Maneka Gandhi, head of the Women and Child Development Ministry, said the Missionaries of Charity have “cited ideological issues” with the adoption guidelines and that “they do not want to come under a uniform secular agenda.”
Sister Amala of Nirmala Shishu Bhawan, a New Delhi orphanage run by the Missionaries of Charity, said: “We have already shut our adoption services, because we believe our children may not receive real love. We do not wish to give children to single parents or divorced people.
“It is not a religious rule but a human rule. Children need both parents, male and female. That is only natural, isn’t it?”
Oh really? Not a religious rule but a human rule? That’s simply a lie. I’ve been to India and seen the conditions in both orphanages and for children on the street. Believe me, a single parent is far better than these alternatives.
From the Catholic News Agency:
“Our rules only allow married couples to adopt,” Sister Amala explained, saying the sisters are concerned about the moral upbringing of the children who are adopted by single individuals, rather than a mother and a father.
Sister Amala seems to be a spokesperson for this practice, but the Telegraph gives what I think is the real reason why these kids won’t find homes:
One of the fears of sisters in the conservative Roman Catholic order was that single parent could “turn out” to be gay or lesbian, even though adoption by homosexuals is not allowed in India.
“The new guidelines hurt our conscience,” Sister Amala, who runs the group’s children’s home in New Delhi, told The Indian Express.
“They are certainly not for religious people like us. What if the single parent who we give our baby turns out to be gay or lesbian? What security or moral upbringing will these children get? Our rules only allow married couples to adopt.”
That’s just immoral. And the Indian government is properly inflexible. As the Telegraph also notes, if the Missionaries don’t comply, and they won’t, then I do fear for these kids, who will be placed in state custody. Maneka Gandhi wants to up the number of adopted orphans from the current 4,000 per year (out of 20-30 million orphans!) to 50,000: an admirable goal. But she noted that if the Missionaries don’t comply, the kids will go elsewhere, and, if you know India, where they go won’t be pleasant:
“We are trying and persuading them because they are valuable, good people and have experience,” [Gandhi] said. “But if they do not follow the central guidelines, we will be left with no option but to de-recognise the orphanages run by them and shift the children to other places.”
Just like the Missionaries like their dying destitutes to die in pain because suffering is holy (it’s equivalent to being kissed by the tears of Jesus), so they prefer to let children suffer rather than give them a gay or single parent. Let us at last stop idolizing Mother Teresa and her acolytes. They help the poor for one reason only: to bring them to Jesus. Their hearts are hard and their ways immoral.
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The Church is one of the greatest forces for evil in the world today, with its only significant competition various other religious institutions such as the Saudi royalty.
And that most emphatically includes the Pope! Were he even half the “compassionate conservative” the liberal press portrays him as, he’d already have been on the horn to India and ripped his minions there a new one.
He and his co-conspirators have no real interest in children save as sex toys for the hierarchy. If anything, the objections expressed about homosexuals adopting the children are thinly-disguised outrage that somebody else is going to get to do to the kids what they themselves were planning on doing.
b&
Ben, I agree with every word, but just to point out that the Saudi position is a bit more complicated, in that their system is a Faustian pact between the Al-Saud ruling family and the religious establishment. The former get the oil profits and run the foreign and defence policies; the latter run the mosques (obviously) but also much of the education and ‘justice’ systems. This is one reason why appealing to the royals over human rights has so little effect. If they paid too much attention they would upset the Al-Sheikhs – and that would never do.
So let me get this straight; a group of orphanage-running nuns say its immoral for women to raise kids without a father and are unwilling to foster those kids out to single women? The lack of self-awareness is fairly mind-boggling.
It just goes to show, that religion never has, and never will operate on logic and reason.
It’s right up there with anti-choice activists who oppose birth control.
That’s a good point.
That was my immediate reaction too eric.
As I explained in a private e-mail to Jerry a few years back, the reason why I do not use my full name on any public online platform is because of the potential danger to my adopted daughters.
Birmingham City Council Social Services, at least in 2000, would put children out to adoption without regard to whether the adopter was married, single, gay or whatever. There was a problem however, if the couple were not married. At that time, and I don’t know whether it is the case now, one person had to be named as the adopter: if the couple were married then effectively the two people as a married unit were the adopters.
