To be fair, she really seemed to practice what she preached.
lekatt, let’s try this. Which of the following do you believe?
1.) Mother Theresa’s religious order lacked sufficient funds to purchase pain-relieving medications in sufficient quantity to treat patients in its facilities;
2.) Mother Theresa’s religious order enjoyed sufficient funding to purchase pain-relieving medication, but other logistical hurdles made the provision of this medication impossible;
3.) Mother Theresa’s religious order enjoyed sufficient funding to purchase pain-relieving medication, and had the logistical capacity to do so, but chose not to provide these medications; or
4.) Mother Theresa did, in fact, provide pain-relieving medication in appropriate quantities to patients in her order’s facilities.
Note that I’m not interested in Mother Theresa’s personal finances - we all agree that she chose to live an ascetic life. I’m asking about the institutions she built - why do you believe that they did not provide pain-relieving medication? (If, that is, you concede that point.)
You know, if all the same people who are spending time, energy and money promoting, or detracting from the saintliness of this woman would instead spend one tenth of that time actually ministering to the needy, whether out of religious conviction, social conscience, or vain self promotion, it would be a good thing.
But bitching is much easier than doing.
Saints are in heaven, if you believe in heaven, and saints. Either they don’t exist, or Jesus is unlikely to be fooled by media hype, or Papal declarations. Let’s move on,to other matters, in our hearts, and in our acts.
Oh, and specifically for the faithful, if you don’t think you should pray to Mother Teresa, then perhaps you should pray for her.
Tris
What makes yoiu think we don’t “do?”
I’ve spent far, far FAR more time doing volunteer work than I’ve spent discussing Mother Tersa in my life. What do I win?
I can spread the truth about Mother Theresa and care for the needy. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Oddly enough, a Mother Theresa t-shirt. http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-gifts/9002190/Mother-Teresa-T-shirt/?aid=178
It would seem to me that if you can convince people to donate their money to charities working with the poor who don’t believe that desperately poor people also need to suffer, more actual care might be delivered.
Indeed.
Really, can you prove that.
Here is my proof.
[[REMOVED BLOG LINK]]
Where is yours.
oh yes, I did volunteer Hospice work for years.
Everything.
Tris
So do most atheists I know. What is your point?
And I can ignore the former, and applaud the later. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Tris
Sure, but it would have jack-all to do with this debate. Promoting and detracting is how debate works.
So’s threadshitting. It’s not as though the time you spend complaining about this debate is any more valuably employed from the point of view of actual service to the needy than the time we’re spending participating in this debate.
And debates about the saintliness of someone are of less benefit than time spent examining the acts we ourselves are doing. Despising Mother Teresa does not accomplish much in the way of benefit to the needy, nor does convincing another to despise her. If the benefit of the needy is your concern, Mother Teresa is no longer important.
I suppose I could get into the merits of complaining about my arguments, but it would be pointless. As pointless as the argument about Mother Teresa, and her spiritual worth.
If she is an evil soul, in fact, and her acts on the earth were despicable, she either died and no longer exists, or died, and faced a judgment far more perceptive than any I have to offer. What matters now is how people perceive her acts. I am sure that many of the Sisters of Mercy were vain in their choices of career, and perhaps Mother Teresa encouraged that vanity. Perhaps the world should have examined the actual conditions among the dying poor in Calcutta. I don’t recall a lot impassioned public concern about it before the Beatification of Teresa. But in the minds of many of the Faithful (mostly Catholics, I guess) she is a symbol of service to the poor. What they venerate is that symbol. Actually serving the poor would be a better idea than venerating someone else who did.
To them, and to the disenchanted who feel betrayed by her human frailty, my point is the same. Leave the state of Mother Teresa’s soul to someone else. Yes, the false charity of which she is accused is a very bad thing. But that means you should move yourself closer to the charity you wish to be in the world, not that you should distance yourself from it.
Tris
You don’t have to join the debate if you think it’s pointless, you know. Arguing the relative value of this particular debate is a silly. Most debates (and certainly most threads) on this board accomplish less than whatever we could all do to benefit the needy.
And that’s what the debate is about: how “should” we perceive her acts?
