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social worker - and the priorities are different - something Hitchens does not understand. The most basic concept of an oath of obedience, and that you follow instruction, happily and without question, dedicated to your religion, not out to solve poverty, but to council and comfort the poor, is foolishly turned by Hitchens into the observation that sisters are "sheep" who "blindly follow" their leader. Basically Hitchens writes crap and expects others to see it as wisdom.
In all his articles and books "debunking" Mother Teresa he makes two points - and only two points that are justified valid criticism and both are really just point of view. Mother Teresa did not have great accounting and no accounting controls and reports for her "Missionaries of Charity" and the 4,000 nuns and 40,000 lay workers involved - but then the religious judge the stewardship of their contributions by the results obtained - and not by debits and credits in a balance sheet of assets and liabilities. Also, like Jesus, Mother Teresa did not avoid crooks and thieves - and accepted donations from those folk. Hitchens relates over and over her being socially with the wife of Haitian dictator "Baby Doc" Duvalier, with corrupt US businessmen like Charles Keating, and with Nancy Reagan - a big deal this is not.
Indeed most of Hitchens screed is against doing religious things - indeed conservative religious things that are dogma in the Roman Church - but are just misguided at best and corruption at worst to Hitchens. As usual with Hitchens he throws out labels and asserts their validity rather than giving facts - saying she is a religious fundamentalist (and it is true she follows the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church), a political operative, a primitive sermonizer with questionable motives who's into a cult of death, suffering, and subjugation - WOW - I don't see Hitchens living with the poor and trying to help them - perhaps this is just guilt?
Indeed in a the huge organization that is Missionaries of Charity, Hitchens saw in some shelters some nuns with lousy medical skills - concluding that Mother Teresa cares more about baptizing the dying more then saving them, about saving souls more then mending bodies - can we say a bit of a leap by Hitchens with little logic?
I suspect it is the uncritical worship of Mother Teresa that hurts Hitchens' ego the most, worship being something Hitchens lost in Liberal circles as to himself as he became a drunk that would hurt liberal progressive causes out of distaste for the personalities of the leader of the day for those causes.
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