiedeking appeals to the generosity of supporters in view of her powerlessness in the face of the children’s great needs. Powerlessness?! In an organisation with a billion-fortune, which has 3 times as much money available to it as UNICEF is able to spend in all of India? The Missionaries of Charity has have the means to buy cots and build orphanages, — with playgrounds. And they have enoungh money not only for a handful orphans in Delhi but for many thousand orphans who struggle for survival in the streets of Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta.

That’s like the nuns and priests who ran the horrible industrial “schools” in Ireland that locked up the children of the poor and treated them like garbage. The state gave them money for the support of the children, and the church kept much of it for itself.

It’s a multi-level multi-country crime; it’s fraud on a massive scale. And what do we see? “Sainthood” and fawning coverage by the global news media.

Shashank Bangali at the LA Times takes a look at the controversy over “Mother” Teresa.

Few people are as closely identified with a city as Mother Teresa is with Kolkata, the onetime colonial Indian capital where the Albanian nun garnered worldwide admiration for her work with the poor, infirm and outcast.

…

Many in Kolkata revere her for the half-century of service that earned her a Nobel Peace Prize and the moniker “saint of the gutters.” The Missionaries of Charity, the order she founded in 1950, sheltered tens of thousands of leprosy victims, sidewalk-dwellers, tuberculosis patients, orphans and the disabled at 19 homes across the city, and now has branches in 150 countries.

What exactly was her “work” with the poor, infirm and outcast? It wasn’t meeting the needs of the poor, infirm and outcast, it was trying to glorify the Catholic church through them. The missionaries “sheltered” leprosy victims, sidewalk-dwellers, tuberculosis patients, orphans and the disabled – but mere shelter isn’t enough (and it was crappy shelter). She had the money to do more but she gave it to the church.

“She had no significant impact on the poor of this city,” said Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, who served as mayor from 2005 to 2010.

“Whatever good work she did has also been done by any other philanthropic organization. I don’t find anything extraordinary in it.”

Bhattacharya is one of a few vocal critics in Kolkata who argue that Mother Teresa’s shelters glorified the ill rather than treating them, and that her charity appeals across the world misstated the reality of what was once among India’s most prosperous cities.

“No doubt there was poverty in Calcutta, but it was never a city of lepers and beggars, as Mother Teresa presented it,” Bhattacharya said.

“She was responsible for creating a negative image of this city. As a Calcuttan I feel totally disgusted by it.”

She put her hands on people, but she didn’t provide them with medical treatment.

“She would walk through the streets or go around in a wheelchair, speaking with everyone,” said Renu Sarnakar, a bespectacled woman in her 50s who was fashioning packets of Hindu religious offerings out of banana leaves. “Once she caressed my face very lovingly, even though I was ill.”

A widow, Sarnakar said she was admitted to Nirmal Hriday a decade ago with tuberculosis. Medical care was basic, and Sarnakar recalled that many in the women’s ward did not survive.

“The ones who die, they die,” Sarnakar said. “But for those who can get better, the sisters are very good to us.”

They die if they don’t get medical treatment. The nun could have spent the money to make that happen, but she gave it to the Vatican instead.

Mother Teresa faced criticism over the spartan conditions at Nirmal Hriday beginning in the early 1990s. The editor of the Lancet medical journal, Robin Fox, found after volunteering there that the sisters did not seek medical diagnoses for patients and administered only the most rudimentary painkillers and antibiotics.

The nuns resisted change, with Mother Teresa often saying that suffering brought one closer to God. A decade after her death, the nun then in charge of the home, Sister Glenda, told the local Telegraph newspaper, “We don’t want modern things.”

If they don’t want modern things, they should leave sick people alone.

In the fall of 2008, Hemley Gonzalez, a Cuban-born Miami real estate broker seeking a fresh start after the housing crash, came to Nirmal Hriday as a volunteer. He was tasked with giving daily sponge baths to 50 men, including some suffering from respiratory infections.

But there was no heating, making the water unbearably cold for the patients, Gonzalez said.

“The men started screaming when I poured water on them,” he said. “I’m not a doctor, I’m not a nurse, but I can tell by common sense that if someone has a respiratory disease you don’t bathe them with cold water.”

