This is actually a very good point. If she was just a horrible monster, just withholding care for conversion and whatnot, why did almost a million people (according to a CNN article on her funeral - CNN - Mourners honor Mother Teresa at funeral Mass - September 13, 1997 ) including the poorest of the poor line the streets for her funeral?
I’m inclined to believe that perhaps they thought that Mother Teresa eased the suffering of the poor and did a great service to the people she took care of.
Why on earth is Hitchens’ color relevant? Unless of course you’re a racist who believes white people always lie. Facts have no color and Hitchens’ book on the old fraud Mother Theresa is extremely well-researched. It certainly opened my eyes.
Why did millions of Russians cry when Stalin died?
Perhaps millions cried out of relief, while others showed up in hundreds of thousands just to witness that she (like Stalin) was really dead. 
And from the same article:
, and this nasty bit about secret baptisms:
Yes, but “We believe this person is doing a great service” is a very different thing from “this person actually is doing a great service”. And the photos of her missions seem to paint a very different story.
Relevant:
Also, it would be news to me that Hitchens was a habitual liar.
I think the two options are not necessarily opposites.
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Was she a scourge?
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Was she a saint?
Those of us outside the church can judge 1, but not 2.
And even if the answer to 1 is yes, the answer to 2 can be yes. I am not a religious person and have no opinion on saintdom. The RCC gets to define it any old way they please, and if they decide that Hitler is a saint, Hitler is a saint.
Impossible! He helped the poor by being rich. Sheesh. It’s like you don’t even understand economics.
oh snap! 
Anyone who was under Mother Teresa’s care probably didn’t live to attend her funeral. They were hospices, remember, so anyone who entered wasn’t expected to make it out alive. But if you operate a hospice, you are expected to try to mitigate your patients’ suffering, not refuse to buy painkillers because the suffering of the innocent glorifies your god, and if people are being sent to your hospice with treatable illnesses, then perhaps you should put some effort into providing real medical care and not just a place to die.
I suppose I’m just following the trend, which seems to be that whenever someone does something we don’t like, we call them a “white man”, even when they aren’t one.
But that said, the people of Calcutta loved Mother Teresa. For a rich white westerners to say that Mother Teresa actually fooled and harmed them certainty smacks of condescending attitude, implying that the poor of Calcutta aren’t smart enough to judge what’s in their own best interests.
And who apparently didn’t even know that the “Mother” part is the treatment usually given to nuns (some orders use Sister for most nuns and leave Mother for the Mother Superior), see cite from him in post 3. Such willful ignorance doesn’t exactly lead me to trust anything coming from him.
Sorry, what?
I’m pretty sure he knew that. He was being sarcastic.
I’ve never seen a ton of clear and convincing evidence of Mother Terasa being a monster, a lot of Hitchens critiques of her hinge on the very different worldview of the deeply religious and atheists.
There’s different types of atheists, I’m an atheist because I don’t believe, but I was raised Catholic and have a pretty firm understanding of the theology and how they think. I believe that there are different moral codes that people can choose to live by. Utilitarianism is not one that I particularly like for a host of reasons. Hitchens on the other hand was an atheist utilitarian, who only looked through a very narrow lens of that worldview.
So when he blasts Teresa for her words that she “wasn’t as social worker” and it “wasn’t her goal to alleviate poverty”, frankly is just judging her by a utilitarian worldview. Teresa inarguably worked to lower the mortality rate associated with being poor, but she did so in a way consistent with a strict adherence to traditional Catholic values.
Christianity by and large does not see poverty, or even a life of suffering, as a terrible thing. That’s a very atheist utilitarian world view. Can you feed yourself? Can you clothe yourself? Can you acquire shelter? Can you acquire treatment for disease? A certain type of Catholic worldview would not see it as a terrible thing if you answer yes to all of those but you happen to be very poor. Teresa strongly believed in the sanctity of life, and if you note a lot of her work relates to doing things to try and make sure poor people could enjoy good medical health and long lives. A traditional Catholic view has always placed great emphasis on never surrendering to death. No big dose of morphine and a graceful exit–note JPII very specifically made sure that in his final days nothing was done medically to hasten his exit, even though his last few weeks were not enjoyable ones.
