The Scandal of Mother Teresa's Sainthood

In 2003 close to 300,000 people crowded into St. Peter's Square and it’s surrounds, to celebrate Pope John Paul II's beatification of Mother Teresa, known as the ‘Saint of the Gutters’.

Pope John Paul, himself on his last legs told the gathered crowd in a weakened voice “In her, we perceive the urgency to put oneself in a state of service, especially for the poorest and most forgotten,the last of the last”

Some 450 doe-eyed nuns from Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity flew-in from Calcutta to witness the three hour ceremony.

Like everyone there that day, the Nuns witnessed a sham on a grand scale, as did a fellow Indian mother of four, there in Rome as a special attendee.

The fast-tracking of Mother Teresa’s sainthood, is widely known, less so the fact the posthumous miracle she is credited with - simply did not happen and is little more than a crudely constructed fabrication.

Fabrication, that became the last crucial pieces in the Catholic Churches beatification ‘jig-saw’ of the Albanian nun, orchestrated by a frail and dementia ridden pontiff who wept aside the set 17th century red tape, and began making Teresa a saint in record time. Rather than decades, even centuries - the process would take just years.

The final part of the jig-saw was evidence of a miracle following the candidate’s demise.

On Sept. 5, 1998, the first anniversary of the nun's death, Monica Besra (above) left her family to seek help from the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, India. Suffering abdominal pain caused, she believed, by a tumor.

But the purported tumor vanished when nuns from the mission placed Teresa’s picture & an accompanying locket, on her abdomen, the site of her pain.

In August 2001, Monica's post-death miracle was supplied to the Vatican as part of the fast-tracking of Mother Teresa's canonisation.

None of this happened the way the Church portrayed it.

Before all of this allegedly happened, Monica Besra was suffering from tubercular meningitis and from an ovarian tumor, which was discovered during an ultra-sound investigation. This came about after was admitted to the government hospital in Balurghat, suffering similar severe pain. She was subsequently treated by Dr.Tarun Kumar Biwas and the gynaecologist Dr. Ranjan Mustafi. After she left the hospital, the treatment was continued in the North Bengal Medical College and Hospital and ended successfully in March 1999. A final ultra-sound investigation showed that the tumor had disappeared.

The Hospitals superintendent supplied Sister Betta from the Missionaries of Charity with Monica's medical records containing sonograms, prescriptions and physicians' notes etc that provided ample evidence it was medical treatment that cured her, and not a magical photo through which a dead nun emanated curative properties from beyond the grave.

But, rather conveniently the ‘good’ nun Sister Betta, lost those official medical records shortly after receiving them.

Despite openly admitting at one stage they had solicited Monica Besra’s hospital records, abruptly The Missionaries for Charity then changed their story, and ignoring a mountain of evidence to the contrary, including statements from their own mission, they now claim they never received the official medical records in the first place.

What they did ‘discover’ in their place amongst the 34,000 pages of meticulously accrued miracle documentation, are claims that several doctors had certified that the healing was ‘scientifically inexplicable’.

One ‘small’ problem with this transcript, is the Balurghat Hospital who treated Monica Besra has no records of these doctors and further, none of these anonymous witnesses could be traced.

Balurghat Hospital Doctors are adamant in the validity and robustness of their diagnosis and statements from officials from the same hospital back this up, with claims the Catholic order has been pressuring them to say Monica's cure was miraculous.

Remarkably, amongst all those 34,000 pages of ‘official evidence’ for Teresa’s miracle cure from beyond the grave, there was not a solitary sentence from anyone who was actually involved with Monica Besra’s medical treatment.

"This miracle is a hoax."

Monica's husband Seiku, has had enough of all the publicity concerning his wife’s so-called miracle and freely speaks out against the hysteria, which still sees devotees flocking to his door-step expecting a similar instant cure.

“My wife did feel less pain one night when she used the locket, but her pain had been coming and going. Then she went to the doctors, and they cured her."