When Gonzalez proposed raising money for a water heater, senior nuns rebuffed him.

Gonzalez said the nuns did not distinguish between patients who were terminally ill and those who could be treated and released. He said he observed nuns rinsing dirty needles with tap water and reusing them.

“It felt like a museum of poverty,” said Gonzalez, 40, who later founded Responsible Charity, a nonprofit organization that promotes children’s education in Kolkata and the western city of Pune.

Hemley friended me on Facebook years ago, because I had a critical view of the Albanian nun.

Aroup Chatterjee, a Kolkata-born physician, said when he moved to Britain to practice medicine in the mid-1980s, Westerners told him constantly that his city “must be horrible, because that’s where Mother Teresa works.”

While Kolkata has vast pockets of poverty — three in 10 residents live in slums — it has lower income inequality and fewer underage workers than other major cities, according to official statistics, and the state’s per capita income is on par with the national average.

“It was very disturbing for me to hear that people thought that I came from a city and a culture that was so helpless that we couldn’t take care of ourselves, and we had to depend on an Albanian nun to look after our every need,” Chatterjee said.

In a 400-page book, recently rereleased under the title “Mother Teresa: The Untold Story,” Chatterjee levels an extensive list of complaints — including her embrace of unsavory donors (including savings and loan swindler Charles Keating) and allegations that she secretly converted Hindu and Muslim patients to Christianity on their deathbeds.

In a videotaped January 1992 meeting with the staff at Scripps Clinic in San Diego, where she had been treated for pneumonia, she boasted of baptizing as many as 29,000 people who had died at Nirmal Hriday since 1952.

“Not one has died without receiving the special ‘ticket for St. Peter,’ we call it,” she said. “It is so beautiful to see the people die with so much joy.”

Chatterjee said Indian officials should have raised concerns that the conversions violated the patients’ religious freedom, but such views remain unpopular.

A Facebook post recommending a tv interview with Aroup Chatterjee:

Aroup is spot on in this interview about “Saint” Teresa.

When I visited the Hospice for the Destitute and Dying in Kalighat (a district of Calcutta), Sister Nirmala – Teresa’s successor – told me that my marriage to a “Hindu” was a “big problem” and she looked quite upset about it (I think she assumed that I am Christian, which I am not). Nirmala stated that my marriage would never work and she wanted to have a word with me. I walked out. She was obviously a Christian chauvinist bigot, ie a fascist.

Teresa’s libelling of Calcutta has human costs. Calcutta is a wonderful city with the kindest, most intelligent and tolerant people of any of India’s megalopolises. In my mind, it’s a village of 15 million that operates largely without any enforced law and order, only by the people’s will and their belief in justice and aiding those who are less fortunate.

Indeed, it is a safe haven for many escaping poverty, discrimination, war and genocide from neighbouring states and countries: Biharis, Oriyas, Assamese, Nepalese, Chinese, Tibetans, Afghanis, Bangladeshi Hindus, etc. Although predominantly Bengali, it is a melting pot of cultures. There is not a city on Earth that will absorb and accept people in the way that Calcutta does.

Teresa took advantage of the city’s tolerance and naivete to destroy its reputation for the profit of the Vatican. This has put Calcutta forever on the back foot in terms of attracting investment and development. Because she made it a place of lepers lying in gutters, Calcutta is treated like a leper lying in a gutter.

The Times on Dr Aroup Chatterjee on “Mother” Teresa.

Over hundreds of hours of research, much of it cataloged in a book he published in 2003, Dr. Chatterjee said he found a “cult of suffering” in homes run by Mother Teresa’s organization, the Missionaries of Charity, with children tied to beds and little to comfort dying patients but aspirin.

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.

Again – like the nonsense about suffering as some kind of virtue-pump – a self-regarding performance of saintliness that disregards the needs of the people she pretended to care about. Frugality with the needles is not a virtue.

Helen Dale a few hours ago:

Mother Teresa wasn’t a friend to the poor, she was a friend of poverty. There is a difference.

That’s also my view of her.

An academic in political philosophy and ethics has an opposed view:

Most Christians think that God can allow us to suffer if the suffering is redemptive. I think that too. And that looks like all she is saying, [is] that God can heal our hearts through some kinds of suffering and that we can accept it as such.

