It’s where the term originates.
I guess people like Hitchins are common-it is easy to criticize.
The fact is, MT did help a lot of people, and lighting one candle always is more than sitting and cursing the dark.
As Indira Ghandi once said, most people do nothing and yet offer criticism. the people who do the work are to busy to indulge.
Those hospices and “centers for the poor” did not actually help anybody.
How so?
I was going to mention this as well. One of the last things I found respectable about the catholic church (the institution not individual catholics). As time goes on, it seems to be making itself more and more irrelevant.
They had to have helped somebody, or else there wouldn’t have been such a rush to get in them. At the very least, they provided beds and company for the dying, so they wouldn’t have to die alone in the street.
They actually abolished it in 1983., before Mother Teresa’s death, when they replaced the adversarial method of canonization, and replaced it with one where one person (the “promoter of justice”), weighs both the arguments for and against canonization.
According to Penn and Teller, they didn’t allow friends and family to visit.
That’s a pretty low bar for “help.”
Yes, she would give people soup and allow them to die in her “hospices,” if they were willing to endure being proselytized, and lectured about how good their suffering was for them. There are millions of people in the world who do more than that.
Others have already pointed out what I would have said. She didn’t use her vast resources to alleviate pain and suffering even though she amassed those resources through the expectations of her donors that the money would be used to help the poor in measurable and real ways. Pain meds, leprosy cures, real medical intervention, these were all denied the “patients” in her care. But MT didn’t go without.
She was an illusion. People wanted there to be a tiny woman who towered over Calcutta in her piety and strength. But she had enormous resources and did nothing enormous with them. She could have saved lives, but apparently the only lives worth saving were fetal.
And the Catholic Church embraces her.
Moreover, in a DEBATE started specifically to evaluate the positive contributions made by a particular individual and to assess whether popular perceptions of them are accurate, it is necessary to criticize.
Superfluous Parentheses started this thread for the explicit purpose of discussing the “Mother Theresa image” and assessing its validity with respect to the impacts she actually had in the world.
Coming into a such a discussion for the sole purpose of pouting that “it’s easy to criticize” and “well, at least she did some good” amounts to little more than threadshitting. The question here isn’t whether or not Mother Theresa ever did anything good: it’s about whether the amount of good she did justifies the popular image that was built up around her.
Homeopathy, crystals, cults, fat burning pills and devices, faith healing, etc.
Desperate people clutch at hope.
She was a Catholic nun. Of course she’s going to proselytize and glorify suffering. That’s pretty much the definition of a Catholic nun.
And I don’t even know if it’s entirely a bad thing. These people were dying. Maybe it did them some good to believe that their suffering had a redemptive purpose. It gave what was happening to them meaning and hope rather than making their suffering meaningless and purposeless.
The question really isn’t whether it was a bad thing, but whether it was a saintly thing. You don’t have to think she was evil to think she wasn’t a saint.
I have no dog in this fight. I want to learn. I’m wondering two things:
First, MT’s hospices and whatnot were fronts for money making schemes. This intrigues me. What did the money she was skimming off the top end up going to?
Second, I’m wondering how what she did is so drastically different from a regular hospice, which also focuses on easing the pain associated with death. It seems to me that suffering for godly purpose is more comforting than suffering for no purpose. This might indeed ease the suffering of death.
Of course, it would actually be better to prevent suffering and if she had the means to do so and didn’t, it’s kind of despicable. But, that just brings me back to my first question of what she actually did do with her substantial means.
You know who else was “difficult at times”? St. Peter and St. Paul (especially with each other), St. Francis of Asissi, St. Thomas More, St. Joan of Arc and pretty much every saint who ever lived! Saints are famously unpleasant. They put unreasonable demands on the rest of us. “Difficult” is no barrier to canonization.
Hospice care is about easing pain. MT’s orgs denied pain meds to patients.
As for where the money went, your guess is as good as mine. How much money total is also a good question. It had to be in the millions. Charles Keating sent her 1.2 or so million alone.
Because there are more efficient ways for me to help people.
Also, attacking other posters for what is imagined to be their lack of charity is nothing more than a transparently obvious smokescreen to distract from the actual topic of discussion. Todderbob’s charity or lack thereof is completely irrelevent to this discussion - after all it’s not like he’s claiming to be a Mother Theresa.
Sounds like Indira had served on a committee or two.