"My wife was cured by the doctors and not by any miracle." he forth-rightly tells anyone who will listen, not that the Catholic Church has to this day ever spoken to crucial witness like him.

Monica Besra is a 38-year-old tribal woman from Dulidnapur village, a mother of four.

She is illiterate and speaks her tribal mother tongue only, a few words of broken Bengali & English.



The official statement she purportedly supplied to the Papal chief investigator Brian Kolodiejchuk (via one of the sisters at the mission) happens to be written in fluent English and shows familiarity with details of Catholic doctrine she was, or never could to this day, be privy to.

Until recently Monica had been cashing-in on her new found fame, but it appears her flame has dimmed, and the devoted & often desperate miracle-seekers beating a track to her house, had reduced to a trickle.

Last year Monica turned her attention to a far richer source than the often poor & now infrequent miracle seekers, when she began making public murmurings that she was not in-fact the benefactor of a miracle cure and that she was used by the Catholic Church for their own selfish purposes, then callously abandoned to a life of penury.

Her threats to ‘spill the beans’ had the required effect.

Fearing her admissions would expose the stage-managed nature of the deceit, The Vatican arranged for ‘hush money’ to be paid to her via, of all entities, the local Mother Teresa Charitable Welfare Society.

When this pay-off was exposed in the Indian media the Society was forced to comment saying simply it was ‘a donation’.

A substantial one, and as 'icing on the cake' , places for the Besra children at a private Catholic School.

Monica Besra, then went back believing in the miracle.

So what does The Vatican & the Indian missionaries behind this scandal , have to say about the controversy still surrounding Monica Besra’s miracle? The missing files? Failure to speak to key witnesses? The role of medical science etc.

Well they no longer comment on the subject, so the final say is fittingly left to Monica herself:

"I took the medicines they gave me, but those who love Mother will believe”


Footnote: For more on Mother Teresa you may be interested in my previous blog entitled ‘The Loathsome Cult of Mother Teresa’

Holy Cow: The Loathsome Cult of Mother Teresa.

“She started off with one companion and a borrowed apartment. After a course in nursing, she went out, picked up a dying man from the gutter and brought him home to her apartment. In those nearby slums she could easily find old people dying in the gutter, abandoned babies in garbage pails, lepers thrown out by their families and other such rejects”

She remembers that first day: “Such a beautiful day, to meet Christ face to face in the poor. He was there – the hungry, the sick, the naked Christ – and the thought of Him in this distressing disguise gave me great joy, peace and strength”.

"This woman was, of course, Mother Teresa – the embodiment of a Christ-like virtue; the human face of COMPASSION"

[ Excerpt from a sermon made by Year 13 student at Lindisfarne College, N.Z ]

Keen to continue both the myth and revenue streams, every year hundreds of Kiwi teens from Catholic secondary schools are flown off to Calcutta to worship at the alter of a deceased Albanian nun: Mother Teresa.

If ever there was a case of reputation blighting the facts – Mother Teresa’s is it.

Christopher Hitchens accurately summed-up this ascetain as “the single most successful emotional con job of the 20th century”.

Let’s get this straight from the beginning - Mother Teresa’s ‘driving force’ was her extreme faith, not some philanthropy to help the poor and less well-off. She became ‘the poster girl’ of the Catholic Church (thankfully not the centre fold spread) on the back of the Papalist propaganda machine aided by a news media eager to lap-up ‘good news stories’ and a gross failure on their behalf to look beyond her visage.

M.T was an open advocate of suffering ‘to bring one closer to Jesus’.

Her warped method of alleviating suffering - was to practice it.

In any ‘Nobility of Suffering’ – Mother Teresa would be queen.

"The most beautiful gift for a person is that he can participate in the suffering of Christ," (obviously her words, not mine)

At the bedside of one screaming sufferer, she was heard to say "You are suffering, that means Jesus is kissing you." "Then tell your Jesus to stop kissing me" rebuffed the poor man.

