I read a lot about her ideology, and frankly I find her ideology appalling. But here are some yes/no questions:
-Did she run organizations that fed hungry people, without requiring them to pay for the food?
-Did she run organizations that offered any health care to sick people, without requiring them to pay for the health care?
-Did she run organizations that provided a roof for homeless people, without requiring them to pay for the shelter?
My understanding is that the answer to all three questions is “yes.” Is this correct?
I don’t think it makes sense to treat her case as an all-or-nothing case. We can recognize the harm done by her ideology while also recognizing the good done by her material work.
I think most of the criticism of Mother Teresa stems from a lack of understanding of the conditions she was working in. The people she helped came out of that help in a state that we would consider grinding poverty. But what it’s hard for us First Worlders to realize is that they were even worse off before the help. Could she have given some of those people more help? Yes, of course, but her resources were limited, and that would have meant cutting off the help to yet others. She chose to give help equally to all who asked, and that meant that there wasn’t very much for any of them. She did all she could, and would have done more if that were possible. It’s not like she was holding wealth back for herself.
Huh, the standards for Sainthood aren’t based in secular morality.
Yep–and plus, I very seriously doubt based on what I know of Mother Teresa that she had any sort of “official mission statement” that said x % of donations to her would be used for x purpose. People saw she was going good works and donated money. Some, maybe most, expected the money to be used to provide services to the poor. Some were certainly donating for religious-proselytization reasons too, though. Like I had said, people shouldn’t confuse a Catholic Charity founded in 1950 by a woman with no business training with some of the more modern, professional charities in the United States.
By the time Teresa died the Missionaries of Charity had thousands of sisters, providing hospice care, care to those with AIDs, care for alcoholics etc. Would any of us here want to spend time in one of their facilities in India? Absolutely not. But again, they were serving people who literally were not being served at all. Unless they were actively hastening their deaths there is very little argument to be made they weren’t helping them, even if all they did (and there is no evidence this is all they did) was provide a little creature comforts to a person dying, that’s still a great and noble thing.
The organization also, by the way, was called “Missionaries of Charity” what exactly does a missionary do? To be frank if someone donated money and was upset to find out some of it went to proselytization, that’s on them for being stupid.
But I will also say this: If being an effective executive director of a well-heeled non-profit organization is sufficient for sainthood, then there are a lot of unsung saints out there.
But I really can’t speak to the saint thing, since I don’t believe in miracles. If they say she performed some miracles, then why shouldn’t she be a saint like all the others? Nothing bad will happen if she’s made a saint. Nothing bad will happen if she’s not.
Was she an awesome person? The hell I know. It seems like she did questionable things and held questionable positions. Just like 99% of the world. But she also did some good things too. Just like 99% of the world.
Some people need role models to help inspire them to be better. I really wish people would stop unquestioningly worshipping celebrity, including the religious kind. But seems to me if the Catholics need another role model, they could do worse than Mother Theresa. At the very least, she’s no worse than the others they’ve already got.
So obviously real miracles, as far as anyone can prove, do not exist. What instead tends to happen is the Catholic Church will retroactively “find” official miracles to support canonization of someone that the Church leadership really likes. It’s usually easy to do because a Catholic priest or nun will touch or pray with thousands of sick people during their career. Some sick people will beat the odds and survive, cancers, even terrible ones that have metastasized, sometimes experience spontaneous tumor rescission and overall cancer remission. If that rare natural occurrence happens some time after you prayed with Mother Teresa–well there you go, an official miracle.
Looking at some members of the canon of Saints, it looks like there is no provision that prevents someone from being Saint AND Scourge. So there’s that.
