Mother Teresa in hotpants

Mata-Ji's Tomb

When I was at Maitri Hospice, I struggled several times with the Gift of Love, Mother Teresa’s San Francisco home for the dying. I was not alone. More than once, I got a call from a distressed mother, sister, or friend of a radical fairy who got stuck in the “Gift of Love,” where a well-intentioned Indian nun was beating the Devil out of him with a bunch of peacock feathers. There was nothing we could do to stop it because the Mother’s missions were entirely self-funded and exempt from any anti-discrimination regulation, and she was a saint. Unless we were family (which did not include boyfriends), we weren’t even allowed in to witness the loud calls to say the rosary together at 4 PM.

It fit the rumors of her Indian house for dying destitutes where baptism came before any medical treatment.  I found myself siding with Christopher Hitchens. As a liberal Catholic, at least in my history, I resented that this woman enforced heavy-handed religious demands by her saintly persona and rumors of being a living saint. A few younger, mostly Latino gay kids who really did feel that AIDS was punishment for being gay found some consolation in the care of the sisters. Most San Francisco gay men did not. I found it abhorrent. But we all kept our mouths shut. A hundred men were dying every week, and so many were homeless we needed every act of kindness that was offered.

Many years later, around 2015-16, when she was canonized, I visited Mata-Ji's tomb in Kolkata. My opinion shifted in a way I did not expect. I didn’t find myself less critical of the “loving” behavior of Mata-Ji’s sisters in the Gift of Love, but my experience of her presence at the Mother House did shake some of my preconceived ideas.

My partner and I hired a car and followed the Ganges from Rishikesh towards the delta east of Kolkata where its holy waters empty into the Bay of Bengal. I’ll try to write about our trip along the Ganges another time. In almost every way, it was a very disturbing experience. For all the planning, money, and repeated efforts to care for holy Ganga Mata, every government and every Lok Sabha has proven helpless to clean its waters, making more hollow promises and postponing the drastic work required.

A few days later, when we drove through the long delta and reached the shore of the Bay, we could only spend a few hours before we had to leave; the sludge was thick and black; we couldn’t escape its foul smell; it coated everything; the volume of untreated sewage, chemical run-off from the factories along the river, discharge from the tanneries, mixed with human remains, was overwhelming. I said out loud that it was a cesspool and my partner told me to shut up. Slandering the holy ground could get us in big trouble.

We quickly decided to double back to Kolkata and spend the rest of our time there. The seat of the British East India Company since the 17th century, the central city and some of the suburbs are very beautiful, filled with lovely colonial buildings; even the typical Indian middle-class neighborhoods are incredibly clean for India.

On the last day before the flight back to Delhi, we decided to visit Mother Teresa's tomb. We either didn’t read the guidebook carefully enough or just didn’t plan well, but we arrived at the very unassuming Mother House just after 1 PM. A simple sign over the gate clearly said it was closed from 1-3. Our plane was either 4:30 or 5. We’d missed our chance. We rang the bell at the gate anyway. A lovely young nun answered and explained that the sisters needed time for prayer and rest. Their chapel was closed. But then, in the next breath, she said she could open the door for us and let us visit the shrine room for a few minutes. Of course we said yes.

A very simple, unadorned wooden door stood just to our right. Inside, almost nothing indicated a sacred place: it was a fairly large room with a low ceiling, the ubiquitous cheap floor tile that was in every Indian house, simply painted cement walls, the rough timber beams with single harsh fluorescent bulbs, a few wooden benches, and stacks of the cheap plastic chairs that were in every house, on every balcony, every restaurant. There was a nondescript altar for Mass against one wall, and in the middle of the room, her tomb. Just that, a very plain white marble box, about the size of a large dining table, with an inscription and a painted statue of the Virgin Mary, which was very nice, but something that looked mass-produced for the shops that sold icons and statues of every saint and god of India. Totally, absolutely ordinary. One sister in prayer on a kneeler in a back corner; our rule-breaking sister standing in the doorway. The only thing that set the room apart was that it was immaculately clean and absolutely unlike any other religious holy place that I’d ever visited in India.

It also felt absolutely appropriate.

