I’d be looking at how the RCC is doing in Albania or India for the reasons behind this.
Do they need a boost in popularity to prop up falling numbers or is there another cover-up involving pedophile priests on the way and they need a distraction?
Yeah, you were getting there.
It would be ridiculous to think that she was personally inventorying bedpans or washing needles. But it would also be ridiculous to think that, as founder, leader and spiritual driving force of the organisation which was a vehicle for her life’s work, the only way she could be responsible for its failures would be if she was personally responsible for inventorying bedpans or washing needles. Wouldn’t it?
If she was merely terrifyingly negligent in her management of the institution she set up to care for the poor and sick while soliciting millions of dollars in donations on the basis that she cared deeply for the poor and sick then this exhibits a disregard for the people in her care that is scarcely, if at all, less vile than *knowingly *allowing curable people to die.
Apologies - I was posting in haste from the train (Hi, I’m Stanislaus and I have an SDMB problem) and taking the allegations as read for the purposes of this thread of argument - that is, that if the allegations are true, you wouldn’t consider them vile. Allow me to rephrase:
As to context, the allegation is that she worked very hard to put herself in a position to care for large numbers of sick and destitute people and, once in that position, she grossly betrayed the trust it represented either wilfully or through prolonged negligence.
That would be vile if true, yes?
If you remember, did her speech leave you with the impression that she worked hard to ensure that the people in her care were treated adequately? Did she touch on the quality of medical or palliative care in any way? If she solicited donations, do you remember having the impression that they would be spent on providing some degree of physical care or only on the spiritual needs of the residents?
So you don’t agree that she’s vile, but you fine with her being a regular piece of shit?
No, I don’t quite agree. One possible view is she was naive with respect to,the challenges of management, believing that she had things handled when she did not.
This, in my view, is not “vile.”
But this is why I don’t debate accusations like how vile someone is. If I allege that the law says X, and you say it’s Y, we can resolve the issue with reference to citable authority.
When we try to weigh what kind of negligence is vile, more or less vile, vile at all, and the like, we cannot similarly agree.
The best answer I can give is that I would need more detail. But someone who was idealistic but incompetent in execution would not, in my view, be fairly described as vile.
I plead the passage of nearly 25 years, but as best I recall, she discussed care, without much detail. The implication was both physical and spiritual care, but I don’t remember her talking in any way about the details, except that there were few, or no, other options available for the afflicted.
I do remember that we gave her an award that included $100,000 honorarium and a gold medal. She told us she was planning to melt down the medal and use it to make wedding rings for girls who wanted rings but could not afford them. So the Knights asked her to keep the medal as was and voted her an additional sum of money for the purchase of the rings.
I suppose that can be read negatively.
He’s only tedious because people let him be tedious. Most of **Bricker’s **schtick on the RCC can be met with “yes you are right about RCC doctrine, and yes the events in question are internally consistent with RCC doctrine, but RCC doctrine is shitful.” And that’s usually that.
She was on the same train of thought that lies behind Munchausen’s by proxy, I think. Being associated with getting people better isn’t as heroic as being associated with tending to people who are dying in drawn out incurable agony. If they are cured or their pain is relieved, the glory and attention associated with “selflessly” tending to them evaporates.
So, a priest who was guilty of sexually abusing children but later made what the Church considered imperfect contrition, fucking children being a mortal but not an eternal sin, that priest could potentially be recognized as a saint after his death.
The children he raped wouldn’t be, of course, because they fell away from the Church after all of the damage done to them in the church buildings, meaning they refused to come to the source of their redemption, which means they’re doomed to Hell. “Refusing to be redeemed” is either an eternal sin or the only eternal sin, after all, depending on your philosophy.
St. Teresa is going to be in good company, as per Catholic dogma.
When you discuss an odious sin like child rape, naturally it raises strong emotions.
But forget Catholic-specific doctrine for a moment.
