User talk:TUF-KAT/Mother Teresa

Just a few notes on my changes:

Little is known of Teresa's early life except what she later chose to recall.

What does this mean? It implies that she has been less than honest about her life.

In 1975 she supported Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's suspension of democracy in India.

I have changed this statement, but someone who knows should add the facts about the "suspension of democracy" -- were all elections cancelled? (if so, say that) or were civil liberties reduced (in what way, and to what degree, and was it done according to Indian legal provisions and etc.)

I removed the description of Tariq Ali as a Trotskyist, because I don't really see why it's relevant.

I kept Dr. Robin Fox's criticisms, but moved Mary Louden's to a proposed revision of Missionaries of Charity, because both are more about the order than Teresa herself, but I thought keeping some mention of the issue was important. I also moved much of the fiscal- and torture-related criticisms to the same article. Opinions welcome. Tuf-Kat 09:15, Oct 27, 2003 (UTC)

This is the revised text for Missionaries of Charity, which includes information taken from the Mother Teresa article when it applies more to the charity than to the woman. I reproduce it here instead of adding it to the article because there may be POV problems. In any case, I think a "one relared article at a time" policy is useful in these kinds of debates. I reproduce it here so that others can see what was removed.

The Missionaries of Charity do not disclose either the sources of their funds or details of how they are spent. In 1998 an article in the German magazine Stern estimated that the order received about US$50 million a year in donations. Other journalists have given estimates of US$100 million a year. Critics have argued that this money cannot have all been spent on the purpose for which it was donated - aid to the sick and the poor - because the order's facilities, staffed by nuns and by volunteers and offering little in the way of medical facilities, are very cheap to operate and cannot cost anything like these sums to maintain.

Critics have maintained that the majority of the money donated to the order is transferred to the Vatican Bank in Rome, where it is used by the Catholic Church for its general purposes, or is transferred to non-Christian countries for missionary work. Susan Shields, a former employee of the Missionaries of Charity in the United States, has alleged that even when donors explicitly marked money as, for example, "for the hungry in Ethiopia", she was instructed not to send the money to Africa, while still writing receipts with the text "For Ethiopia". Under the laws regulating charities in most countries, this would amount to fraud and/or theft.

In Britain, where the law requires charitable organisations to disclose their expenditures, an audit in 1991 concluded that only 7% of the total income of about US$2.6 million went into charitable spending, with the rest being remitted to the Vatican Bank. Another former Missionary of Charity worker, Eva Kolodziej, has said: "You should visit the House in New York, then you'll understand what happens to donations. In the cellar of the homeless shelter there are valuable books, jewellery and gold. What happens to them? The sisters receive them with smiles, and keep them. Most of these lie around uselessly forever." This would suggest not so much deliberate misappropriation as financial imcompetence and indifference to the ends to which donated funds are put.

Related to this is the accusation that funds donated for relief work for the sick and poor were actually diverted to missionary work in non-Christian countries. Chatterjee alleged that many operations of the order engage in no charitable activity at all but instead use their funds for missionary work. He alleged, for example, that none of the eight facilities that the Missionaries of Charity run in Papua New Guinea have any residents in them, being purely for the purpose of converting local people to Catholicism.

Defenders of the order argue that missionary activity was part of Teresa's calling and that there was nothing wrong with using donated funds for this purpose. Chatterjee and other critics counter that the public image of Mother Teresa as a "helper of the poor" was misleading, and that only a few hundred people are served by even the largest of the homes. Stern magazine alleged the (Protestant) Assembly of God charity serves 18,000 meals daily in Calcutta, many more than all the Mission of Charity homes together.

Please add comments below

Good, but

I think there are still NPOV problems. To say "It is, perhaps, inevitable that widespread praise and even reverence will lead to criticism and scorn from detractors" is IMO to imply that the criticisms of MT are unfounded. That's unacceptable to some Wikipedians!

Overall, I like this version a lot. I think it's progress. Andrewa 12:05, 27 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I think the article certainly reads well, in some places it does in my view unnecessarily soft-pedal well sourced accusations a bit too much. In particular the "accusations" of torture were in fact admissions of nuns, not accusations. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogostick 02:46, Dec 8, 2003 (UTC)