I walked directly to Mata Ji’s tomb and knelt on the hard, wide step that surrounded it. I know that I touched it. I might have even lowered my forehead until it touched the top, but I’m quite sure that I didn’t kiss it. Regardless, I began to feel very different, not like I’d walked into a room with a famous person, maybe a movie star, and was in awe, but I sensed a presence. It was a very powerful sensation. It felt personal, like meeting someone. I might have been so blown away by the incredible mix of humility, love, and devotion in the way the room was set up, but the feeling went very deep, and I started to cry, softly, but the tears were there just as they are now while I’m writing about the memory. Regardless of whatever opinions I had, I knew that I was in the presence of a Great Being, to borrow a Buddhist term. After a few more minutes, our very kind nun signaled that she had to close the door and do whatever was next in her day. At the gate, she gave us some small miraculous metals, like the ones that the nuns gave us for a correct answer in catechism class, and we left a few hundred rupees in the alms box. We said goodbye and left. My memory may be tricking me, but she had a lovely smile.


During the last Companions Zoom, someone mentioned that it would be entirely inappropriate to put Mother Teresa in hotpants. Then I came across this picture of HH Dalai Lama on his first international trip after escaping from Lhasa. This is the picture taken when he landed in Tokyo. It had to be sometime in the early 60’s. The Japanese stewardesses certainly didn’t dress like nuns, but it doesn’t seem to have bothered HH a whole lot.

Christopher Hitchens vs. the Blessed Venerable Unassailable Saint Mātā-ji, aka Mother Teresa

15th December 2011

Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual ought to be is someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them."

This morning, I got further confirmation that Mother Teresa is not what the world would like us to believe she was. As I was reading that the Missionaries of Charity worldwide are praying for the soul of Christopher Hitchens, the touching sentiment arrived within seconds of news from India that her followers rejected my then partner’s offer to teach English in one of their schools because—his words, a loose translation from the Hindi—“we don’t want fags.” Ah! Homophobes. I was not surprised, but what a loss for the kids who might have really learned something from a very smart, educated guy, fluent in Hindi and English.

I’ve had history with the Missionaries here in San Francisco, though my personal contact has been no more than smiling at some of them on the bus.

Back in 1991, when I was running Maitri Hospice, I got a panicked call from the sister of a man who wound up in the Gift of Love, the Missionaries AIDS Hospice. The woman was completely outraged: her brother felt that he had been taken captive by religious fanatics who cut off his TV, made him say the rosary, and beat the devil out of him with bunches of peacock feathers attached to the beds of recalcitrant patients.

I was never able to verify these practices because the Missionaries did not accept public funding and escaped the normal oversight required for hospice. So it’s only hearsay. I spoke with the guy who felt trapped there and moved him to the top of our waiting list. He moved to Peter Claver House and died before we had a bed.

After leaving Maitri and dealing with my own PTSD, I went to work as the Assistant Director of The Spiritual Center for AIDS Services in Oakland, soon to become just “The Center” as the street folks, sex workers, called us. A few of the men missionaries started The Center, especially one American guy with a deep sense of compassion and commitment to the poor. But he was also gay, came out, and left.

When Mātā-ji learned that a good portion of the infected sex industry workers still worked and that the majority of the injection drug users did not embrace total abstinence, she pulled her support. The Center was taken over by a ragtag group of outsider nuns, priests, gays, blacks, catholic lay people and Jews—Jacinta from the Sisters of the Holy Family was the main stay of the program, really our priest, who did the memorial services, hospital visits, and many hours of counseling; Anne who was a Franciscan ran a day care for kids with HIV and the children of women with HIV; an older Dominican woman, perhaps in her late 80’s, who sat at the door and greeted everyone warmly; a gay priest who did the reports to the CDC; a full cadre of catholic lay people from the suburbs who prepared meals everyday for about a hundred or so. The staff was rounded out with a few other gay men, a Latino Jew who was the social worker and case manager, a black lesbian who did drug and alcohol counseling, a huge, handsome, grounded brother who drove the van, getting folks to medical appointments.

So what’s my point other than my walk into the past to feel deep gratitude and love for a whole bunch of people who really did step up and give of themselves during a terrible epidemic? When I wrote to foundations for money, the board chair, a good friend, told me to milk the Mother Teresa thing as much as possible. Which I did—until we heard through the grapevine that Mātā-ji wouldn't be happy if she discovered her name was associated with the project—that we’d bowed to the idols of case-management, drug counseling, and infectious disease control.

After all, her nuns had ripped out the carpet of the abandoned convent that they’d occupied on Church St. So, of course, they had the blessing of the Most-High on her hijacking social services to covertly turn the world to Jesus.

