No, I don’t think that’s totally true. There are Catholic missionary groups that minister to the poor without enforcing on the recipients of their ministry the extreme austerity that Mother Theresa considered so important.
Of course, all Catholic missions are going to be anti-abortion and anti-birth-control, but many of them differ significantly from Mother Theresa’s ministry in many other ways. Frinstance, groups like the Catholic Medical Missions Board actually provide poor people with professional medical care and things like retrovirals for AIDS management and antibiotics to treat infectious diseases.
The technical answer is that the criterion for sainthood is that the person went to Heaven. Everyone in Heaven is a saint, so if you ask me, I’ll tell you that, for instance, my grandfather is a saint (even though you’ve never heard of St. Edwin of Johnstown).
What you’re probably actually asking about, though, is canonized saints. Those are folks on the list of people that the Church as a whole has recognized as being in Heaven. To understand the process for this, one first must have an understanding of the concept of the intervention of the saints.
A mortal can, of course, pray to God. And a mortal can also ask other folks to pray for them. But surely, it’s not only people on Earth who can pray for us: The prayers of someone in Heaven should surely count for at least as much as the prayers of people on Earth. And humans being humans, some folks will sometimes be uncomfortable with praying directly to God, since He’s in many ways so different from us. It’s perhaps more comfortable to pray to another human like us, but who’s already in Heaven, and ask that person to pray for us. So in addition to praying to God, Catholics also pray to those whom we believe are in Heaven (not necessarily just canonized saints, but anyone we personally believe is in Heaven: I, for instance, might pray to my grandfather), and ask them to pray to God on our behalf.
Now, if a human here on Earth prays to someone to ask for some miracle, and that miracle occurs, then that’s taken as evidence that the person prayed to is in Heaven, since presumably, the process wouldn’t work if they weren’t. So when someone well-regarded by the Church dies, the Vatican starts paying attention, to see whether anyone attributes any miracles to intercession by that person. If they get any claims, agents of the Church investigate the purported miracle, and if two such miracles are verified to the standards of the Church, then the Pope declares that person to be on the list of those known to be in Heaven.
What Chronos said. It’s a widespread misconception that Catholics actually worship saints, and technical terms like “veneration” add to the confusion about this.
But saints are not worshipped or considered divine in Catholic doctrine (not even the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is arguably the recognized captain of the saint team and who gets a lot of veneration). They’re just friends in high places, so to speak: you don’t pray to them as divine beings the way you’d pray to God, you petition them to intercede for you with God. And, as Chronos noted, if your petition is officially recognized as having resulted in an actual miracle, then that’s considered very good evidence that the deceased person does indeed qualify as a universally acknowledged saint.
Does hooking up with someone waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out of your league count as a miracle?
Look, *besides *the standard Catholic anti-abortion, anti-condom, homophobic shit, which is inexcusable enough, she was a hypocrite.
She was a friend to any lowlife criminal and murderous despot, as long as they donated money to the cause. Money she refused to return, even when directly asked by the victims’ representative in the Keating case. Franco, Marcos, Reagan, Duvalier… she never met a Right Wing politician or dictator she didn’t like, it seems.
She preyed on the most vulnerable of society, and did nothing to alleviate either their poverty or suffering. Her “hospitals” were not worthy of the name, without proper beds, medicines or adequate staff, even though she received enough funds to provide these, many times over. Nor did she treat or feed as many people as she claimed. She constantly lied and made up statistics about this.
She preached the virtue of suffering, but was a hypocrite when it came to her own. There’s this image of her living in companionship with the poor all her life - nothing could be further from the truth. For her last several decades, she was away much more than she was in India, and when she was away, she stayed in luxury hotels or as the guest of tinpot tyrants in their palaces, like the Duvaliers. Or flew in thie private jets. And when she had to have hospital treatment, nothing but the world’s finest medical attention was good enough. Yet she had the gall to say “I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.”
Well, you can always report the occurrence to the bishop of your local diocese and see what they think about it. In fact, I strongly encourage you to do so, and to post their reply here when you get it.
Well, Ron Jeremy is (a) not dead, (b) Jewish, and (c) probably not eligible for veneration within the Catholic Church even if he were dead and non-Jewish, but if it works for your friend, hey, why not.
Part of Hitchen’s argument is not an attack on MT per say but the media’s totally uncritical evaluation of her efforts. If you ask people why MT was such a good person I bet 99% would say she helped feed the poor and relieve their suffering and the money donated to her organization went to the poor. None of this is true and as others have said she did not believe in mitigating suffering she wanted people to suffer because suffering brings you closer to Jesus. Mother Theresa never claimed otherwise it was media who dropped the ball and just went with the myth.
For those of us who have actully SEEN the work her nuns do, this is patently false and a misunderstanding of her work.
When she glorifies suffering she is simply reiterating a classical Catholic (and Christian I’d say) belief. It means that hardships in life get us closer to Jesus; it does nto mean that if I see a guy on the street getting stabbed I’m gonna say “how lucky! He’s closer to God!”
Her work might not have been the most efficient, but I’ll take inefficient over non-existent anyday of the week.
OK, What specifically did she do to help those in need? Remember ten of millions of dollars were donated. How did the poor benefit from her millions? Please give examples.
BTW “glorifies suffering” is the most hideous concept I have ever heard of there is no “glory” in another’s pain and misery only if efforts to relieve it which MT emphatically did not do. As you have said " hardships in life get us closer to Jesus" lets bring on the hardships, again MT never claimed she was easing the burden she was following Catholic doctrine, great but the vast majority of people are under the impression she relieved suffering, she did not!
That right there would be enough for me to have slapped the cow, had she said it in my presence.
Then, I’d have asked why her god didn’t just protect her, and if that meant His Holiness wanted me to cause her more suffering, as I cocked my right fist.
Got a question- why is it that the Government of India gave her a state funeral, the Nobel committee gave her the Peace Prize (OK, they also gave it to Arafat, but still…), and even pro-choice liberal politicians lauded her? Were they all deluded as to how horrible she was?
