Christopher Hitchens was right. Colette Livermore, an Australian former-nun (now a medical doctor) has written a book about her time with Mother Teresa's Order in Calcutta. Here are some excerpts from a newspaper article about it:
"Colette Livermore was a gifted student who won a university scholarship to study medicine, but chose instead to follow Mother Teresa and joined the Sisters of Charity.
It was not long before she realised that there were two sides to the saintly persona of Mother Teresa which the media had spun.
"Any organisation that demands you stick to a rigid timetable and do exactly what you're told is on the road to inhumanity, and I think and that was the problem," she says.
"Mother Teresa asked you to give up your brain, your will, everything. She asked for total surrender of the person.
"Once you're within that sort of organisation, it's hard to get your bearings. You're off balance because Mother Teresa is a saintly person and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and all that sort of thing so you think that if you disagree with things, there must be something wrong with you rather than the organisation.
"We did our training and then I was sent to the Gulf province of New Guinea without any warning or preparation and nearly died of cerebral malaria.
"I was there for a few years and then transferred to Manila and worked in a garbage dump looking after people with tuberculosis. I wasn't even trained to the level of a barefoot doctor."
From Manila, Livermore was sent to Calcutta and it was there she tried and failed to leave the order. "You're always told that you're sinful and proud and all that sort of thing. It played with my mind. I realised things weren't right but I couldn't get any external bearings.
"You're cut off. You can't listen to the radio or read the newspapers or talk to friends. You have very little contact with your family. Your mind is only hearing one opinion. There's only one voice speaking. It's difficult to leave when Mother Teresa is telling you that it's to do with the devil."
Livermore's disaffection with Mother Teresa peaked when she clashed with her superiors over a decision not to treat sick children on a holy day.
"A ruling was made that on this recollection day, this day of prayer, children were not to be admitted to the Home for the Children.
"This really sick child came in with stick arms, breathing really fast and dehydrated and I was told he couldn't stay. I had this internal conflict and eventually the child was admitted but only after I'd had a big fight.
"These sorts of things happened time and time again because there was this rigid obedience and timetable, so I wrote to Calcutta and said: 'This can't be right.'
Mother Teresa's reply was not the one Livermore had hoped for. "She said that just as Our Lady watched Jesus die, I should be able to accept the death of a child if obedience asked it of me.
"Then I said: 'That's against the gospel' and they said that even the devil could quote scripture."
Livermore's portrait of Mother Teresa is of a woman tortured by her own spirituality.
"It led her to some pretty dark places," she says. "She talked about her inner emptiness and misery. She said 'Empty yourself of all that's not God.' She just felt depleted and that's what happened to all of us too."
Livermore describes the order as a sect and has written a book, Hope Endures, chronicling her experiences.
Mother Teresa's mistake, says Livermore, was in thinking that obedience was more important than compassion.
"That's not something that's widely known and not part of what the media says about her. It was dictatorial. I should have got out sooner," she says, shaking her head.
When she finally left, she turned to the medical degree she had spurned when she joined the sisters and became a doctor, working in Timor, the Northern Territory, the Congo, Sudan and Darfur.
One casualty of her time with Mother Teresa was her religion.
"I ended up an agnostic," she says. "I just couldn't believe it any more but if, as when I was in Timor from 2000-2003, you can do something for the kids, then for some people at least, you can make a difference."
"... part of the reason I wrote the book [was] to tell religious people not to give up that inner compass that they have. You can't live your life with all these excluding rules."
She says the problems within the order are exemplified by the nuns' practice of self-flagellation, whipping themselves to try to imitate Christ's suffering.
"Suffering comes your way and you have to put up with it but," she says, "but it's sort of warped to go looking for it."
* Hope Endures by Colette Livermore, William Heinemann Australia
From: http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24809240-23272,00.html