I throw my total support to Hitchens in the controversy, and will add some Buddhist prayer that his soul winds up Nowhere, and not in a constricted heaven presided over by fanatics. It seems to me that there is more than enough evidence that “Mother Teresa makes no real effort at medical or social relief, and that her mission is religious and propagandistic and includes surreptitious baptism of unbelievers.”

And finally, from an interview with Christopher, who makes my point very concisely.
Free Inquiry: According to polls, Mother Teresa is the most respected woman in the world. Her name is a byword for selfless dedication in the service of humanity. So why are you picking on this sainted old woman?

Christopher Hitchens: Partly because that impression is so widespread. But also because the sheer fact that this is considered unquestionable is a sign of what we are up against, namely the problem of credulity. One of the most salient examples of people's willingness to believe anything if it is garbed in the appearance of holiness is the uncritical acceptance of the idea of Mother Teresa as a saint by people who would normally be thinking—however lazily—in a secular or rational manner. In other words, in every sense it is an unexamined claim.

Saint Francis Xavier and the Goan Inquisition

“O Tempora, O Mores” -- Not so Fast!

The Miracles of Saint Francis Xavier, Peter Paul Rubens, 1617/1618 

I have been fascinated by the relatively short career of Francis Xavier since Jesuit Prep School. When I started practicing Zen and learned that he was the first Christian with any religious training to contact a Japanese Zen monk, my admiration grew. Then, reading his letters to Ignatius under the direction of Jesuit Brother Tom Marshall, I was struck both by what seemed to be genuine curiosity, an ability to form friendships, and then, in the blink of an eye, to jump into an extremely myopic, dogmatic mindset, hurling condemnations equal to the most ferocious defender of the faith, espousing positions I find barbaric.

When I first went to India, perhaps the second or third trip, we went to Mass in the Basilica of Bom Jesu, where the mummified body of Xavier is venerated. I wrote about it in my blog: Goa, Saint Francis and Me. My first impression was that this was another take on the Indian custom of veneration of saints. But then I discovered an indigenous movement to send Francis’s body back to Lisbon or Rome. The Konkani Christian Victims of Francis Xavier’s Atrocities group began their campaign in 1961 when the Republic of India seized control of Goa and its territories. Based in Mangalore, the Konkani victims claim to be descendants of the people whose lives were destroyed by the Portuguese Inquisition. Xavier asked the King of Portugal to send Inquisitors to Goa. They arrived eight years after Xavier’s death, but that does not absolve him of the murder of 57 Hindus, Muslims and new Indian Christians burned at the stake, nor the property confiscated by those whose baptism secured their status in the upper class or their Portuguese overlords.

In 1994, the Indian Cardinal Simon Pimenta was asked about the controversy surrounding the veneration of the body of Francis Xavier in Goa. He said: “The beliefs and actions of people of earlier ages cannot be judged by the principles of a later age.” The Cardinal was perhaps a bit confused by his own good deeds and his personal, compassionate response to the Teaching of our Lord. Or, like many otherwise good men improperly trained by Jesuits in the classics, when at a loss for words, he grabbed a line from Cicero and tried to construct a plausible excuse. Or perhaps he had fallen under the spell of hagiographers who inflated the number of Xavier’s already impressive 30,000 converts to 700,000 people across Asia between his arrival in Goa, India in May of 1542 and his death on Shangchuan Island off the coast of China in December of 1552. Whatever the case, one thing is clear: a man of the church he loved was embarrassed by the clear and deeply inhuman acts of one of the most important founding fathers, and he fumbled.

But I will condemn him. Our lovely Cardinal friend fumbled. He had no other choice. Hagiography is a straitjacket. The formula dictates stories of saints carefully crafted to “edify,” even if it requires erasing or editing, exaggeration, or stuffing inconvenient facts into an unnoticed corner where they won’t attract attention. Miracles, of course, are required before the Church recommends a particular person’s holy life as worth imitating. They usually also embody some praiseworthy trait beyond avoiding sin, believing dogma, and submitting to the will of God, as if it were contained in the holy rule of a sanctioned religious institute. That’s all lumped together as heroic virtue. I am concerned here with what was left out.

Hagiography leaves enormous room to fuddle. In the recent case of Josemaría Escrivá, both Pope Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict wanted to elevate Opus Dei because it produced the conservative priests they both favored, but they rushed the job and got sucked in by Opus’s self-aggrandizement and propaganda. This left the infallible Church defending the indefensible: human trafficking, the exploitation of women and teenagers, financial irregularities, and other cult-like behaviors. But dear God, don’t touch the halo over Josemaria’s head.

