Mother Teresa: Beloved and scorned on the eve of her canonisation

[rug]

9:02am September 3, 2016
By Nick Alexander

To some she's the paragon of Christian virtue, while others call her "Hell's Angel".

On Sunday in the Vatican one of Christendom's most celebrated icons, Mother Teresa, will be canonised – the culmination of an official church process to ratify her two miracles.

Mother Teresa's impending sainthood comes a year after Pope Francis recognised her second miracle – the 2008 deathbed recovery of a Brazilian man whose brain was riddled with cancer.

Her first miracle occurred a year to the day after her death on September 5, 1997.

http://www.9news.com.au/world/2016/09/02/18/12/mother-teresa-saint-or-hells-angel#aPCUVJo1oTcMDog4.99

http://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2016/8/30/new-york-times-offers-update-on-criticisms-of-hells-angel-as-in-mother-teresa

11 votes, 0 passes | Time left: Unlimited
	Mother Teresa was good.
	0 (0%)
	Mother Teresa was bad.
	9 (82%)
	Mother Teresa was both good and bad.
	1 (9%)
	Mother Teresa was neither good nor bad.
	0 (0%)
	There is neither good nor bad.
	0 (0%)
	Capitalism causes poverty.
	1 (9%)
	0 DU members did not wish to select any of the options provided.
Show usernames Disclaimer: This is an Internet poll

[pangaia]

1. Never met her.

[rug]

20. Me either.

[hlthe2b]

2. She was human, not a "god" & like most humans, both "good" and "bad"

Holding her uniquely "guilty" for all the many faults and bad outcomes of religious belief and in particular, tenets of Catholicism, is too simplistic in my view, though I don't deny that Hitchens had a point.

[rug]

16. That's about it.

[jonno99]

3. Hell's Angel? Hitchens utterly fails to prove his case. nt

Last edited Sat Sep 3, 2016, 12:54 PM - Edit history (1)

[Humanist_Activist]

5. Really? Do you have counters to his claims?

The most I've seen was that what she did MAY have been better than doing nothing at all, but even that is disputed.

[jonno99]

6. Oh please, the video may as well have been titled:

Hitchens Disagrees with Catholic Church Doctrine

Counter his claims? The video was 23 minutes - from which we can conclude:
1) MT holds to traditional Catholic beliefs
2) of the 1000's of leaders she met with, Hitchens shows (after the fact?) that some were poor choices.

If this is the best we've count to counter the churches claim of MT's sainthood, then this is a solid fail.

[Humanist_Activist]

7. Isn't that just a condemnation of Catholic Beliefs?

Particularly "Redemptive Suffering" which she was a big fan of?

I'm mean, if you want to point to a single belief that can be described as evil, that would be the one.

[jonno99]

8. Evil? Again, you're talking about church doctrine. You, I, or the rest of the world

may not agree with it, but our opinion is pretty much irrelevant.

[Humanist_Activist]

9. I would say that if someone were to put such beliefs in practice...

on innocent victims, such as what Mother Theresa did, that it is more than just "differing opinions", don't you think?

Kinda like saying that I don't agree with child abuse, but its just my opinion, so its irrelevant.

Just because its Church Doctrine doesn't give it a pass, or do you think disagreeing that homosexual are intrinsically disordered is just yet another irrelevant opinion?

[jonno99]

10. My original point stands. This criticism is not

so much about her, as it is is about disagreement with Catholic doctrine.

So, did she if fact live a "saintly" life? It depends on who your ask...

[rug]

17. Redemptive suffering does not mean to cause suffering at all.

If it did she would not have welcomed a single person or used a single sponge.

[Humanist_Activist]

18. True, but it does mean accepting it, which is just fucked up...

its one thing to learn to deal with suffering when it can't be avoided, whether physical or emotional. Its another thing entirely to allow preventable suffering to take place because of an erroneous belief that its good for the soul, that's inexcusable.

[rug]

19. Well, sometimes that's all you can do.

It doesn't mean withholding medicine or analgesics.

It has less to do with medicine than it does with the theology of the Cross.

[MellowDem]

4. A couple things...

From what I've seen, Mother Teresa was reported to have taken money in one of the savings and loan scandals and never having returned it, and also to have taken money from a dictator with a bad human rights record. Never seen those refuted. That's pretty bad, given the example,she was supposed to set. But that isn't even the half of it for me.

Mother Teresa's focus on the poor is about as far as the good goes for me. The bad starts in how she used that focus. She opposed women's rights and contraception, two things that drastically reduce poverty and therefore actually promoted poverty. Also, it never seems her focus was on reducing poverty or even suffering, but rather reveling in it as part of her faith.

Certainly, her houses for the dying did nothing to improve conditions on the ground. Free hospices that housed people that may have been saved by hospitals, and Teresa had the funds to actually provide the treatable with services. But her focus was on souls, not reducing poverty or suffering.

A clear example where belief in God actually took good intentions and turned them right around, IMHO.

The PR surrounding her is a rather obvious and cynical example of how the Catholic Church used her for its own purposes, and the "miracles" that made her a saint are another example that the Church is more than willing to engage in deceit of the hopeful to get their way. Just pretty disgusting all around.

The nice thing is that many people do understand this about this particular person, unlike many previous terrible people that are still admired this day due to information being harder to get at and easier to hide even a century ago.

