Former Catholic Sister Says Even Mother Teresa Is a Fraud

According to Susan Shields, Mother Teresa 'harmed her helpers as well as those they helped.'

By Greg Szymanski
June 6, 2007

For nine years Susan Shields worked as a devoted Catholic Sister, working for Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. When finally becoming fed-up in 1989, she left Mother Teresa in disgust over the misuse of millions in charitable donations that never got to their destination -- the poor and afflicted.

Shields story was recently sent to the Arctic Beacon, as printed in the
Free Inquiry Magazine, revealing how Mother Teresa really turned a blind eye to the poor while millions of dollars in donations are still sitting
in Vatican bank accounts.

Here is her story entitled "Mother Teresa's House of Illusions:
How She Harmed Her Helpers As Well As Those They `Helped'

"Some years after I became a Catholic, I joined Mother Teresa's
congregation, the Missionaries of Charity. I was one of her sisters for
nine and a half years, living in the Bronx, Rome, and San Francisco, until
I became disillusioned and left in May 1989. As I re-entered the world, I
slowly began to unravel the tangle of lies in which I had lived. I
wondered how I could have believed them for so long.

"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 as long as 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.

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.

"It is in the hope that others may see the fallacy of this purported way
to holiness that I tell a little of what I know. Although there are
relatively few tempted to join Mother Teresa's congregation of sisters,
there are many who generously have supported her work because they do not
realize how her twisted premises strangle efforts to alleviate misery.
Unaware that most of the donations sit unused in her bank accounts, they
too are deceived into thinking they are helping the poor.

"As a Missionary of Charity, I was assigned to record donations and write
the thank-you letters. The money arrived at a frantic rate. The mail
carrier often delivered the letters in sacks. We wrote receipts for
checks of $50,000 and more on a regular basis. Sometimes a donor would
call up and ask if we had received his check, expecting us to remember it
readily because it was so large. How could we say that we could not
recall it because we had received so many that were even larger?

"When Mother spoke publicly, she never asked for money, but she did
encourage people to make sacrifices for the poor, to "give until it
hurts." Many people did - and they gave it to her. We received touching
letters from people, sometimes apparently poor themselves, who were
making sacrifices to send us a little money for the starving people in
Africa, the flood victims in Bangladesh, or the poor children in India.
Most of the money sat in our bank accounts.

"The flood of donations was considered to be a sign of God's approval of
Mother Teresa's congregation. We were told by our superiors that we
received more gifts than other religious congregations because God was
pleased with Mother, and because the Missionaries of Charity were the
sisters who were faithful to the true spirit of religious life.

"Most of the sisters had no idea how much money the congregation was
amassing. After all, we were taught not to collect anything. One summer
the sisters living on the outskirts of Rome were given more crates of
tomatoes than they could distribute. None of their neighbors wanted them
because the crop had been so prolific that year. The sisters decided to
can the tomatoes rather than let them spoil, but when Mother found out
what they had done she was very displeased. Storing things showed lack of
trust in Divine Providence.

"The donations rolled in and were deposited in the bank, but they had no
effect on our ascetic lives and very little effect on the lives of the
poor we were trying to help. We lived a simple life, bare of all
superfluities. We had three sets of clothes, which we mended until the
material was too rotten to patch anymore. We washed our own clothes by
hand. The never-ending piles of sheets and towels from our night shelter
for the homeless we washed by hand, too. Our bathing was accomplished
with only one bucket of water. Dental and medical checkups were seen as
an unnecessary luxury.

"Mother was very concerned that we preserve our spirit of poverty.
Spending money would destroy that poverty. She seemed obsessed with using
only the simplest of means for our work. Was this in the best interests
of the people we were trying to help, or were we in fact using them as a
tool to advance our own "sanctity?" In Haiti, to keep the spirit of
poverty, the sisters reused needles until they became blunt. Seeing the
pain caused by the blunt needles, some of the volunteers offered to
procure more needles, but the sisters refused.

"We begged for food and supplies from local merchants as though we had no
resources. On one of the rare occasions when we ran out of donated bread,
we went begging at the local store. When our request was turned down, our
superior decreed that the soup kitchen could do without bread for the
day.

"It was not only merchants who were offered a chance to be generous.
Airlines were requested to fly sisters and air cargo free of charge.
Hospitals and doctors were expected to absorb the costs of medical
treatment for the sisters or to draw on funds designated for the
religious. Workmen were encouraged to labor without payment or at reduced
rates. We relied heavily on volunteers who worked long hours in our soup
kitchens, shelters, and day camps.

"A hard-working farmer devoted many of his waking hours to collecting and
delivering food for our soup kitchens and shelters. "If I didn't come,
what would you eat?" he asked.

"Our Constitution forbade us to beg for more than we needed, but, when it
came to begging, the millions of dollars accumulating in the bank were
treated as if they did not exist.

"For years I had to write thousands of letters to donors, telling them
that their entire gift would be used to bring God's loving compassion to
the poorest of the poor. I was able to keep my complaining conscience in
check because we had been taught that the Holy Spirit was guiding Mother.
To doubt her was a sign that we were lacking in trust and, even worse,
guilty of the sin of pride. I shelved my objections and hoped that one
day I would understand why Mother wanted to gather so much money, when
she herself had taught us that even storing tomato sauce showed lack of
trust in Divine Providence."