Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity: Complaints and controversies galore before child trafficking

Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity has landed in trouble after selling, according to Jharkhand Police, three children and a fourth one given away for free by a woman who worked as a nun for a shelter home in Ranchi. 

The fourth child was traced in Ranchi on Sunday and rescued. 

The first baby was rescued on July 3. The second child was rescued from Morabadi area of Ranchi on July 8 and the third was rescued from Simdega in Jharkhand on July 11.

Initially, an employee of 'Nirmal Hriday' a shelter home run by the Missionary was arrested on July 4 for allegedly a child to a Uttar Pradesh couple.

Sister Konsalia was arrested on July 5 in connection with the case and on Saturday confessed to selling three children for money and giving away the fourth child.

Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen criticised Mother Teresa and the charity home. She had tweeted, " Mother Teresa charity home sells babies, it is nothing new. Mother Teresa was involved with many illegal, inhumane, immoral, unethical, unprincipled, wicked, fraudulent, barbaric acts. Please don't try to protect criminals only because they are famous."

However, this is not the first time that Mother Teresa or the Missionaries of Charity has had a brush with the law or has raised the hackles of sane people in societies worldwide.

This is also not the first time the charity homes run by the nuns of Mother Teresa's order are being questioned.

Back in February 2015, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat had said that the prime motive behind Mother Teresa's service to the destitute was converting them to Christianity. He was heavily criticised for his comments, with detractors attacking the RSS for its 'intolerance'.

But Mother Teresa and the missionary has been questioned by several free thinkers, rationalists and people of eminence from around the world ― including by the Christian-dominated West.

British humanist-activist and freethought advocate Barbara Smoker had in a Freethinker column said, "If a fraction of the resources she has deployed in Calcutta alone for the purpose of giving some of the dying paupers a little comfort and dignity in their last few hours had been devoted to providing free contraceptive facilities, the amount of human suffering prevented thereby would have been far greater. This, however, would provide no tear-jerking television scenes for the gratification of sentimentalists in the affluent West." Several know how anti-abortion Mother Teresa was.

Canadian journalist Ted Byfield had written in Alberta Report, "If the real world knew the real Mother Teresa there would be a lot less adulation."

Christopher Hitchens described Mother Teresa's organisation as a cult that promoted suffering. He quoted Mother Teresa saying, "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people."

And with the current controversy over baby selling, the charity home perhaps will be viewed with suspicion.

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