My now wife and I got round the problem by getting married even though we had never considered it before. Both of us wanted to be the adopters. Our excellent Social Worker also told us that adopted children of unmarried couples tended in adolescence to develop real anxiety about the seriousness of the adoptive parents if they were not married. I did not check the data but I have no reason to disbelieve her.
The attitude of the RCC in India is heartless. Had my local Social Services not taken my elder daughter from the birth mother and birth father and placed her with a single foster parent, she would now be dead – she weighed 11lbs at 6 months. British readers should think of the notorious Baby P case from a couple of years back to imagine the start in life that my daughter had and the degradation of the birth parents.
How much worse must the life chances be of a poor Indian orphan? When one thinks of the RCC’s privileging of dogma over these infants’ prospects for survival one can only observe that these people don’t know the meaning of the word ‘morality’. x
We need more people like you to do the right thing towards children and fewer like those who would stand in your way….
b&
Thank Goodness for you and your then future wife Dermot C.
I can’t think of any other group that has even remotely as awful a record of child treatment than the RCC. And many of the closest contenders are likely variations of the desert dogmas. They talk of children being the most precious of things besides their gods, and yet their actions towards children tell a very different story. Right from the most basic attitudes we see that in reality children do not warrant even the basic respect expected to be afforded to other adults. Children should be seen and not heard, they must give their attention unfailingly to adults with a sir or mam but can not expect to be taken seriously by adults. No matter who is actually right or wrong the child must yield to the adult. Children must respect adults but respect of children by adults is not even a consideration. Children can be treated just a slaves were treated, or worse. And despite their mouthings of how precious the children are, abusing and even raping them is of such little consequence that the RCC deems it more important to save face than to protect the children. Of such little consequence that millions of people still give their support and fealty to the RCC. They still gather in droves to pay respect to the leader, the Pope. Who has the nerve to piously prance around in his gilded robes as if he were worthy of extra special respect. If their myths were true he would surely burn in hell forever.
One thing that strikes me about this RCC doctrine of who is and is not worthy of being an adoptive parent is their arrogation of the definition of love. It reminds me of the Hitchslap delivered to Ann Widecombe and the African Archbishop in the London Intelligence Squared debate: when he admonished them for condemning Stephen Fry’s homosexuality as a form of love.
As a prospective adoptive parent one is presented with a biography of the potential adoptee as well as pictures of the infant, in our case. Yes, she looked cute, but that was it. You then go to visit the child at the foster parent’s home. As a not particularly sentimental person, I was completely overcome on first meeting my future daughter. I absolutely fell in love. At first sight. It was the most overwhelming feeling of my life. Like how I imagine birth fathers feel on seeing their first-born.
How much stronger might be that emotion for another, perhaps an infertile single woman who really wants kids, on their initial encounter with their adopted child? How cruel to deprive people of that opportunity. And just because some black-frocked virgo tacta imagines that his god has told him not only what love is but who is capable of feeling and acting upon it. x
It would be up to India as a people or govt. to get off of their asses and do something about this. Kicking the catholics out would be a good start.
Everyone should also read the 1995 book by Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position, Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.
I recommend the book too. Mother Teresa is a nasty piece of work, as most here already know, and this book gives some of the facts.
“MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”
― Christopher Hitchens
I find it difficult to actually dislike individual people, but every time Hitchens talked of Mother Teresa I found myself dealing with an unintentional loathing towards her.
She had a psychological disorder that has made quite possible thousands of individuals of the human race worse off than they were before. Thanks a lot you @#!*& &*&*@@.
Hitchens was also a great opponent of the main fellow who made Mother T popular in the Western world, Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the most suffocatingly cloyingly pious conservative Christians of the 20th century.
Hitchens lambasted him many times on many occasions.
Muggeridge was the author of “Something Beautiful for God”, the main book that got Mother T well known. He was also the most outspoken opponent of the Monty Python film “Life of Brian” and the debate between him and John Cleese over the film is worth watching.
Muggeridge’s “The Third Testament” is just about the most aggravating and annoying work on religious history I have ever read with its portrayal of a whole series of relatively freethinking Christian thinkers like Leo Tolstoy and William Blake as pillars of Catholic orthodoxy.