Then a few minutes later:

Most atheist attacks on her character focus on her view of the morally purgative effects of suffering (again, see the thread), and I think that while she may have publicly exaggerated at times (though many of the quotes adduced to that effect don’t demonstrate this, as you can see from the discussion earlier in the thread), she has a view that is defensible within Christianity about how we can choose to let suffering fundamentally improve our characters and to draw nearer to God.

Later again:

Christian belief by no means guarantees good and right moral belief, but I think she just had a different, but reasonable view about suffering and God than you do. And people who disagree reasonably about moral matters can both have good character.

After that, unfortunately, he stopped engaging.

Is this idea about suffering “reasonable”? I’m not convinced it is, at least not in the sense I understand “reasonable.” It may be reasonable within a Christian system of thought, i.e. if you accept certain assumptions…but maybe it’s not reasonable to accept those assumptions.

Or maybe it is. Either way, I don’t see much merit in this claim that “we can choose to let suffering fundamentally improve our characters” – because I don’t believe that suffering does fundamentally improve our characters. I think it’s a rather sick and ugly way of looking at things to think it does. (This was the sort of thing Nietzsche hated about Christianity.)

What does it mean to say that “God can heal our hearts through some kinds of suffering”? I wonder if it means it breaks us, and thus makes us less “arrogant” and thus more submissive to “God.” But that doesn’t improve our characters, does it, it just makes us more obedient to the boss-God who isn’t there. It’s all rather circular. Pain perhaps makes us more receptive to “God”…but what’s good about that? Swap Hitler or Stalin for God and it becomes obvious that it’s not, so the claim is senseless unless we assume not only that “God” exists but also that it’s good. It’s fatuous to assume either of those, let alone both.

Or maybe he means the Victorian idea that suffering makes people “patient” – like Beth in Little Women. But what’s good about that? How does it improve the character? It’s just self-regarding – I am strong, I can take it, I can suffer in silence. Who cares? That doesn’t make the world a better place. We don’t need martyrs and Beths and silent sufferers and obeyers – we need people who do things. Sick people need good medical care, not nuns leering at them while they suffer.

There are of course religious people who do things, including providing good medical care. It’s just that “Mother” Teresa wasn’t one of them.

So Anjezë Bojaxhiu aka “Mother” Teresa is going to be “canonized” tomorrow – that is, magically transformed (19 years after her death) into a “saint”…there’s so much bullshit in this story I’m going to run out of scare-quotes. The pope is going to say stuff and that will mean she’s now a saint, which is to say, a person of great holiness. What’s holiness? Ah that’s the great question, isn’t it. Is it religious fanaticism or is it kindness and compassion?

In her case, of course, it’s the first and not at all the second.

Pilgrims will venerate her relics and have the opportunity to buy 1.5m commemorative 95c postage stamps, released on Friday, that celebrate her “great strength, simplicity and extraordinary humility … [and] tireless dedication”, according to an accompanying brochure.

Yeah see that’s all no good. Those qualities are all no good if they’re put to bad uses, as they were in her case. Her dedication was worthless when it wasn’t outright harmful.

The prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, paid tribute to Mother Teresa in a radio broadcast, saying “she devoted her whole life to the poor”.

Again – not the point. Worthless if put to bad uses. She devoted her whole life to telling the poor to submit to Baby Jesus giving them pain.

Aroup Chatterjee, a doctor, grew up in Kolkata and now works in the UK. He is one of Mother Teresa’s most vocal critics. “Many rogues have become Catholic saints,” he said. “What bothers me is that the world makes such a song and dance about a superstitious, black magic ceremony.”

He added: “It’s obvious that people are duped, they have a herd mentality. But the media has a responsibility not to collude with it.”

He has described Mother Teresa as “a medieval creature of darkness” and a “bogus and fantastic figure” who went unchallenged by the world’s media.

According to his 2003 book, Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict, based on the testimonies of scores of people who worked with the Missionaries of Charity, the medical care given to sick and dying people was negligible. Syringes were reused without sterilisation, pain relief was non-existent or inadequate, and conditions were unhygienic. Meanwhile, Mother Teresa spent much of her time travelling around the world in a private plane to meet political leaders.

