I am certainly willing to concede, for the sake of this debate, that Greenpeace’s practices are exemplary.
But are they standard, for world-wide organizations? In other words, you can hardly criticize me for failing to run as fast as Usain Bolt.
Charities are getting better and better at providing transparency and accountability to donors. I’ve already linked to CAFOD: Oxfam’s reporting on its activities can be found here. Save the Children International’s here. World Vision’s here. Some are better than others but all have got off the starting blocks. Even the minimal information offered by the Episcopal Church is something.
By contrast, the Missionaries of Charity are doing nothing.* . Everyone else cited so far is *literally ***infinitely **better than they are. It’s unfair to criticise someone for not being Usain Bolt. It is fair to point out that they aren’t even on the track.
(In terms of standards, you may be interested to read about the work of the International Aid Transparency Initiative, which makes it its business to create a shared standard for publishing data.)
*(I may have missed something - their website is here)
Generally speaking, there’s decent information about most developmental institutions. Some have argued they put too much effort into evaluation and oversight, though I tend to disagree.
Stanislaus praises the bookkeeping of the Catholic Aid Agency. Fair enough. I observe that they received an audit. Good. I wonder though whether nunneries or monastic organizations have that level of transparency. And in the back of my mind I suspect that the Catholic Church’s books, when taken as a whole, are a mess. And that the mess needs to be plugged so as to kick the can down the road for a few additional decades. The basis for this suspicion is based upon an admittedly sketchy understanding of longstanding allegations about the Vatican Bank, and some hasty skepticism about the transparency of an institution dating from before the medieval period.
I see the Episcopal Church has audited financial statements: Audited Financial Statements – The Episcopal Church
ETA: Heh. Whaddya expect from God’s frozen people? 
It looks like that’s because they receive Federal grant money. That would bring with it the requirement to be audited annually.
I’m not sure how you can say its a sketchy understanding when your own link provides a lot of quotes that the Vatican Bank is extremely corrupt and dodgy.
So here’s a thought. Why should the RCC be the only church that gets to have it’s own sovereign nation as it’s headquarters? Lets face it, Vatican “city” is basically the size of a couple of city blocks, its status as sovereign nation is a historical accident and makes no sense in the modern world. The EU should declare unilaterally that it is part of Italy and subject to both Italian and EU law, including all the EU’s banking laws.
I can’t see having the Vatican as this strange quasi sovereign city state / religion benefits anyone else apart from the RCC. Sorry the Papal states lost all their lands long time ago, time to strip the bullshit nation state status as well.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Yes, good luck with that plan.
It’s not just the bookkeeping, laudable though that is. It’s the willingness to publish evaluations of their work and to respond to critical evaluations that really impresses me. Too much of charity, and especially too much of third-world aid, suffers from lack of evaluation. It’s not enough to have really good intentions. You have to do stuff that works, and not do stuff that doesn’t work (and even not do stuff that works a bit but not as well some other stuff does), *and *be ready to change what you do when you find yourself on the wrong side of that line. CAFOD appear to be doing that. MoC don’t. And the measurement of that failure is in raw human suffering.
How many divisions does the Pope command? One small group of swiss guards I believe. If the EU decides to assume sovereignty over the vatican it will happen, what exactly can the vatican do to stop it?
How do you expect the EU to go about that without violating the EU charter (or whatever its founding document is called)? The Vatican City State is a sovereign nation, whether you like it or not. The number, type, and caliber of military forces present there, if any, do not have any bearing on that simple fact.
- The EU currently couldn’t decide to assume sovereignty over a vacant bar stool.
- They’ve got bigger issues to deal with right now.
- The Italians would never stand for it.
- The Poles would never stand for it.
- The French would never stand for it.
- The Spanish would never stand for it.
- The Portuguese would never stand for it.
- The Bavarians would never stand for it.
- The British wouldn’t care that much, but aren’t exactly in a position to make their voice heard right now.
- Seriously? I mean, seriously?
Just because its unrealistic doesn’t mean that it not the right thing to do. Someone justify to me exactly why the RCC / Holy See should have sovereign status ? And by the way the Holy See is not regarded as a full sovereign nation in international law, its status is somewhat ambiguous. It’s not a UN member, only an observer. Similarly for lots of other international law aspects. The Holy See is always an exception that doesn’t fit the general rules for nation states.
Because it’s a historical anomaly that isn’t worth the effort to clear up.
And I thought Verne Troyer was about to be canonized.:smack:
Let’s take over San Marino first. It’ll be a good practice run, and it’ll solve their Eurovision voting problems.
Who the fuck did she hurt? Who was worse off because Mother Teresa lived? What evil did she unleash on us that she deserves this scorn?