[rug]

11. I really haven't delved into the merits of the debate about her that's been going on for 20 years.

Too much histrionics. Too much offensiveness and too much defensiveness.

What I have learned is that much of her Order's work is about palliative care not curative care. There's at least one hospice in the U.S. that one can visit or volunteer at to make up one's own mind. Regardless of whether there was outright negligence in the past or not, I can't imagine this hospice in Pennsylvania would stay open if a tenth of what's been claimed is true.

http://www.motherteresahospice.com/#!what-when-who--why/cdvp

My daughter received palliative care at St. Mary's Hospital in Bayside, New York. It's an Episcopal hospital run by Episcopal nuns. It's a very important and necessary work whether it's done by the religious or the secular. The fact that most nongovernmental palliative care is provided by religious organizations doesn't diminish in the least. A room where someone is dying is the last place to debate the merits of religion or atheism.

For the record, my choice in the poll is the last one.

[Humanist_Activist]

12. The problem is the level of care present in the hospices in India...

of which there were claims of denying pain medication to patients, reusing needles, etc. To the fact that many of the patients that ended up in her hospice may have had treatable illnesses if she devoted some of the substantial sums they received on medical treatment.

[rug]

13. I understand that's the criticism (but not the main one) and I can't evaluate its accuracy.

If it's correct, it's horrible and inexcusable.

If it's not it's a cynical calumny.

As to how the people she cared for got there in the first place, I don't know. Do you?

The greater problem is the existence and causes of such inhumane poverty in the first place.

Where did they come from? That is at least as important as doing a post-mortem on Mother Teresa.

That and a clear, unbiased view of the present activities of the Missionaries of Charity.

[MellowDem]

24. It would seem less histrionics would be involved...

if the whole idea of sainthood wasn't part of it.

I would think any rational minded person, even believing Catholic, can look at the miracles the Church says were needed to make her a saint and find the whole practice of deciding who is a saint cynical and tawdry. I do think the Church will be moving towards removing miracles altogether as a requirement in the future, because they're just too easy to debunk anymore, and the most that can be said is that "no one knows" why such and such recovered.

[rug]

25. There have been saints for 2,000 years without people losing their minds over the concept.

You may be right about removing the "miracle requirement". I remember when the quota was three; one to be called Venerable, two be beatified, and three to be named a saint. Originally saints were declared locally by popular acclamation.

[struggle4progress]

14. India's median annual per capita income is around $600

That means 600 million Indians must survive with annual cash equivalent, at most, to two weeks pay for a US minimum wage earner

Unsurprisingly, about the same number don't have any real shelter

About 875 million Indians don't have access to modern toilet facilities

Most rural villages, where most of the poor live, lack clean water and many lack even roads

India manages to spent about $60 per capita for health care; the corresponding US figure is about $9000

We might ask what it means to provide "care" to impoverished and seriously-ill persons in that context -- but the only possible answer, of course, must be completely inadequate by our much more comfortable standards

[rug]

15. Sometimes I wonder what the hell we're fighting about in here.

Those statistics are damning.

[edhopper]

21. It looks like she caused more sufferring

than alleviated is.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/world/asia/mother-teresa-critic.html

Over hundreds of hours of research, much of it cataloged in a book he published in 2003, Dr. Chatterjee said he found a “cult of suffering” in homes run by Mother Teresa’s organization, the Missionaries of Charity, with children tied to beds and little to comfort dying patients but aspirin.

He and others said that Mother Teresa took her adherence to frugality and simplicity in her work to extremes, allowing practices like the reuse of hypodermic needles and tolerating primitive facilities that required patients to defecate in front of one another.

And those "miracles", Pleeeaaassseee!

[rug]

22. Oh, Chatterjee's been pushing that for two decades.

All I'll say is he left the poverty of Kolkata for London after he got his medical degree whereas Mother Teresa went to Kolkata and its poverty.

[edhopper]

27. I am sure you can find ways to discount him

and other critics.

[rug]

29. If there's a 25% OFF! tag hanging from his ear, I'll take it.

Regardless, he left; she came.

[edhopper]

32. And what she actually did there is immaterial?

[rug]

33. What she actually did there is material.

The question, lost in today's shitstorm, is what did she actually do, good and bad. As soon as people pt down their agendas we may find out.

[edhopper]

34. We have found out

read the Lancet investigation. Or the testimony of the nuns who where there.

[rug]

35. Is there anything less than 22 years old?

[edhopper]

36. She died 20 years ago FFS.

that is the most ridiculous argument yet.

Pray to her all you want, this is just absurd now.

I'm done.

[rug]

37. Come on, ed, you can do better than that.

Go back and rally the troops again.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/123051939#post5

[edhopper]

38. Case in point

[IMG][/IMG]

[Jim__]

23. Most of us are some combination of good and bad.

Mother Teresa practiced what she preached. My guess is that she did far more good than bad.

[rug]

26. Your last sentence would be a fitting epitaph for anyone.

[edhopper]

28. Though there is evidence

that she did more bad than good.

[Jim__]

30. Not that I've seen.

[edhopper]

31. Depends where you look

[Jim__]

39. You're the one claiming there's evidence.

Go ahead and present it.

[edhopper]

40. has been

over and over on all these Teresa threads.