Well ok she devoted the part of her life not spent travelling around the world in a private plane to meet political leaders to the poor. Doesn’t sound so impressive, does it.

Among those cited by Hitchens was Susan Shields, a former worker with the Missionaries of Charity, who claimed that vast sums of money accrued in bank accounts but very little was spent on medical expertise or making the lives of the sick and dying more comfortable.

Robin Fox, the editor of the Lancet, wrote in 1994 about the “haphazard” approach to care by nuns and volunteers, and the lack of medically trained personnel in the order’s homes.

The investigative journalist Donal Macintyre spent a week working undercover in a Missionaries of Charity home for disabled children in Kolkata in 2005. In an article in the New Statesman, he described pitiful scenes. “For the most part, the care the children received was inept, unprofessional and, in some cases, rough and dangerous.”

Humility and dedication aren’t enough. Who knew?

Three years ago, a study by academics at the University of Montreal concluded that the Vatican had ignored Mother Teresa’s “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 … abortion, contraception and divorce.”

But the Vatican is making her a saint anyway, because hey, relentless propaganda works.

From the New Statesman in August 2005: Donal MacIntyre reports some of the truth about “Mother” Teresa.

dormitory held about 30 beds rammed in so close that there was hardly a breath of air between the bare metal frames. Apart from shrines and salutations to “Our Great Mother”, the white walls were bare. The torch swept across the faces of children sleeping, screaming, laughing and sobbing, finally resting on the hunched figure of a boy in a white vest. Distressed, he rocked back and forth, his ankle tethered to his cot like a goat in a farmyard. This was the Daya Dan orphanage for children aged six months to 12 years, one of Mother Teresa’s flagship homes in Kolkata. It was 7.30 in the evening, and outside the monsoon rains fell unremittingly.

Earlier in the day, young international volunteers had giggled as one told how a young boy had peed on her while strapped to a bed. I had already been told of an older disturbed woman tied to a tree at another Missionaries of Charity home. At the orphanage, few of the volunteers batted an eyelid at disabled children being tied up. They were too intoxicated with the myth of Mother Teresa and drunk on their own philanthropy to see that such treatment of children was inhumane and degrading.

Or maybe just too Catholic, too indoctrinated, too unthinking, too convinced that piety=goodness to see that such treatment of children was inhumane and degrading. Irish industrial “schools” were run by people like that.

Volunteers (from Italy, Sweden, the United States and the UK) did their best to cradle and wash the children who had soiled themselves. But there were no nappies, and only cold water. Soap and disinfectant were in short supply. Workers washed down beds with dirty water and dirty cloths. Food was prepared on the floor in the corridor. A senior member of staff mixed medicine with her hands. Some did their best to give love and affection – at least some of the time. But, for the most part, the care the children received was inept, unprofessional and, in some cases, rough and dangerous. “They seem to be warehousing people rather than caring for them,” commented the former operations director of Mencap Martin Gallagher, after viewing our undercover footage.

Much of that was because “Mother” Teresa refused to spend money on the people she claimed to be caring for, instead giving it to the church (and spending it on herself when she was ill).

Susan Shields, formerly a senior nun with the order, recalled that one year there was roughly $50m in the bank account held by the New York office alone. Much of the money, she complained, sat in banks while workers in the homes were obliged to reuse blunt needles. The order has stopped reusing needles, but the poor care remains pervasive. One nurse told me of a case earlier this year where staff knew a patient had typhoid but made no effort to protect volunteers or other patients. “The sense was that God will provide and if the worst happens – it is God’s will.”

“God will provide” but the 50 million dollars sits in the bank account.

Nearly eight years after her death, Mother Teresa is fast on the way to sainthood. The great aura of myth that surrounds her is built on her great deeds helping the poor and the destitute of Kolkata, birthplace of her order, the Missionaries of Charity. Rarely has one individual so convinced public opinion of the holiness of her cause. Her reward is accelerated canonisation.

But her homes are a disgrace to so-called Christian care and, indeed, civilised values of any kind. I witnessed barbaric treatment of the most vulnerable.

But she’ll be a “saint” all the same.