There
is a reason for the obvious lack of any medical equipment in this
clinic of Mother Teresa's and it's not lack of donations.I was looking for something else when my search engine came up with this post from two years ago. I think it's highly pertinent given the recent results of the CDF investigation. It's hard to believe this investigation has been going on for over three years. Since the original reasons cited the same problems as the result, I can't help but wonder if the results were held in abeyance until they might have some specific impact at some specific time in the US. Anyway this post certainly took me back to the future.
Progressives Must Stop Ignoring Certain Conservative Beliefs About Holiness
Sometimes
I come across articles that leave me pondering for quite awhile. This
happened to me the other day when I came across an article written by
Susan Shields for the website "Council for Secular Humanism". Ms.
Shields an ex member of Mother Teresa's Sister's of Charity. I'm going
to quote the part that caused me a certain amount of mental angst:
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 if 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. 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.
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. (These
behaviors are endemic to every single one of the right wing traditional
apostolates approved of and singled out for praise by the Vatican in
the last forty years.)
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. 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.
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......
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Taken together these three beliefs describe a very sad definition of the path to holiness. They also describe logical extensions of the belief that man's material existence has meaning only in terms of his soul and that since the fall of Adam and Eve, our bodies are condemned to suffering in order to appease God and purify our immortal souls from the filthy stains of material existence.
Take the first one for example: "the belief that as long as a sister obeys she is doing God's will."
There's
no question that with in the Sisters of Charity, as it is in Opus Dei,
the Legionaries, or any number of other twentieth century apostalates,
obedience to the will of the founder was equated with obedience to God.
This was not just an attitude freely assumed by members, it was
promulgated by the founders themselves and they were backed by the
Papacy. Why wouldn't they be? This demand for obedience to the founder
is exactly what the Vatican demands of every Catholic with regards to
the Pope.
The
problem is neither the Pope nor any given founder is God. Jesus did not
say God is obedience, He said God is love. Every parent has experienced
the fact that our children can still love us dearly without feeling the
need to obey every jot and tittle of what we say. And if a parent
matures with their child in parenting, one finds that they actually love
their children more when those children think for themselves, act
decently on their own initiative, and stop demanding approval for
everything they do.
None
of those free acts of a maturing child is an assault on the fundamental
parent/child relationship. It is instead both a deepening and a
broadening of the relationship. What a parent really learns as their
child matures, is the reason for and nature of, forgiveness. Forgiveness
is not a 'get out of hell' free card. Nor is it a reset button to
engage in the same failed strategy. It's an opportunity to change
direction, learn a lesson and grow some more. Parental forgiveness is
often the weedkiller in our children's garden of life
The second belief is in some respects even more damaging than the first: "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." There are so many
fallacies here. No human person has the capacity to leverage God. That's
a description of a very small god, but it gets worse. The thought that
this god is happy being leveraged by our suffering makes him an even
smaller God. That he would then dispense more grace to humanity because
of his happiness with our suffering makes him very very minuscule on the
god scale. Puts him about as far up the god scale as the parent who
beats their child to get the rush when they cry and then gives the child
candy to shut them up until the next time. It's called abuse dynamics.
Then we come to the third 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". For
Mother Teresa and the Sisters of Charity this belief can be restated as
the love of the concept of poverty as a path to holiness. Their ministry
actually has very little to do with an effective relational love with
the poor. It has to do with their individual choice to live in, and
surround themselves with institutional poverty.
This
is probably why Mother Teresa never built a world class hospital with
all of her hundreds of millions in donations, or did a great deal to
eradicate poverty in the areas in which her convents and clinics
operated. These initiatives served as way stations for sufferers in
which her sisters were given the opportunity to evangelize and 'save'
souls. It was this that took precedence over alleviating suffering or
providing real medicine. The truth is she didn't need a world class
hospital to evangelize and save souls--she needed hundreds of convents
and that's precisely what she built.
In
honesty, Mother Teresa never claimed to be in the business of lifting
the yoke of poverty or eradicating disease in the areas in which her
enterprises operated. She forthrightly said she was in the business of
Catholic evangelization and the saving of souls. The poor people she
worked with were not victims of choices not their own. Instead they had
been given a wonderful opportunity from God to both achieve her
definition of holiness, and offer their unchosen suffering for others.
And of course, they provided the means by which she and her fellow
sisters could achieve their definition of holy poverty. In this respect,
she would have been working against her definition of their best
interests to do otherwise.
Not
one of these three beliefs are espoused by LCWR congregations, which
makes me wonder if that's not part of the problem they are having with
the Vatican. There's nothing like making poverty a short ticket to
heaven to soothe the consciences of people whose own greed makes that
poverty possible. No wonder Mother Teresa had many good things to say
about the Duvalier's in Haiti. Just think of all the opportunity the
Duvalier's provided for the people of Haiti to experience holy poverty.
I
think progressive Catholics need to put some time and effort in
understanding this dynamic in the traditional and conservative Catholic
mind set. Ignoring it will not make it go away nor lessen it's influence
in the Vatican and subsequently on Catholic laity.