Fair point about attracting western interest in Calcutta.
I don’t believe in a soul, and if people don’t judge each other, nobody will.
If you would like an interesting view of Mother Teresa, read “the Missionary Position, Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice” by Christopher Hitchens.
It is clear that Mother Teresa’s organization had an income and business dealings that would have allowed her to offer far better care to the downtrodden and suffering, if only in the form or analgesics. The fact that she was into the Roman Catholic “pain-is-good-for-you” ethos comes out clearly.
One trick used on the dying (almost all of whom are Hindus or Muslims) is for the attending nun to calmly ask the person if they wish to go to heaven. At the slightest sign of consent from the often-delerious patients, the nuns then proceed to nonchalantly wipe the forehead of the dying person with a wet cloth, sprinkling a little water and baptising them by mumbling the Christian formula under their breath.
This is of course kept from general knowledge of the population in India, but has been attested by former (apostate) members of her order.
I snipped, and sniped. Sorry. I don’t consider my point to be threadshitting.
How we perceive them is entirely based on why we are perceiving them. If we are examining her for the effectiveness of her relief effort, one sort of examination is warranted, if we seek to understand if she should be considered a saint, an entirely different sort of examination prevails. Those not believing in sainthood really have no particular reason to participate in that debate, since they do not believe the premise in the first place.
I find that organized charity begins failing in direct proportion to it’s hierarchical size. One person serving another generally avoids an entire set of mechanisms of failure. It also has the drawbacks of economy of scale. But, the fact is that many hands will invite many pockets as an unavoidable concomitant, and social posturing will begin to matter more, the more public the charity is. The Sisters of Mercy, and the Catholic Church are beset by those same issues. I have the same point to them that I made here. It is easier to talk than to do. Easier to send money, than to act. Much harder to find out if you actually helped if you were never actually there. Last year’s failure is easier to find than this years opportunity.
And it is the major point, as far as I can see. Whatever she should have done, or should not have done, at one time Mother Teresa actually went to Calcutta, and spent time with the dying poor. Her other possible failures must be held in balance with that, if we wish to examine them for their relevance to the world.
I will freely admit that there is a judgment to be made. Did the Sisters bring comfort, and mercy to the dying poor of Calcutta, and did that fact mitigate the other costs of their organization’s choices? I think they fall far short of Divine charity. Folks usually do. I have very little interest in promoting Church Hierarchies and their agendas. If the money was spent on Monasteries, and Convents, then it is the charity of those institutions that should be examined. And the fact that the Sisters resist any open examination of their books is not inspiring of trust.
But, finding out the Truth About Mother Teresa isn’t a pressing issue for me. It is a trivial thing, except as a religious matter, and I am not all that religious, and not at all Catholic. Saints don’t much matter to me. If I do a charitable act, it isn’t because of Mother Teresa. If I fail to do one, it isn’t her fault either.
But back to how we should perceive her, I don’t think unmasking her foibles, or even her crimes will benefit the poor, or the needy, or the dying. People do not venerate her for her fund-raising expertise or her political acumen. They venerate the image of a woman dedicated to the service of the poor and needy. The acts are admirable. Let us venerate the acts. Yes, we are almost assuredly wrong about exactly what those acts were. But instead of trying to dig up facts, let us move to involve ourselves in the acts of the day, and hold ourselves to the standard we think she met, or should have met.
Tris
Or she died and is being praised and rewarded by an evil god for deliberately refraining from relieving suffering. Or she’s haunting the world as a ghost, using her ghostly powers to reduce the effectiveness of painkillers wherever she goes. Or she was reincarnated as a newt.
Gotta cover all the bases.
Mother Teresa was not only a manufactured poster girl for the conservative Catholic right, but she was also a hypocrite. This woman advocated criminalization of abortion and prosecution of abortion doctors for murder, said that AIDS seemed like just retribution for sexual misconduct, and opposed the availability of contraception even in countries like India. But when it came to her own medical needs, the situation was different.
