Whoa, that’s probably a rather misleading way of putting it. I know of no reason to think that the Missionaries of Charity hospices etc. were merely “fronts for money making schemes”. After all, Mother Theresa and her Missionaries of Charity had been running those hospices etc., on a very skinny shoestring, for literally decades before the public knew about her or had any interest in contributing large sums of money to her efforts.
However, once she did become famous and started attracting very large charitable donations, she didn’t apply the increased funds to provide increased services to the poor and sick people she ministered to. As the former Sister of Charity whom I quoted in an earlier post has reported, huge sums of money just sat around in bank accounts while Mother Theresa was still running her organizations on a very austere and ascetic basis.
Despite the comments about hypocrisy made by other posters, I haven’t seen evidence that Mother Theresa made it a personal goal to get a soft life for herself while imposing suffering and austerity on others. Sure, when she was old and infirm—and an incredibly lucrative asset for the Church due to her levels of popular fame and goodwill—her superiors in the Church hierarchy would tell her to get this or that checkup or medical treatment, or to fly to this or that city to give speeches, and she’d do what they told her. (All the sources I’ve seen say that she valued subservience and obedience very highly, especially for religious community members and especially within the Church.)
But as I noted above, there were decades when she was out there running ministries while she wasn’t famous, and I don’t know of any evidence that she pampered herself or the other missionaries in any way inconsistent with her philosophy that suffering and poverty are valuable.
So I seriously doubt that Mother Theresa was ever “skimming off the top” of her vast donation revenues any money for selfish purposes of her own. What she did with the money was probably whatever her Church superiors told her to do with it.
Let’s not gloss over Mother Theresa’s political advocacy in judging her character.
Ultimately she failed in her goal of keeping divorce outlawed in Ireland, but it makes me think less of her that she wanted to force people (by law) to stay in loveless marriages.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned in this thread is that in 1982, she worked out a temporary cease-fire in Beirut in order to have time to save dozens of children trapped in a hospital. Nonetheless, I’m sure one of our local atheists will soon be along to explain why this was a bad thing.
She was hated by a handful of rich people who like to hate people. She was loved by the poor. And she was really hated by Christopher Hitchens, which means that she must have been doing something right.
I have read several books about her, including her own. I don’t get the same feeling about her that is posted by others.
She would take gifts given to the Catholic church such as paintings, and sell them to give the money to the poor. When she was found out they were going to kick her out of the church. She pleaded for them to send her to the worse place on earth and they sent her to India. The people she helped were collecting garbage from the city and selling what they found to buy food, some were just eating the garbage. She established schools for the children, she lobbied the city government to pay the people for collecting the garbage and finally won after years of trying. She counseled the men to not beat their wives. She carried sick people to the steps of the hospitals and set there until someone treated the person. She turned down donations from rich people were just patronizing her. She changed the lives of the poor people she served, and when she died the grieving crowds were huge. She had the link below pasted below desk.
[[REMOVED BLOG LINK]]
I doubt her detractors read anything about her. Let alone her book.
People aren’t all either angels or demons. Even a person whose beliefs lead them to mostly do damage can ‘slip up’ and do some amount of good now and then. Thing is though the occasional ups don’t make us forget the downs - and failing to use millions of dollars of charitable contributions in their intended way is pretty damning.
Er, I mean -She indoctrinated those Beirut kids to evil christianity! Yeah!
It has been mentioned in this thread, and nobody did claim that it was a bad thing.
Practically everybody in the West can be considered rich by the standards of the world’s poor. I’m also quite certain Hitchens hates a lot of people. He also tends to make excellent points - and a failure to address good points does not work in your favor.
Why don’t you just tell us what your point is. I have no interest in reading a bunch of testimonials. Is there anything in them which refutes the relevant criticisms?
“Interest”? We don’t read cites for their intrinsic “interest”, grasshopper, we do it to fight the ignorance. And, of course, for the distant possibility of eventual canonization.
On to Keweenaw’s cites:
http://asia.kidsworldwide.org/experiencesmothert.htm
This one describes a very nice facility providing care to children with disabilities in Tamil Nadu, India. It was named after Mother Theresa upon its founding in 1998, the year after she died, so it’s irrelevant to the issue of her own ministry efforts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/wo...a.8073173.html
This one’s a tourist report of a brief volunteer stint in 2007 at Mother Theresa’s home institution in Calcutta, and it appears to confirm existing reports about the institution’s well-meaning but bare-bones approach to helping the poor:
http://www.essayedge.com/sample-essay_law5-after.html
This is a sample law school application essay advertising a commercial essay editing service, which opens with a brief and rather vague description of the alleged applicant’s alleged impressions of alleged volunteer work in one of Mother Theresa’s Calcutta institutions. Puh-lease. This commercial product isn’t evidence of jack-shit beyond the extent to which modern media PR has made Mother Theresa and her facilities the “Hallmark face” of global charity.
http://reflectionsfrommaadi.blogspot…orphanage.html
Blogpost about a 2009 visit to a “Mother Theresa orphanage” in Cairo, Egypt. Not clear what connection, if any, it has to Mother Theresa’s own work during her lifetime, hence irrelevant to a debate about her personal beliefs and actions.