Whenever the name comes up, I always think “Mother Fucking Teresa.” Sometimes I say it that way, too.
In fact I’m getting so used to doing that, that I’m in danger of forgetting that the general public doesn’t automatically think of her as Mother Fucking Teresa. It just fits so well, and flows so easily off the tongue.
That’s my new ‘stub-toe’ aphorism!
May I strongly advocate that *everyone* says ‘Mother fucking Teresa’ (or as an alternative, ‘Mother ratbag Teresa’ if you wish to avoid the F-word). If we try hard enough, maybe we can replace her saintly image with an evil one, like Vlad the Impaler or Jack the Ripper.
(Being a Red Dwarf fan, I was extremely disconcerted when Red Dwarf, one of the most subversive and anti-authoritarian shows on TV, in its episode ‘Meltdown’ which featured a battle between wax-droid armies, included Mother Teresa on the side of good, along with Elvis, Einstein, Pythagoras, Lincoln, Stan Laurel, Noel Coward, Gandhi, Francis of Assisi, the Dalai Lama, Queen Victoria and Marilyn Monroe. On the villain side were Hitler, Caligula, Messalina, the Boston Strangler, Napoleon, Al Capone, Richard III, Mussolini and James Last.
Totally frivolous though Red Dwarf is, it’s an indication that Mother Insane Sadist Teresa was regarded in a favourable light when the episode was made in 1991. I would like to think that, post-Hitchens, no scriptwriter would make that mistake. Hence my suggested campaign.)
Mother Evil-Fucking-Bitch Teresa!!!
cr
sub
This is just sad.
Christian charity always has been given to those outside the church only for the express purpose of proselytizing. Otherwise, charity remains strictly within the church family. And, very often church wealth does not make it very far from church coffers. They seem to think that if wealth is accumulated by/for the church, it somehow also benefits the church members who are poor. Our neighbors in Mexico, Central and South America reflect this version of Catholic Church charity. Look at the magnificent churches. Then look at the indigenous people on the street. Kind of a religious version of Reagan’s useless “trickle down theory”.
This is one reason I objected to the “1000 points of light” charity of President Bush.
All people in need are deserving of help, whether associated with a Christian church or not.
Pretty much feudalism, just like the good ole days.
This just makes it obvious that these nuns don’t really care about the kids in their care. How much love could these children be getting from people who put dogma before everything else.
It’s sick that they would put the supposed immortal soul of a child before its happiness – don’t they think their God will forgive a child the sin of being adopted by a single person?
Also, if I were a single parent — due to either divorce or death — I think I would bristle in fury over the statement that the love I give my children somehow isn’t “real” love. Wtf.
And why not insist that adoptive parents don’t give “real” love either, because genes are everything? This tendency to prejudge the quality of care, concern, affection and attachment by arbitrarily ranking certain family situations as objectively superior to others is fraught with peril. Love doesn’t work like that.
I’m going to make a guess that these same orphanages also refuse to allow atheist parents to adopt. WE don’t know what REAL love is because we don’t know GOD. If the Catholics could, they’d probably throw a lot of kids now in families out onto the street along with the orphans who had been under their “care” — so that they don’t only feel their faith, but live it. Glory, glory.
People being people, however, I’m going to guess that more than a few of the nuns are heartsick over this. Surely some of them must have become emotionally attached to the children, in general or with specific favorites. If the church was having problems getting their members to join the religious orders before, I say watch what happens NOW.
I completely agree! This attitude is one that is potentially being communicated to the children in their care too. They can never find parents who truly love them because they’re not biological children. It’s sick. Kids who are already vulnerable having that idea put on them that they might never be good enough.
All you can really say for these women is at least they’re protecting the kids from life on the streets.
WTHell is a “uniform” secular agenda?? It seems like it is the sisters who are being uniform!!
If they don’t get special treatment, then religion will look like any other organization. In some cases they probably ask for changes and exceptions to laws just to make their privilege clearer, regardless of whether or not anything really bothers them.
