Religion
In reply to the discussion: Mother Teresa: Beloved and scorned on the eve of her canonisation [View all]MellowDem
(5,018 posts)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.