Mother Teresa, Atheist?

During the summer I read a book by Christopher Hitchens. PositionMissionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Verso, 1995). I had heard about the book and I was really angry, because Mother Teresa has always been one of my heroes. I am not religious but I believed that she was one who truly helped the poor. The book opened my eyes. I did more digging and learned that she had billions of dollars in banks all over the world and yet people were dying in her facilities for lack of proper medicine and care. Hitchens accuses her of being political…okay maybe.


Today, thanks to the astute observation of a friend, I find that Mother may have really been an atheist like me. It seems she had doubts and serious concerns about god’s lack of help. But atheist, monotheist or…whatever she was, all that money should be used to help the poor.

MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?

Mommie Dearest
Letters reveal Mother Teresa's doubt about faith - Yahoo! News
Missionaries of Charity