In your understanding of general Christian belief, is it fairer to say:
(A) no matter how contrite and seeking forgiveness he might be, a person who has raped children can never be forgiven by God, and is automatically consigned to Hell,
-or-
(B) even such a horrible sinner as that can be forgiven by God
Mother Theresa Sent to Hell in Wacky Afterlife Mixup
The onion, can’t link, iPad annoyance…
Because she’s running a bunch of health centers in third world countries and I expect standards to be lower than first world. Because otherwise you will be only treating a few people.
Now frankly I find that argument a lot easier to make for pain relievers than for freaking sterilizing needles. Autoclaves are not that expensive. But then you wonder whether she was just a lousy manager. Those who toured through the facilities didn’t report that they were like, say, US mental health hospitals of the 1950s-1970s. A fair number of people volunteered to work at her clinics and the reviews weren’t all negative.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m pretty dubious of the whole enterprise. The critiques may very well not be overblown. But they sure smell that way. For example the Lancet article appeared to compare standards at the Calcutta facility to standards in London. I’d like to know how MT’s clinics compared with others in the same country, before I get all judgmental. I’d also like to see more details about the accounting and the fund raising appeals.
I can take a dim view of the management of a charity without concluding that it is managed by a Bond villain.
Not a Catholic, but I would expect anythingthat deserves to be called God by Catholics can forgive anything/anyone he wants to. By analogy, I expect he has the power to condemnanything/anyone he wants to. And we’ll assume, for fun or because we assume that an omniscient and omnipotent being has no need for logic or consistency, that there are no strict rules for this. And since canonization/sainthood is voted on by those Catholics still bound to Earth, that God puts aside his perfect knowledge of everything that ever has or ever will happen, and subordinates his perfect judgment to the bickering of the last of his creatures.
Either that or he has a mind of his own, in which case Mother Theresa, who promoted suffering in the service of fundraising, might find a stone in the road to sainthood.
There is no sane basis for that view. If she had received money for the hospices and distributed the money among the hospices in a suboptimal manner (failing to recognise that some were growing faster or had greater need) you could make that argument, but mere inexperience does not explain her skimming most of it off the top to expand her fucking cult. And we have her own words to prove that the rot goes deeper than that. Putting someone who thinks the suffering of the innocent is a good thing in charge of a hospice is like putting a rapist in charge of a women’s shelter.
Out of idle curiosity, are there any Dopers willing to share here who are also Catholic, and think at least somewhat in tandem with the OP?
Do you beliieve in the Passion of Jesus? (That refers to both the fact of, and the religious sigificance of, Jesus’ torture and death)
Do you understand that she did?
Thanks for the pretzel.
Now how about untwisting the logic and putting the horse in front of the cart.
Yes, God can forgive anything He wants to.
And yes, He can condemn anything He wants to.
But there’s where your journey goes astray. Catholics do not believe that by act of canonization, we place the soul in question into Heaven. We are merely affirming that which God has already done.
Is it possibe that we are wrong? That we canonize a person and then it turns out that this person was in fact consigned to Hell?
Sure, It’s unlikely, in my view, because God’s mercy is extensive. But the Church is not claiming we PUT anyone into Heaven; the claim is that God welcomed the soul into heaven and we are proclaimng that fact.
And for whatever it’s worth, posts of this general form are a bit annoying:
I’m not a Catholic, nor even a Christian, and in fact don’t believe in any supernatural nonsense like a deity, Heaven, souls, or an afterlife of any kind. Now, let me explain to you why I say Mother Teresa’s soul did not go to heaven.
The Big MT has been dead for a while now. So she isn’t going to be funneling any money off, canonization not withstanding.
I look at this as being like the Baseball Hall of Fame. If you aren’t a serious baseball fan, do you really care which players have been named to it?
The ranks of the saints are filled with people who were, no doubt, unpleasant. There are some in there, as well, who weren’t even real people. One more name to the list scarcely matters.