Christian Subversion And Missionary Activities - 3

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<b>Former Catholic Sister Says Mother Teresa Is a Fraud</b>

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->June 6, 2007

For nine years Susan Shields worked as a devoted Catholic Sister, working 
for Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. When finally becoming fed-up in 
1989, she left Mother Teresa in disgust over the misuse of millions in 
charitable donations that never got to their destination -- the poor and 
afflicted.

Shields story was recently sent to the Arctic Beacon, as  printed in the
Free Inquiry Magazine, <b>revealing how Mother Teresa really  turned a blind eye
to the poor while millions of dollars in donations are still  sitting
in Vatican bank accounts.</b>

Here is her story entitled "Mother Teresa's  House of Illusions:
How She Harmed Her Helpers As Well As Those They  `Helped'

"Some years after I became a Catholic, I joined  Mother Teresa's
congregation, the Missionaries of Charity. I was one of her  sisters for
nine and a half years, living in the Bronx, Rome, and San  Francisco, until
I became disillusioned and left in May 1989. <b>As I  re-entered the world, I
slowly began to unravel the tangle of lies in which  I had lived. I
wondered how I could have believed them for so long. </b>

"Three of Mother Teresa's teachings that are fundamental to her  religious
congregation are all the more dangerous because they are believed  so
sincerely by her sisters. Most basic is the belief that as long as a 
sister obeys she is doing God's will. Another is the belief that the 
sisters have leverage over God by choosing to suffer. Their suffering 
makes God very happy. He then dispenses more graces to humanity. The 
third is the belief that any attachment to human beings, even the poor 
being served, supposedly interferes with love of God and must be 
vigilantly avoided or immediately uprooted. The efforts to prevent any 
attachments cause continual chaos and confusion, movement and change in 
the congregation. <b>Mother Teresa did not invent these beliefs - they were 
prevalent in religious congregations before Vatican II - but she did 
everything in her power (which was great) to enforce them. </b>

"Once a  sister has accepted these fallacies she will do almost anything.
She can  allow her health to be destroyed, neglect those she vowed to
serve, and  switch off her feelings and independent thought. She can turn
a blind eye to  suffering, inform on her fellow sisters, tell lies with
ease, and ignore  public laws and regulations.

Women from many nations joined Mother  Teresa in the expectation that they
would help the poor and come closer to  God themselves. When I left, there
were more than 3,000 sisters in  approximately 400 houses scattered
throughout the world. Many of these  sisters who trusted Mother Teresa to
guide them have become broken people.  <b>In the face of overwhelming
evidence, some of them have finally admitted  that their trust has been
betrayed, that God could not possibly be giving  the orders they hear</b>. It
is difficult for them to decide to leave - their  self-confidence has been
destroyed, and they have no education beyond what  they brought with them
when they joined. I was one of the lucky ones who  mustered enough courage
to walk away.

"It is in the hope that others  may see the fallacy of this purported way
to holiness that I tell a little  of what I know. Although there are
relatively few tempted to join Mother  Teresa's congregation of sisters,
there are many who generously have  supported her work because they do not
realize how her twisted premises  strangle efforts to alleviate misery.
Unaware that most of the donations sit  unused in her bank accounts, they
too are deceived into thinking they are  helping the poor.

"As a Missionary of Charity, I was assigned to record  donations and write
the thank-you letters. The money arrived at a frantic  rate. The mail
carrier often delivered the letters in sacks. We wrote  receipts for
checks of $50,000 and more on a regular basis. Sometimes a  donor would
call up and ask if we had received his check, expecting us to  remember it
readily because it was so large. How could we say that we could  not
recall it because we had received so many that were even larger? 

"When Mother spoke publicly, she never asked for money, but she did 
encourage people to make sacrifices for the poor, to "give until it 
hurts." Many people did - and they gave it to her. We received touching 
letters from people, sometimes apparently poor themselves, who were 
making sacrifices to send us a little money for the starving people in 
Africa, the flood victims in Bangladesh, or the poor children in India. 
<b>Most of the money sat in our bank accounts. </b>

"The flood of donations  was considered to be a sign of God's approval of
Mother Teresa's  congregation. We were told by our superiors that we
received more gifts than  other religious congregations because God was
pleased with Mother, and  because the Missionaries of Charity were the
sisters who were faithful to  the true spirit of religious life.

"Most of the sisters had no idea how  much money the congregation was
amassing. After all, we were taught not to  collect anything. One summer
the sisters living on the outskirts of Rome  were given more crates of
tomatoes than they could distribute. None of their  neighbors wanted them
because the crop had been so prolific that year. The  sisters decided to
can the tomatoes rather than let them spoil, but when  Mother found out
what they had done she was very displeased. Storing things  showed lack of
trust in Divine Providence.

"The donations rolled in  and were deposited in the bank, but they had no
effect on our ascetic lives  and very little effect on the lives of the
poor we were trying to help. We  lived a simple life, bare of all
superfluities. We had three sets of  clothes, which we mended until the
material was too rotten to patch anymore.  We washed our own clothes by
hand. The never-ending piles of sheets and  towels from our night shelter
for the homeless we washed by hand, too. Our  bathing was accomplished
with only one bucket of water. Dental and medical  checkups were seen as
an unnecessary luxury.

"Mother was very  concerned that we preserve our spirit of poverty.
Spending money would  destroy that poverty. She seemed obsessed with using
only the simplest of  means for our work. Was this in the best interests
of the people we were  trying to help, or were we in fact using them as a
tool to advance our own  "sanctity?" In Haiti, to keep the spirit of
poverty, the sisters reused  needles until they became blunt. Seeing the
pain caused by the blunt  needles, some of the volunteers offered to
procure more needles, but the  sisters refused.

"We begged for food and supplies from local merchants  as though we had no
resources. On one of the rare occasions when we ran out  of donated bread,
we went begging at the local store. When our request was  turned down, our
superior decreed that the soup kitchen could do without  bread for the
day.

"It was not only merchants who were offered a  chance to be generous.
Airlines were requested to fly sisters and air cargo  free of charge.
Hospitals and doctors were expected to absorb the costs of  medical
treatment for the sisters or to draw on funds designated for the 
religious. Workmen were encouraged to labor without payment or at reduced 
rates. We relied heavily on volunteers who worked long hours in our soup 
kitchens, shelters, and day camps.

"A hard-working farmer devoted  many of his waking hours to collecting and
delivering food for our soup  kitchens and shelters. "If I didn't come,
what would you eat?" he asked. 

"Our Constitution forbade us to beg for more than we needed, but, when  it
came to begging, the millions of dollars accumulating in the bank were 
treated as if they did not exist.

"For years I had to write  thousands of letters to donors, telling them
that their entire gift would be  used to bring God's loving compassion to
the poorest of the poor. I was able  to keep my complaining conscience in
check because we had been taught that  the Holy Spirit was guiding Mother.

To doubt her was a sign that we were  lacking in trust and, even worse,
guilty of the sin of pride. <b>I shelved my  objections and hoped that one
day I would understand why Mother wanted to  gather so much money,</b> when
she herself had taught us that even storing  tomato sauce showed lack of
trust in Divine Providence." <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->