Consider these facts from a deposition by Aroup Chatterjee, a long-time resident of Calcutta who had researched Mother Teresa’s operations and methods:
“In the April 1996 issue of the US magazine Ladies Home Journal, Mother Teresa said that she wanted to die like the poor in her home for the dying destitute in Kalighat. This is a very outrageous statement indeed. By then she had had numerous in-patient medical treatments in some of the most expensive clinics around the world. This includes the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California and the Gemelli Hospital in Rome. She also had numerous treatments at Calcutta’s Woodlands and Belle Vue Clinics, which are outside the reach of 99% of India’s population. She also received (on numerous occasions) sophisticated and expensive cardiac treatments at Calcutta’s Birla Heart Institute.”
Presumably, she was not told by staff at these clinics for the rich that her pain was just “Jesus kissing her”, as she was fond of telling the dying in her shelters.
At the time of her death: “. . . she was surrounded in her bedroom by sophisticated and expensive cardiac equipment, which had been specially fitted for her. Such privilege is usually granted to kings, presidents and dictators. Whether such exclusive facilities befit a future Saint is for the Committee to decide, but I would ask it to take note of the wide discrepancy between Mother Teresa’s deeds and her pronouncements. In 1984 Mother Teresa (publicly) declined the offer of cataract surgery from the St Francis Medical Centre in Pittsburgh, USA, telling the media that she could not possibly accept the £5000 treatment; but the very next year she had the same surgery (which cost even more) in St Vincent’s Hospital , New York.”
For more of these observations see here.
I can’t agree. It is of less direct benefit, sure, but I would say there’s considerable aid in puncturing an undeserved reputation for saintliness - if that reputation is indeed undeserved.
You’ve suggested before that an admirable thing to do is to simply live, being and doing the most good you can. A worthwhile goal. In terms of convincing others that one’s cause is worth following, it’s also a good idea. It is, as you say, easy to debate, and much harder to do, so the life of a person who has done many good works is much harder to “argue” against. A life of works is a potent example. But, if in this case a good reputation is undeserved, then it serves as a different example; not that you, too, can rise above and dedicate yourself to goodness, but that you, too, can earn a reputation that you aren’t worthy of. You, too, can lie or decieve about your cause and get away with it. You, too, can accrue money, yet not spend it on goodly acts. And perhaps most worrying, that, you, too, can convince the world that you are the best of people, to be an inspiration, and not be called on your more unpleasant acts.
If Mother Theresa deserves the scorn she’s got here, then the lesson her life teaches is that you can do evil and get away with it with a literally saintly reputation. It removes that most potent of influences on one’s life; that if you do not act in a loving way you shall not be loved in return. And it means comparisons with other saints; after all, if the Church declares an unworthy woman to be a saint, what other saints that it’s declared are unworthy? If it is wrong about one person, what else is it wrong about? Corruption strikes at the very root of things. Whether she’s a saint or a sinner is of quite considerable importance.
It’s been pointed out that, to a believer, there are things more important than this temporary phyical reality we find ourselves in. If Mother Theresa was on the level (and perhaps if she was not) she herself considered that it was a worthwhile task to serve the spiritual nature of humanity. An inspiring reputation speaks straight to that spiritual side; an inspiring reputation, tainted, likewise taints that spirit. You’ve argued that we should be better spending our time aiding physically; isn’t aiding the spirit good, too? By accepting a lie, by accepting a lie in the very name of all that is considered Truth with a capital T, doesn’t that undermine the entire thing?
Because I can tell you my first thoughts when I discovered this controversy. “Huh. Well, if such a noted paragon’s story isn’t true - what else isn’t true?”
Actually, I don’t agree with this sentiment at all. I think we should look at the complete picture then decide if they are worthy of respect or condemnation. I don’t think we should judge people through rose colored glasses.
Should we ignore faults of Martin Luther King, Abraham lincoln or Benjamin Franklin?
I don’t think so. I think it is much more inspiring to see people still do good things in spite of their very human weaknesses. For people like MT, after seeing a more complete picture of her, I find her weaknesses overshadow any perceived good she is credited with. For me, I find her to be a disgusting figure who put what she wanted to believe, even though she apparently didn’t believe herself, ahead of human decency. For this, she deserves harsh criticism and should not be put on a pedastool as an example for others to follow.