Inspired by this Orcs of New York post. Saint Olga allegedly killed 5000 men for failing to pay their taxes on time (you thought the IRS was bad) and burned a city down to boot. Any saints who have killed more people in their time on Earth?
Didn’t the god of the bible kill everyone on earth apart from Noah and his sons? plus by his direct orders I think other genocides were carried out.
I don’t know if that god counts as a saint but clearly the holiest “being” is setting a heck of a precedent.
Some would say Mother Theresa allowed thousands to suffer and die while in her care instead of, you know, helping them. No clue about the body count though.
Louis IX of France (Saint Louis) participated in two Crusades but I am not sure his body count would have approached 5000.
I imagine Olga didn’t personally kill them either, but in any case and since we’re including second-hand it’s definitely got to be someone who was a ruler.
And the people criticising Mother Teresa are failing to take into account that she didn’t have the resources to cure those people, as well as apparenly confusing “help” with “heal” (it’s just a little letter after all); her order was born to help in what little ways they could (shelter, bed, food) those who would otherwise have had neither shelter, nor bed, nor food. When they can get the appropriate medications they do provide them - but that “when” isn’t a given. The same people would criticise the Knights Templar because there were fleas in some of the dormitories or the Mayo Clinic because all their patients die (eventually).
You’d be looking at Stephen I of Hungary, or the Emperor Henry II, maybe. They’re both canonised saints whose day job as secular rulers required them to fight numerous wars. Accurate casualty figures are not available.
But they’d have numerous rivals. Charles I of England, canonised by the Anglican church, fought a civil war. St. Alexander Nevsky is principally remembered - and, indeed, named for - the Battle of the Neva (although, in fairness, the event itself may be mythical). Vladimir the Great prosecuted a few wars while consolidating and enlarging the territory of Kievan Rus although, it has to be said, much of this was done before his conversion to Christianity. Still, it was done. Blessed Karl of Austria was Emperor of Austria during the last two years of the Great War; if we lay any deaths at his door, we must lay a very large number, I think.
Saint Olaf/Olav (Olaf II of Norway) was known to be particularly bloodthirsty, though I doubt you’ll get an accurate number.
He sailed for the 8th crusade and then immediately died of disease. I don’t think he ever fought that one. Losses for the 7th crusade were “light” among the Ayyubids, so probably not unless you’re counting deaths of people who followed him.
That’s just one of many, many articles you could easily find showing that she was a fraud, and took donations but failed to spend them on those she was “helping”. “Help” that consisted of allowing people to suffer in agony rather than easing their pain, as that suffering was, in her opinion, “holy”.
I would think a potential ‘winner’ would be Pope Paul VI, specifically for his decision to overrule his theological committee that had decided that the birth control pill was compatible with Catholic doctrine, and to forbid its use in his encyclical.
This had a devastating effect on efforts to control the population explosion. And that has contributed to continued starvation across the world, especially in the poorest regions. Starvation & associated malnutrition-related diseases cause the death of something like 300 persons per hour!
Even if only a small part of those deaths can be laid at Paul VI’s feet, over the past 49 years that is still a way more massive number than anyone else mentioned here.
(And that’s not counting the additional deaths of mothers during childbirth, or the increased toll of AIDS in Africa, where his condemnation of condoms feeds that death toll.)
Not a saint, and if you live somewhere where you are dying of starvation, you are unlikely to have the means to get regular checkups and afford pills.
The accusations against her are in fact that because of her belief in the redemptive value of suffering, she deliberately didn’t provide medications when she could (in particular pain medicine), and that she spent the money given to her on other goals instead, like fighting contraception.
If we include non-Catholic saints, Nicholas II of Russia is considered a Saint by the Russian Orthodox Church, who among the various pogroms, repression, and harshly putting down of rebellions ordered the direct deaths of tens of thousands, plus his complete incompetence during World War 1 which then lead the way for the Russian revolution, easily has killed more people both directly and indirectly than anyone else in this thread.
But here we are arguing over the hypothetical deaths of Mother Teresa
The Saint of Killers, obviously. I mean, he killed God and Satan.
It has to be real. They made a movie about it.
It seems to me that the majority of overpopulated states are not terribly tied to the Catholic religion. Even countries like Nigeria, JPII had to make a point of telling the local priests that celibacy meant what it said. I don’t think those guys were dogmatic about the pill. China, India, Indonesia, central Africa…
About the only areas of overpopulation he might have had a hand in would be South America and the Philippines; and I haven’t heard of a lot of mass starvation in those areas in the last 50 years.
Even within Roman Catholic canon there’s someone who gets part of that credit - Saint Longinus. He’s the Roman soldier who delivered the finishing blow with his pilum to Jesus on the cross. Hey it’s only one third of the trinity but that still seems like extra credit is due.
Except that Jesus was already dead when Longinus poked him. He might have intended it as an act of mercy, but he was too late.
The Ethiopian Orthodox do recognize Pontius Pilate as a saint, though.
Latin America isn’t overpopulated, and fertility rates have collapsed much faster than they have in the west. Mexico, for example, had a fertility rate of 7.2 in 1965 (around the time of Humanae Vitae), and has dropped to a TFR of 2.2 today. As of the most recent numbers I can find, eight out of 20 Latin American countries (including the largest) are below replacement level fertility today, and most of the rest are heading in that direction. Guatemala is the only country with a TFR above 3.0.