Man, your niece must have gone to a very posh part of Calcutta. I am reticent to believe there so few sick people and so many opening at Mother Theresa’s hospitals that it was an actual public health problem in a city of 9 million people. Third world countries don’t work like that.
How were the hospital open if no money was spent on them?
I imagine all people died within a week, famished to death.
Here is what I assume is an accurate and up to datelist of Donors and Partners for this particular Catholic Hospital in Liberia.
So not just the Liberian National Health System.
It’s my understanding that the amount of donations and supporting members to MT’s Hospices is no less impressive as her name brand is far more recognizable than the one hospital in Liberia linked above.
I’m afraid I’m having trouble finding a reliable source of listed donors for the MTH organization to be able to offer a fair side by side comparison.
Fair enough, but where was she getting her guidance from?
As I apparently failed to make clear, I understood in the first place that canonization has nothing to do with who is in Heaven and who isn’t: it’s just cheerleading. We can’t know what God thinks, which is why the Church is free to call her a saint whether He likes it or not.
I suspect she was getting her guidance from the teachings of the Catholic Church… as she interpreted them.
Forgive my lack of knowledge of Catholic doctrine. How much flexibility of interpretation is permitted an ordained member of the order of the RCC? I mean, was she within the guidelines? Who within the RCC decides/judges, if anyone?
This is a difficult question to answer, because it depends so completely on the specific factual situation that stating some kind of a general rule is almost impossible.
In very broad terms, there are core truths that no faithful Catholic can deny. Then there are many more things that are generally left to the individual, who is supposed to apply his (or her) “informed conscience,” to determine the issue.
And of course, we might imagine someone who genuinely, and in good faith, holds some belief or undertakes some action that others equally strongly are convinced is problematic. The Church has internal processes – tribunals and inquiry bodies – that exist to settle questions that reach this level of contention.
Is there any evidence that suggests MT’s conduct with respect to the hospices was reviewed by said bodies of the RCC?
Was the question even raised?
But you keep thinking the opposition is being that way in direct opposition to the Catholic church. It’s not. It wouldn’t have mattered if she were a different religion, either. Your mistake is thinking that everybody has your same logic pattern.
Not so far as I am aware.
But since there were hundreds of volunteers and visitors passing through her clinics, the lack of such reports is, for me, suggestive of the conclusion that the horrific conditions described earlier were exaggerated.
There were reports of haphazard medical care, including the warm water rinsing of needles, while she was alive, yet the church didn’t act or seem to care, so you conclude that the issues were exaggerated?
Yes.
The same reporter, Fox, agreed that the facilities were kept clean, and the issue seemed to be the lack of trained medical volunteers – an unavoidable consequence of where she was working.
But you are conflating what I was discussing – reporting variances in dogmatic belief or practice – with reporting variances in medical care that arose from the location.
Mother Teresa certanly did not believe that it was a sin to use boiling to sterilize needles.
If we were discussing the abuses by Church of Scientology, would you be equally skeptical? After all, the overwhelming majority of their members are very rarely vocally critical of their church.
Belief you’re doing no harm =/= no harm done.
So?
What subject, specifically, is under discussion?
I guess it would depend on the specifics. If we were discussing lack of autoclaves in a third world Scientology-run care facility, I’d buy it.
MT seems to have killed this thread, so I think that counts as at least one miracle.
It’s difficult for me to believe that the church acted like it didn’t care because the issues were exaggerated. It’s easier to believe (for me, as a non Catholic) that they acted like they didn’t care because they DIDN’T CARE. we aren’t talking about an underfunded organization that simply didn’t have the money to buy an autoclave. Or didn’t have the resources or knowledge to separate TB patients. this was a richly funded enterprise.
Before fairly recent memory, the church didn’t act to deal with child abuse as pandemic within the church. Does that mean that before reforms were instituted at a Vatican level, there were no problems ? The fact that medical professionals and volunteers both said there are issues with the care given to the sick and dying, yet the church did nothing, does not mean (again, To me) that the problems didn’t exist.
I’m not so sure I agree with “richly funded.” But maybe I’m ignorant of their funding.
What was the per-patient funding available to them?
Well, again, let’s separate the issues – when I spoke of reporting to the Church, I was addressing a question of what might happen if Mother Teresa was espousing some contrary doctrinal beliefs.
I suspect that people might have looked at the lack of autoclaves and attirbuted it to lack of funds to purchase autoclaves.
So I’m not denying that there were probably instances of care that were sub-optimal, especially measured against care available in a first world nation.
So far as I can understand, though, it was the equal or better than other options available to the destitute in India at the time.
The problem is that many, even those who have visited, can’t really grasp how bad poverty is and how much you would pinch every penny.
What is a horror story in a good US hospital is par for the course and “thanks goodness we had this option” in a poor country.
Re-using needles seems terrible, but I remember going, in the 70s, to a top dentist using metal syringes that he would sterilize after every use. Autoclaves use power like crazy, too, and are not cheap if heavy duty.
I completely accept that it could’ve (and should’ve) been more efficient, but it wasn’t like MBA were knocking on the door to work for little money.