ISTM part of the heightened tension over Mother Theresa has to do in part with secular media and popular culture portrayals in which she gets held up as some sort of extraordinarily exemplary humanitarian beyond the strictly Catholic Church sphere – exemplified AND boosted by the Nobel accolade. Absent that flank by which she was media-canonized in life among many Western elites, she might not have become a candidate for Fast Track sainthood but her regular-order cause for canonization (founders of Orders commonly head that way) would probably be proceeding at a comfortable pace with normal pros and cons being argued. That also intensifies the spotlight on the issue of the existence and working of a “missionary order” into the late 20th Century when a lot of our mainstream culture has come to see missionary/proselytizing work as distasteful or even oughtright a wrongful act of aggression.
Many in the West even outside Catholicism too eagerly drank up the Mother Theresa image and mythos in life, and to many now it seems shocking or gratuituously hostile or negative to cut it down and point to shortcomings and failings. Which it is not. Her pop-media elevation to “celebrity living saint” may well deserve getting popped publicly and that would just be a matter of truth. But in the end, the cause for actual canonization stands or falls on the merits that are required for it: she’ll be canonized because she meets the RCC’s standards, not because she meets the standards of our movement of Concerned Utilitarian Humanist Rationalists (oh, and our CUHR’s opinion plus 5 Euros gets us coffee at the Vatican…)
I couldn’t give two shakes of a rat’s anatomy if she’s canonized by the RCC. What bothers me is her effective canonization in the popular culture. People acting as though she’s beyond reproach, as though she’s some perfect individual, as if she shat cures for cancers and passed kidney stones made of uncut diamonds. And that’s just not her.
Yes, there’s an obvious compromise here. Canonize her, and make her patron saint of the issues that were closest to her heart: unnecessary suffering, unsustainable overpopulation, and sexually transmitted viral epidemics.
These are issue in which, after all, the Catholic Church as a whole is a major stakeholder, so it would be useful to have a designated intercessor to interpret God’s exact wishes.
I find it implausible that a woman who built a whole complex to care for the dying couldn’t find a doctor willing to write scrips. If she didn’t find one, that wasn’t a priority for her. There are controls on the distribution of opiates in India, but they are no more onerous than in the US. (And most drugs are easier to get.)
Stipulating that she didn’t get opiates for people who needed them–did she prevent them from getting opiates that they otherwise would have gotten without her intercession? The money that would have been spent on opiates–what was it spent on instead?
My understanding is that her effect on poor folks in India getting opiates is about the same as yours or mine. I hope you won’t demonize me for not giving opiates to poor sick people.
Of course she was in a better position to do it. But there’s a problem in which folks trying to do good get blamed for not doing enough good, and I want to be careful not to fall into that trap.
Going back to my earlier question: were there people who ate who otherwise would not have? People who got medicine (not all medicines–clearly not opiates or contraceptives–but some medicine) who otherwise would not have? People who slept under a roof who otherwise would not have?
I don’t really care about Calcutta; I care about individuals. It seems to me that many people were better for their contact with her than they otherwise would have been.
I’m surprised to hear you say this. Whenever you and I disagree about a topic I pay attention because in general I trust you thinking.
In this case I disagree. The service she provided was more or less defined as Hospice care. Hospice: a home providing care for the sick, especially the terminally ill. I think that more or less has the built in definition of needing pain medication, terminally ill situations.
I think her (stated) attitude that suffering brings people closer to God demonstrates a DEFINITE agenda. A self serving agenda.
She is not someone who refused to give a homeless person $3 and prayed for them instead. She actually ran a facility for people in need. I do not see how anyone can defend her, even to give her the “benefit of the doubt”. To me her actions (inactions) are clearly wrong, biased, and self serving.
Of course, I am highly anti religious. But my own agenda does not mitigate (correct word?) her bad actions.
1- yes, they are better inside than sleeping on the street
2- What medicine? Reports says besides aspirin (or maybe an antibiotic) they really got nothing.
In this case, I’m going to have to lean toward what was better for Calcutta. A lasting improvement in conditions there could have easily been spurred by delivering basic (by western standards) medical care and by access to contraception, things Theresa could have arranged for with the donated sums but did not.