http://banglabackchat.blogspot.com/2…-in-dhaka.html
Blogpost about a 2005 visit to a “Mother Theresa orphanage” in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Not clear what connection, if any, it has to Mother Theresa’s own work during her lifetime, hence irrelevant to a debate about her personal beliefs and actions.
http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/India...log-25640.html
Blogpost about a 2005 visit to a “Mother Theresa orphanage” in Agra, India. Not clear what connection, if any, it has to Mother Theresa’s own work during her lifetime, hence irrelevant to a debate about her personal beliefs and actions. Unintentionally amusing in its mischaracterization of Mother Theresa’s own ministry as “serving the despondent leper population in the ghettos of Calcutta” (needless to say, leprosy sufferers were not the majority of her patients), and unconsciously inconsistent in noting that India’s “biggest problem continues to be its own population growth” but not questioning the wisdom of supporting anti-contraception Catholic missions in India.
http://www.archden.org/index.cfm/ID/...Mother-Teresa/
Announcement of an upcoming speech by someone who actually worked in Mother Theresa’s Calcutta missions starting in 1986, and whose description doesn’t contradict the other reports discussed here:
http://www.creative-spirit.net/homeless.htm
Blogpost about a 1990 visit to a Missionaries of Charity soup kitchen in Madrid, Spain. Not clear what connection, if any, it has to Mother Theresa’s own work and the institutions that she herself ran.
http://www.pcmoldovann.com/archives/…-soup-kitchen/
Blogpost about a 2008 visit to a Missionaries of Charity soup kitchen in Kyiv, Ukraine. Not clear what connection, if any, it has to Mother Theresa’s own work during her lifetime, hence irrelevant to a debate about her personal beliefs and actions.
2006 | Journey to Honeyville…-soup-kitchen/
You’ll never guess: yup, a blogpost about a 2005 visit to a Missionaries of Charity soup kitchen in Winnipeg, Canada. Not clear what connection, if any, it has to Mother Theresa’s own work during her lifetime, hence irrelevant to a debate about her personal beliefs and actions.
http://journals.worldnomads.com/rick...ost/27702.aspx
Blogpost about a 2008 visit to Mother Theresa’s missions in Calcutta, which, again, in no way contradicts the foregoing descriptions of the missions’ approach:
My links are from people who have had direct contact with the order she founded or those that were inspired by her example.
Mother Teresa life and legacy is one of caring and compassion especially for the most destitute and shunned of society. She continues to be an inspiration to millions even after her death.
If you come from the mindset that her faith convections somehow taint her work with the poor then nothing I can say will change your view of her.
I don’t give a shit about her “faith convictions.” I’m of the mindset that people who force other people to suffer for their own gratification are not all that compassionate.
To be fair, I think it can reasonably be claimed that all or almost all of the recipients of Mother Theresa’s ministry didn’t suffer any more under her organization’s care than they would have suffered without it, and probably most of them suffered at least somewhat less. Even a little food and water and shelter means a big improvement for many of these people.
Still, I agree that it’s also fair to say that minimizing suffering in the most effective and comprehensive way, which we might assume is the primary goal in ministering to the sick and poor, was simply not Mother Theresa’s chief priority.
The illustration that sticks in my mind the most is the repeated accounts from multiple sources of volunteers and nuns spending hours each day washing patients’ bedding by hand. In Calcutta.
That just seems ridiculous. Every major Indian city has thousands of washermen and washerwomen who launder clothes and linens for very reasonable prices. Any Indian institution with any pretensions to being run efficiently (and even many that have abandoned all such pretensions) contracts out its laundry chores to the professionals who make their living at it.
Sending out the linens to the dhobi-walas or washerpeople would free up the time of nuns and volunteers to do more actual caring for sick people (as well as putting some much-needed income in the pockets of the dhobi-walas so they’ll be less likely to become destitute themselves). And it probably wouldn’t cost in a year anything approaching the sums donated to Mother Theresa in a week.
Insisting on performing every menial task in-house, even when it becomes such a big chore that it gets in the way of your core mission, isn’t being thrifty and practical. Rather, it’s making a fetish of self-sufficiency and humility, at the expense of the goal of helping others as effectively as possible.
Not all of Mother Theresa’s detractors are atheists.
When I first heard some of these allegations, I was shocked. Surely MT was a shining example of human goodness. Then, people came up with cites and facts.
She misused funds. As others have said, she ran dying houses rather than hospitals. The lack of medications meant they didn’t even qualify as proper hospices.
Presented with proof she’d been given stolen money, she refused to give it back.
This is not, IMO, the behavior of a proper saint.
BTW
You want a saint who gets respect among Dopers? Go with Jon Von Neumann. He had a very fine mind and was reportedly fun at parties too.
That phrase is factually wrong.
They have helpded thousands in Peru who would not have received any help at all. No, they didn’t bring MRI machines to the slums, sorry.
If you don’t like pizza, don’t go to “Tony’s Pizzeria”.
If you’re starving, don’t complain and eat your pizza, if you don’t like it there are others willing to relieve you of it.
No, it doesn’t. While your claim of having sex with anyone may be suspect, the work of MT’s nuns is easily accesible through the internet.
(In Spanish) http://www.ua.es/personal/jms/album/misio/misio.htm ( houses 100 old people and 40 abandonded children and provides food for poor.
we do it to fight the ignorance. And, of course, for the distant possibility of eventual canonization.