Reply to Indigenous Tribes Push Back Against Evangelical Missionaries

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[quote=Anonymous]After Mother Teresa founded her religious congregation, it grew to have over 4,500 nuns and was active in 133 countries as of 2012.[6] The congregation manages homes for people who are dying of HIV/AIDS, leprosy, and tuberculosis. The congregation also runs soup kitchens, dispensaries, mobile clinics, children's and family counselling programmes, as well as orphanages and schools. Members take vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience and also profess a fourth vow: to give "wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor."[7]

Mother Teresa wrote in her diary that her first year was fraught with difficulty. With no income, she begged for food and supplies and experienced doubt, loneliness and the temptation to return to the comfort of convent life during these early months:

Our Lord wants me to be a free nun covered with the poverty of the cross. Today, I learned a good lesson. The poverty of the poor must be so hard for them. While looking for a home I walked and walked till my arms and legs ached. I thought how much they must ache in body and soul, looking for a home, food and health. Then, the comfort of Loreto [her former congregation] came to tempt me. "You have only to say the word and all that will be yours again", the Tempter kept on saying. ... Of free choice, my God, and out of love for you, I desire to remain and do whatever be your Holy will in my regard. I did not let a single tear come.[42]

She opened a hospice for those with leprosy, calling it Shanti Nagar (City of Peace).[47] The Missionaries of Charity established leprosy-outreach clinics throughout Calcutta, providing medication, dressings and food.[48] The Missionaries of Charity took in an increasing number of homeless children; in 1955, Mother Teresa opened Nirmala Shishu Bhavan, the Children's Home of the Immaculate Heart, as a haven for orphans and homeless youth.[49]

By 1997, the 13-member Calcutta congregation had grown to more than 4,000 sisters who managed orphanages, AIDS hospices and charity centers worldwide, caring for refugees, the blind, disabled, aged, alcoholics, the poor and homeless and victims of floods, epidemics and famine.[54] By 2007, the Missionaries of Charity numbered about 450 brothers and 5,000 sisters worldwide, operating 600 missions, schools and shelters in 120 countries.[55]

At the height of the Siege of Beirut in 1982, Mother Teresa rescued 37 children trapped in a front-line hospital by brokering a temporary cease-fire between the Israeli army and Palestinian guerrillas.[58] Accompanied by Red Cross workers, she travelled through the war zone to the hospital to evacuate the young patients.[59]

When Eastern Europe experienced increased openness in the late 1980s, Mother Teresa expanded her efforts to Communist countries which had rejected the Missionaries of Charity. She began dozens of projects, undeterred by criticism of her stands against abortion and divorce: "No matter who says what, you should accept it with a smile and do your own work." She visited Armenia after the 1988 earthquake[60] and met with Soviet Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov.[61]

Mother Teresa travelled to assist the hungry in Ethiopia, radiation victims at Chernobyl and earthquake victims in Armenia.[62][63][64] In 1991 she returned to Albania for the first time, opening a Missionaries of Charity Brothers home in Tirana.[65]

By 1996, the Missionaries of Charity operated 517 missions in over 100 countries.[66] The number of sisters in the Missionaries of Charity grew from twelve to thousands, serving the "poorest of the poor" in 450 centres worldwide. The first Missionaries of Charity home in the United States was established in the South Bronx area of New York City, and by 1984 the congregation operated 19 establishments throughout the country.[67]

On 13 March 1997, Mother Teresa resigned as head of the Missionaries of Charity. She died on 5 September.[71][72] At the time of her death, the Missionaries of Charity had over 4,000 sisters and an associated brotherhood of 300 members operating 610 missions in 123 countries.[73] These included hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, soup kitchens, children's and family counselling programmes, orphanages and schools. The Missionaries of Charity were aided by co-workers numbering over one million by the 1990s.[74]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa

Navin B. Chawla points out that Mother Teresa never intended to build hospitals, but to provide a place where those who had been refused admittance "could at least die being comforted and with some dignity." He also counters critics of Mother Teresa by stating that her periodic hospitalizations were instigated by staff members against her wishes and he disputes the claim that she conducted surreptitious baptisms. "Those who are quick to criticise Mother Teresa and her mission, are unable or unwilling to do anything to help with their own hands."[43]

Sister Mary Prema Pierick, the current Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity, also stated that Mother Teresa's homes were never intended to be a substitute for hospitals, but rather "homes for those not accepted in the hospital... But if they need hospital care, then we have to take them to the hospital, and we do that." Sister Pierick also contested the claims that Mother Teresa deliberately cultivated suffering, and affirmed her order's goal was to alleviate suffering.[49]

Melanie McDonagh has noted that Mother Teresa is in large part "criticized for not being what she never set out to be, for not doing things which she never saw as her job. ... What she wasn't was a head of government. She didn't address the fundamental causes of poverty because she was addressing the symptoms and she did that well," nor were her sisters social workers. McDonagh commented, "She wasn't trying to do anything except treat people at the margins of society as if they were Christ himself."[50]

Mari Marcel Thekaekara points out that after the Bangladesh War, a few million refugees poured into Calcutta from the former East Pakistan. "No one had ever before done anything remotely like Mother Teresa's order, namely picking up destitute and dying people off the pavements and giving them a clean place to die in dignity."[51]

Three prominent palliative care professionals,[peacock prose] David Jeffrey, Joseph O'Neill and Gilly Burn, responded to Fox in the Lancet and argued that it was disingenuous to single out Mother Teresa's hospices for healthcare limitations that were common to most care facilities in India. They noted Indian healthcare generally suffered from: "1) lack of education of doctors and nurses, 2) few drugs, and 3) very strict state government legislation, which prohibits the use of strong analgesics even to patients dying of cancer". They concluded Mother Teresa's homes were being unfairly held to the standards of "western-style hospice care... not relevant to India".[52]

In 2012, William Doino Jr, wrote that "The remarkable thing about Hell’s Angel is that it purports to defend the poor against Mother Teresa’s supposed exploitation of them, while never actually interviewing any on screen. Not a single person cared for by the Missionaries speaks on camera. Was this because they had a far higher opinion of Blessed Teresa than Hitchens would permit in his film? Avoiding the people at the heart of Teresa’s ministry, Hitchens posed for the camera and let roll a series of ad hominem attacks and unsubstantiated accusations, as uninformed as they were cruel."[54]

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/45/1086646.page

I think that the passage that explains that those who do not do anything to help with the poor, suffering, dying, and destitute, with their own hands, yet criticize someone who did, is actually the crux of this issue.

If Hitchens was so hot to help, and knew the best way to do so…why didn’t he open his own facilities to help these people? [/quote]

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