Book Review : The Myth of Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa: The Untold Story; Dr Aroup Chatterji; Fingerprint; Pp 360; Rs 295

The book exposes the ‘other face’ of Saint Mother Teresa and her dubious connections

Dr T H Chowdary

Mother Teresa was born in Skopje, Macedon on August 26, 1910 and was baptised as Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu. Teresa’s father was a Venitian (Italy) Nikolar Bojaxhiu who emigrated to Albania (when it was an imperial possession of Italy). Different biographers of Teresa described him as chemist, building contractor, wholesale importer of food, a doctor’s assistant  as they were informed by his daughter Teresa. She came to India  in 1937  as a nun; was moved by the misery of  uncared for, famished, starving, disease-afflicted millions on Calcutta   city’s pavements”.  She established the Missionaries of Charity (MC) in 1950  as a refuge for them. The MC “picked” up thousands of them, fed, dressed and   nursed them to health. Foreign charities gave abundant funds for her mission. She claimed that she and  her nuns did all this work out of Christian compassion; she never mentioned that those sheltered and  nursed were converted to Christianity.  

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Teresa was beatified by the  Pope in October 2003 and now on September 5, 2016, sainthood was conferred (called canonisation) upon her.  When she died in September 1997,  her funeral in Calcutta was conducted with state honours; the then Prime Minister Sri I K Gujaral and West Bengal’s Marxist-Communist Chief Minister Jyoti Basu “graced” the occasion; besides hordes of her foreign admirers, financiers and  publicists also came for the  funeral.  Never in the history of Roman Catholic Church was a person elevated to Sainthood within 19 years of  his/her demise as Mother Teresa!  
Dr Aroup Chatterji, the author, was born and brought up in Calcutta. He emigrated to the UK; married an Irish Catholic lady and has three children. He was appalled at the tremendous image that was being built up for Mother Teresa and her work of charity in the West, especially in the USA and the UK.  As a Calcuttan, he knew of the insignificant and not much known charity work of Teresa in Calcutta.  He grew curious and researched and studied her activities for over twenty five years. He found that what was propagated or propagandised about Mother Teresa was only ten percent truth and ninety percent was fiction, lies!  She accepted donations knowingly from drug peddlers and swindlers. What is worse is that she wrote to the prosecuting government officers and judges in the USA not to punish them, her swindler- criminal donors.  In response to Mother Teresa’s letter to let go a swindler, the American prosecutor wrote to her  to return the monies to the cheated; monies she accepted from the swindler, in the true Christian spirit.  Again, it is alleged that she lied and gave exaggerated and false figures of persons she was daily feeding in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1979! The ambulances donated by a Calcutta businessman were used by her nuns as taxis to ferry them in Calcutta! Her nuns refused to pick up dying persons within even 200 meters of the compassion house! (Dr Aroup Chaterji has recorded his telephone conversations with the nuns and reproduced them verbatim in the book). Mother Teresa told her western audiences that her mission routinely picked up abandoned babies, dying and dead bodies from Calcutta’s pavements.
Dr Aroup Chatterji familiarised himself with the Vatican’s procedures for beatification and sainthood. He petitioned to the Vatican to be heard and questioned. He deposed before the  assigned interlocutors, called the postulator of  the cause  and fearlessly and truthfully exposed Mother  Teresa’s lies and  association with and  defence of  criminals, prosecuted and  jailed in the  USA.  All was in vain.  The Pope executed the accelerated procedures for conferring sainthood on Mother Teresa.  
Dr Chatterji says scores of persons with established and exposed criminality were declared saints by the Vatican (ie Popes). The Catholic Church in Calcutta ascribed two miracles (one cure of an Adivasi of TB and abdominal tumour patient ) having occurred by the grace of the  dead Mother Teresa,  an aluminium medal of whose was tied to the  Adivasi woman, Monica Bersa, on September 5, 1998, the first anniversary of  Teresa’s death. The miracle cure was announced on October 1, 2002.  Obviously, it was not a miracle cure but the outcome of medical treatment was asserted by doctors who medicated her and by the Superintendent of the Belurghat Hospital. TV channels and newspapers carried this refutation prominently in the following week. In October 2003, Pope John Paul II beatified Mother Teresa. She became “blessed”. Monica Besra and her family were flown by the   Church to the Vatican: She met the Pope. Soon after beatification, Besra
repudiated the miracle and said she was cured by medicine.
Dr Chatterji showed that Mother Teresa went on innumerable foreign tours and was seldom available in India when tragedies like the Latur earth quake in September 1993,  or flood in Calcutta.  No charity of her mission was forth coming.  Her dead body or funeral was seen or participated in by very few poor of Calcutta.  Celebrities   from several countries where she was propagandised and the “secular” IK Gujaral, the short time Prime Minister and the Marxist (traditional friends of those who convert Hindus to Christianity or Islam) CM Jyoti Basu graced  Mother Teresa’s State funeral, an honour not given to any Shankaracharya.
The Untold Story must be read by truth-seeking and  truth-respecting  Indians to know what frauds Christian missionaries  and their NGO allies are  committing at the  bidding of their foreign masters and  financiers  to reap
harvests of  converts from poor and uninformed Hindus.