She provided grotesquely inadequate medical care and pain relief at her so called ‘hospitals’ and hospices.

What she ran was a ‘Home for the Dying’. There were no doctors or nurses (in the Western concept of the terms) little in terms of medicine to cure the sick, no palliative care to speak of . These were merely crude doss-houses for the poor victims to spend their last miserable days. The largest of these ‘Homes for the Dying Destitute’, had one communal ‘open plan’ toilet, stretchers for beds, no chairs and a policy which banned visitors.

Saving souls was priority, not saving lives.

When she became sick herself, she flew off to a clinic in the United Sates, first class, on Air India. A wise decision one thinks, given the sad state of sanitary conditions her own facilities. It’s hard to imagine Teresa wanting to squat-down next to some destitute as they went about their bodily functions, when she herself headed an Order with a seven figure bank balance.

That Order she founded banked millions upon millions, which was never spent on the poor. Her ‘Mission of Charity’ remains the only Indian Charitable Organisation that refuses to ‘open its books’ so donors can see where their money has been spent. Vatican bankers don’t exactly have a reputation for honesty and prudent investment, but odds on that’s where most of the donations ended up.

Not one hospital was built with the millions that flooded in, but there are at least 150 known convents that benefited.

She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women to decide their own conceptive needs. Better to have eight staving and sick ‘little Catholics’ than plan for a family with two, both of which at least stand a shot at a decent life.

Over-population is an acute problem in India and MT’s solution was to add to this misery by campaigning for a ban on birth control, which I guess ‘drummed-up some more business’ for her homes for the dying, and further added to her credentials as a Saint (at least through the blinkered eyes of The Catholic Church)

“I would say it was a certainty millions of people died because of her work” (Christopher Hitchens on Penn & Teller)

She was happy to fill her coffers with the monies misappropriated by the atrocious, corrupt Duvalier family from Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) “It was a beautiful lesson” was what she said about her time with the Duvalier’s.

Whilst the dead and dying lay on their crude beds in her hospice, this master manipulator found time to travel the globe and ‘meet & greet’ world leaders like the Reagans and Princess Diana. Cripes she even had time to campaign in Ireland against the right to divorce and re-marry (it must have been the leapers low season back home in India) When asked about Diana’s divorce, just two months after visiting Ireland, MT bowed to expediency and stated “it was for the best”. In other words - it’s fine for influential ‘blue blood’ benefactors to get divorced but not Irish plebs. Hell -why not sell an indulgence and be done with?

When Lady Di & Mother Teresa meet it was always in an outdoor environment.
They could never find a man-made structure big enough to house both egos together.

And when she made her Nobel prize-winners speech she spoke-out against the ‘greatest threat facing world peace’. And what is that threat you may ask? Well in Saint Theresa’s world (as opposed to yours and mine) it’s abortion.

She was expedient with the truth when it suited her own needs. For example she claimed that her mission in Calcutta fed over a thousand people daily. On subsequent occasions (depending on her audience and the depth of their pockets) the number rose to 4000, 7000, and 9000. In actuality her soup kitchens fed no more than 150 people, and this included her retinue of nuns, novices, and brothers. She claimed at one point that her school in the Calcutta slum contained five thousand children when it actually enrolled less than one hundred.

People hate being fleeced and tricked, so when facts like these are presented to say those Kiwi kids about to board their flight to India, it’s human nature they'd either refute them (in preference to the propaganda spread by those with a vested interest, that’s to say the Catholic Church) or attack the source of the revelation as being ‘mean spirited’ or ‘ignoring the good things she’s done’.

To the great unwashed there is no ‘Bad’ Mother Teresa only ‘good’ and to these devotees, this is where the matter rests, there amongst what are little more than Vatican Press Releases spread by negligent journalists. Rational critique of her life is seen as blasphemy, such is her pre-eminence in the annals of popular belief.

But those who dare to ‘scrape the surface’ will see little of virtue in her life and little if any compassion - just twisted devotion.