Hitchens just had a real problem with the fact Teresa didn’t view earthly poverty as the end all be all of “terrible things” and it’s a very Christian idea that earthly misery is something to be put up with–and yes, even glorified to a degree. Early 20th century prosperity doctrine has served to transform Christianity to a more pagan religion in which you do x to receive y in magical reward, but the Catholic Church doesn’t follow the line and never really has (and mainstream Christianity never did until some theologically retarded developments in America.)
Aroup Chatterjee has several reasons to be taken somewhat skeptically in regard to Mother Teresa. He disliked the way her actions and words portrayed his home town (Calcutta) and has thus some degree of personal animus and reason to negatively portray Teresa. He also made a big deal about “mismanagement of finance.” Okay, whether that’s true or not isn’t super relevant. There’s no evidence she fraudulently enriched herself or anything like that. Her worst sin might be that there was a “perception” any money given to her organization would be spent on medical care, and some of it wasn’t. But that’s true of all charities. She wasn’t a professional accountant or business person. There’s not necessarily any malice in being bad at managing large sums of money. In fact most people go to college and are then given experience managing smaller sums of money until they’ve earned a position of trust managing large sums of money. Mother Teresa didn’t have any of that in her life so it’d kind of be shocking if she had managed charitable donations well or even competently.
That’s why in the first world charitable organizations long ago adopted the management and fiscal practices of businesses. The Catholic Church has long been on the bad side of history in that department, being very slow to adopt modern financial behaviors in the Vatican and while most of say the church’s dioceses and organizations in America are ran quite professionally in some parts of the world (like mid-20th century India, for example) things weren’t quite ran that way.
Without any clear indication of financial malice, I default to the logical assumption to not ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to incompetence.
Finally, Chatterjee criticizes the quality of care offered at her facilities as lacking. This is undeniably true–it was lacking. If you had pretty much anywhere else to go other than one of her facilities, you’d be better off going there. Except the thing was, she was serving people that in classist India were not being served. They did not have access to good or adequate medical care. She was doing the best she was able to do (which is far different than ‘the best possible’) with limited expertise and resources, and serving people that frankly the powerful elites in India didn’t give much of a shit about (and still honestly do not, India is one of the most class stratified countries in the world.)
But anyway most of this doesn’t really matter. The Vatican doesn’t beatify and then canonize people because they are great utilitarian secular humanists it puts a hell of a lot more weight on conversions and such than it ever would on purely secular deeds. So many of these criticisms from an atheist perspective kind of miss the point of why the RCC saints people in the first place. From a Catholic perspective it is truly the case that if you’re choosing between converting someone and saving their soul and saving their life, saving the soul will always take precedence.
I don’t agree with that perspective because I disbelieve in a soul, a heaven-or-hell hereafter and etc, but within the logical constraints of Catholic morality I don’t see much to condemn Mother Terasa for, that we actually have evidence to support.
It seems likely that she died an atheist:
Not relevant to her benevolence, but certainly relevant to official sainting.
It is easy to criticize, but hard to emulate. The fact is, Mother Teresa did work to mitigate suffering of humans. When Hitchens does something even remotely similar, he earns the right to criticize. Or take the great humanitarian , Bill Clinton. he runs an allegedly charitable foundation, and collects billions of $$. Yet, he lives a life of luxury, dines at the best restaurants, travels first class, and lives in luxury-does he merit any praise?
By what mechanism did she mitigate suffering? People gave her money so she could use it to mitigate suffering of humans, but what did she do with that money that achieved that goal? As I see it, she did not desire the mitigation of suffering, instead seeing the suffering of the weak as beautiful and holy. She embezzled money that should have gone to a worthy cause, building missions instead of buying painkillers.
Christopher Hitchens willingly allowed himself to be fucking tortured to mitigate the suffering of humans. Sacks of shit like Donald Trump still advocate waterboarding prisoners, but Hitchens was a man who could say from first hand experience exactly what kind of evil this is.
Nonsense. The fact that we do not live up to someone’s good deeds does not remove our right to decry their misdeeds. Particularly if that person is being held up as a literal saint, and is often seen as a near-perfect human being. Particularly when their misdeeds throw fairly extreme shadows on their good deeds. The criticism of Teresa reflects explicitly on her good deeds. The criticism is that her work to mitigate the suffering of humans was horribly misportrayed, and was nowhere near as positive as she is given credit for, or indeed for what we would expect, given the money she was given.
I vote scourge. The “saint” part is entirely hype.