Don’t know that, no — but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Not surprised. During the Aid crisis dying men’s partners were not allowed to visit. Who cares about compassion when God is an absolute despotic ruler. Even in the U.S. Catholic Charities in Los Angeles will not cover spouses in their health insurance for two reasons: a woman might obtain birth control pills and the spouse might be gay. What a Church!
It’s no surprise that the Missionaries of Charity would portray themselves as victims to secular laws and mores, entirely consonant with their modus operandi. Hitchens is a good intro, but to learn the whole story about Mother Teresa and her order, one must read Aroup Chatterjee’s extremely difficult to find book, Final Verdict, in which, page after page after page, the physician from Calcutta meticulously and exhaustively details and catalogs and documents her countless, may I say, sins, great and small. At almost every turn of the page, and it’s a long book, reading the things he documents brought a fresh wave of visceral revulsion. To use a biblically laden word, what she did, and what she stands for is an abomination. She was a whitened sepulchre if there ever was one. She was not selfless but solipsistic, not to mention conniving and corrupt.
Those who buy the snake oil and mistake Mother Teresa and her white sari crew for holy, humble, selfless rescuers of “the hungry, the naked, the homeless,” etc., including fetuses, and think that is why she is being canonized (and she will be) are blind to the raison d’être of her mission. Chatterjee gets it straight from the horse’s mouth when he quotes her emphatic and unequivocal declaration: “We are not nurses, we are not doctors, we are not, teachers, we are not social workers. We are religious, we are religious, we are religious.”
The reason she will be canonized is for her religiosity, her fanatical devotion to the Roman Catholic religion, her blind adherence and devotion to an empty set called the Triune God, and her single-minded fetishization of the dogmas and rituals of that God, among which is the appallingly atavistic (and fundamentally Christian) notion of offering up a hapless victim for sacrifice to appease the Great Three-in-One – which is why, as noted in the post, “the Missionaries like their dying destitutes to die in pain because suffering is holy…” it enables the sacrificial victims, whether they want to or not, to emulate “the passion of the Christ” and thereby be redeemed. I’m not able to succinctly express what I’m trying to get at in this notion of devotion to “the religious”; but I came across a New Yorker cartoon by Bob Mankoff, which, in one brief sentence and a picture, beautifully distilled and clarified this concept. It depicts an Aztec-y sacrifice in which the priest executioner, his ritual knife raised over the supine victim who is restrained hand and foot by acolytes, says to him “Look, it’s not personal – it’s religious.” Coulda come straight outta Mother Teresa’s pie-hole. I consider her ‘mission’ to be the epitome of what’s called pathological altruism, which could be defined as “the sacrifice of others for the sake of oneself.”
Further, Mother Teresa parasitically sought to co-opt and supplant Kali as the tutelary deity of Kali’s own, eponymous city, even physically encroaching upon her temple sanctuary in typical parasitic missionary fashion. To extend the religious trope, she could be regarded as a Catholic avatar of Kali, Kali of the New Dispensation – and both got off on death and the boneyards; but instead of dancing on Siva’s body in the boneyard, she dances on Christ’s. Years ago, I heard an on-the-scene BBC radio report describing an image of Mother Teresa that the reporter found in a Hindu temple in Calcutta. Lovely syncretism.
Another abomination: it might not be generally known but back in the 1990s, Ole Agnes used her unprecedented influence within the hierarchy to protect a notorious paedophile Jesuit, who abused altar boys right smack in her San Francisco convent, perhaps even while she was in residence. Again, stomach-turning stuff. Whether she actually knew about it while it was occurring is unanswered, but it is documented that she used her considerable influence to help protect him and have him returned to his priestly duties. What a holy woman. Here is a link to that story http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/tainted-saint-mother-teresa-defended-pedophile-priest/Content?oid=2183718, much more about this is on the site, including a long cover story.
Appalling, but unfortunately not so surprising, alas.
“It is not a religious rule but a human rule. Children need both parents, male and female. That is only natural, isn’t it?”
So, if a parent dies, does it therefore follow from the above that the remaining, SINGLE, parent should give up his/her children?
“One of the fears … was that single parent could “turn out” to be gay or lesbian”
Because we all know that no married parents have ever turned out to be gay.
Oh, wait…