So here is a woman who dedicated her life to the poorest of the poor in India and the world, often risking her life in the process; who left a life of relative comfort and opened leper houses (and later AIDS houses) and hospices for the poor who were literally dying in the streets. These people weren’t preached towards conversion during their dying moments, muslims were ministered to as muslims, hindus were ministered to as hindus (although she did try to convert people).
She opened orphanages in India when no one gave a shit about them. She tried to help according to her own understanding and her faith. And then the critics come along and criticize her (frankly its mostly due to her stance on abortion, birth control, divorce, etc.). They act like she enriched herself and lived a life of luxury by exploiting the poor. They criticize her for getting a pacemaker instead of just dying like the people in her hospices.
Shame on you. None of us have dedicated half as much to the easing of the suffering of others as she has from 1929 through he last days, and you criticize her because she didn’t ease their suffering enough and because she received advanced medical treatment that she did not provide to the people in her hospices? You sit there from the comfort of your middle class homes and point your finger at all the things you would have done differently and call her a monster. The people that she was victimizing seemed to be very grateful for her help, but I suppose she just brainwashed these people in her hospices to be grateful for not having to die in a gutter somewhere in the slums of Calcutta. I suppose she brainwashed all those impressionable young orphans to be grateful for having a place to sleep and food to eat, even if she couldn’t or wouldn’t give them the same care that we would want for our own children.
Who the fuck did she hurt? Who was worse off because Mother Teresa lived? So she took money from evil men to do good things. Would it have been better if she left that money in the hands of evil men? Maybe, maybe not. You claim that she only used 5-7% of the money raised on the poor and the rest went towards building nunneries and secret accounts based on the unsupported statements of her critics.
For the most part, this is people who disagree with her extreme stance on abortion, birth control and stuff like that trying to find reasons why people who can overlook a nun being TOO Catholic to hate her. If she was a con artist then where was all the money? Did she enjoy the her ill gotten gains in secret somewhere while no on was watching? Who did she hurt? Who was worse off because Mother Teresa lived?
BTW I am not Catholic.
What color is the sky in your world?
Yet again, you advance an argument of the form, “It’s theoretically possible, so let’s assume it will happen!”
In your lifetime, the Vatican will not lose its sovereign nation status. That’s the reality. Yes, the Vatican could be invaded by Italy, or Greece, or bombed into oblivion by Bolivia for that matter. Those are not mathematically impossible outcomes, but they are realistically so improbable as to be effectively impossible.
Like a small child, you simply assume that what you’d wish for is what will happen, and then prattle on as though a discussion about stricter audit controls is in the same ballpark as a discussion about the EU assuming sovereignty over the Vatican.
My advice to you is to go ride a unicorn under your sparkly lemon sky.
As mentioned, I think the most serious accusations are as follows:
[ul]
[li]That she raised millions of dollars worldwide from donors who she knew believed the money would be spent on generally alleviating suffering, but in fact simply never spent the vast majority of it despite ample opportunity to do so.[/li]
[li]That she accepted funds which were ear-marked for specific purposes (e.g. “the famine in Ethiopia”) but simply banked them without spending them as the donor had intended.[/li]
[li]That she ran (a) hospice(s) which failed to provide sterile needles despite ample funds being available to ensure this basic minimum of good medical practice.[/li]
[li]That she ran (a) hospice(s) in which people with curable diseases were not treated but instead allowed to die unnecessarily.[/li]
[li]That she deliberately withheld painkillers she could easily afford with the intention of prolonging patient’s pain without the informed consent of the patient or even against their will.[/li][/ul]
I believe it’s fair to say that these are serious allegations. If true, the answers to your questions above would be:
- The people she was supposed to be caring for.
- The people she was supposed to be caring for, the people who gave her millions to care for them and the people who would otherwise have been helped had those millions been given to an effective charity.
- The untold pain and suffering of sick and dying over decades.
Bit of a cock-tease, as well.
The issue with this list of problems is that the evidence for them is more absence of proof of the alternative. In other words, we know there were sufficient funds because the Order didn’t file financial reports showing that there were NOT sufficient funds. Therefore, there WERE sufficient funds.
And just in case we are moved to grant any benefit of doubt in another direction, we are reminded of her questionable political contacts and her doctrinaire positions on abortion, divorce, and birth control, because those show us what she’s REALLY like.
What?
I think one of the issues that makes this a difficult debate is that Mother Teresa is held in high regard - venerated, in fact - by millions. She has long been held up as an example of selflessness, humility and virtue. If this reputation is unearned, or even a flat out lie, then the many people who see her as saintly will be, to put it mildly, disappointed. It’s only natural for them to find these allegations upsetting.
Given that, jokes about cockteasing and worse, the childishly provocative “horrible disgusting Albanian dwarf” rhetoric don’t really serve the cause of people trying to make the case that Mother Teresa deserves neither people’s worship nor their money. Serious allegations deserve to be treated seriously by both sides.