In the case of Francis Xavier, the Jesuits waited until the footnotes to mention that he asked the Portuguese to send the Inquisition to Goa. The only other prominent Jesuit tainted by the Inquisition was Robert Bellarmine, another saint who actually signed the warrant for Giordano Bruno’s execution, and was an Inquisitor at the trial of Fulgenzio Manfredi, who was also burned at the stake. Bellarmine did convince Galileo to renounce the Copernican theory that the Earth revolved around the sun, based on the evidence of scripture, which was scientifically wrong but does not concern me as I’m examining his misguided use of the death penalty.

Xavier’s conversion strategy and subsequent enforcement of Christian discipline among his fledgling churches used the deadly force of a conquering army. I was present at a conference where Father X DeSousa, a Goan Jesuit, described his ancestors' conversion by drawing his index finger across his neck. The choice between baptism or execution leaves little room for free will.

Xavier died when he was only 46. He built a massive and inflated record as a missionary while still a relatively young man. I always felt that under the heroism was a full-blown fanatic, a religious soldier of fortune with a magical worldview. He jumped aboard a Portuguese carrack, becoming its chaplain, as it sailed to India in the service of a greedy colonial power. He was no doubt brilliant, initiating a conversation about the numinous world, but then too quickly expropriating every means at hand to gain dominance and force submission.

I am not insinuating, nor do I believe that Pimenta condones or justifies any of the methods or goals of the Inquisition, yet here we are: it is indisputable that Xavier requested that Portuguese inquisitors enforce the straight-and-narrow in doctrine and politics, supporting an imperial, colonializing, slave-trading complex to plunder Goa. His presence gave God’s blessing to their colonial designs.

Adhering to Archbishop Pimenta’s warning about extracting facts from their particular tempora et mores, we’ll have to wait another century for the Age of Enlightenment. It’’s not particularly fair to burden a religious figure of the sixteenth century with attitudes from our own post-colonial experience, but I refuse to condone participating in the fiery executions of the Inquisition as worthy of any saint, not even a swashbuckling Jesuit.

_________________

Notes:

During the Goa Inquisition, which lasted from 1560 to 1812, about 16,000 people were brought to trial. Out of these cases, records show that 57 people were put to death by burning, and 64 were burned in effigy (using a statue because they had already died or fled). Thousands more faced other punishments, such as prison, exile, or the loss of their property. The Portuguese colonial government destroyed most of the records in 1812, so these figures are likely low, conservative estimates.

The First Provincial Council (1567): In Goa, church authorities played a major role in refining legal definitions of slavery. The Council condemned "unjust" slavery (such as capturing people during peacetime) but validated slavery resulting from a "just war" or self-sale during extreme famines.

Xavier personal attitude contributed to (not just condoned) the continuation of enslavement by the Portuguese. Though far fewer Indians were enslaved than West Africans, Indians were captured and sold as chattel. According to Teotonio de Souza, the former head of the Xavier Center of Historical Research, “[Xavier’s] appreciation of Indians, whom he called Negroes, was negative, and he became enthusiastic in his mission to Asia only after discovering the ‘white people’ of Japan and China.”

Are Books Next?

Originally posted Monday, January 26, 2009. I stand by my prediction.


Liberal education as we know it will soon become a thing of the past. I wonder if anyone really cares or realizes the cost?

Here is a comment from a reader, Andrew Davis, of The New Republic:

“In other news, American Airlines announces they will no longer fly airplanes.

“After careful analysis, we discovered that we make most of our profit selling tickets, not flying planes, so we are canceling all flights henceforth. Tickets, however, are still available online, over the phone, or from an agent. Our customers will also be glad to know that we are also reducing our fuel surcharge by fifty percent."

clipped from blogs.tnr.com

Why Book Reviews Matter

Rumors surfaced last Friday that Book World, the Washington Post's highly-respected weekly stand-alone on all things literary, might be closing. Politico's Michael Calderone quickly confirmed that, while no decision has been made, it's under high-level discussion as a cost-cutting measure. This would leave the New York Times' Book Review as the last stand-alone book section in American dailies.

In recent years, in-house book reviewing has been eliminated, abridged, or downgraded by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Cleveland's Plain Dealer, and The San Diego Union-Tribune — the list goes on.



*For more of my collages, go to Application of the Senses
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