Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mack4289]

The argument against Mother Theresa is an old one, I know, but I was talking about it today with a co-worker and it got my interest. For those who are unfamiliar with the argument, this is basically it, from Christopher Hitchens, who wrote a whole book against her, entitled "The Missionary Position":

http://www.salon.com/sept97/news/news3.html

"While much was made of Mother Teresa's devotion to the poor and downtrodden, she was in fact a lifelong friend to the rich and powerful. Some examples:

In 1981 Mother Teresa journeyed to Haiti, to accept that nation's highest award, the Legion d'Honneur. She received it from the Duvalier family, and made a glowing speech in which she said that dictator "Baby Doc" and his wife Michele not only loved the poor, but were loved by the poor in return.

In 1990 she made a trip to Albania, then the most oppressive of the Balkan Stalinist states, and laid a wreath on the grave of the dictator Enver Hoxha as well as on the irredentist monument to "Mother Albania". She was herself of Albanian descent (born in Skopje, Macedonia), but many Albanians were shocked by her embrace of Hoxha's widow and her silence on human rights.

In 1992 she intervened with a court in Los Angeles, which was about to sentence Charles Keating, the biggest fraud and embezzler in American history. His S & L racket stole a total of $252 million, mainly from small and poor depositors. A strong Catholic and right-wing campaigner against pornography in his spare time, Keating gave Mother Teresa $1,250,000 in cash and the use of a private jet, in return for which she gave him many useful endorsements, including a character reference to the court. The court had asked Mother Teresa to return Keating's donations, which may well have been stolen, but she never replied to the request.

What about her celebrated concern for the poor and the weak? Here the record is much murkier than her saintly image would suggest. I have been shown testimony from leading American and British physicians, expressing their concern at the extremely low standard of medicine practiced in her small Calcutta clinics. No pain killers, syringes washed in cold water, a fatalistic attitude toward death and a strict regimen for the patients. No public accounts were made available by her "missionaries of Charity" but enormous sums are known to have been raised. The income from such awards as the Nobel Prize is alone enough to maintain a sizable operation. In one on-the-record interview, Mother Teresa spoke with pride of having opened more than 500 convents in 125 countries, "not counting India." It seemed more than probable that money donated by well-wishers for the relief of suffering was being employed for the purpose of religious proselytizing by the "missionary multinational."

What kind of theology was she promoting? Mother Teresa offers an intensely simple version of Christian Fundamentalism. She believed that we are all sinners conceived in iniquity. She frequently described the suffering of the poor as a gift from God, and took a highly traditional attitude of resignation and stoicism. She was extremely critical of political attempts to change injustice and equality, describing herself as "non-political" but also expressing sympathy for conservative Catholic forces in Latin America and Southern Europe. She was adamantly opposed to the use of contraception. She said that she would never permit a child to be adopted by any parent who had ever consented to an abortion. In her Nobel Prize speech, she described abortion as the single greatest threat to world peace. She was a staunch ally of the present Pope in his battle, within the church, against the "social gospel" and other liberal heresies.

.... In Calcutta once, Mother Teresa gave me a tour of a tiny orphanage she had opened. The scene was an affecting one, though it hardly made much difference to the immense problems of that city. As the tour was concluding she suddenly gestured with her arm and said, "You see? This is how we combat abortion and contraception in Bengal." This admission, that the purpose of her operation is propagandistic rather than strictly humanitarian, was an honest one. Mother Teresa, as far as I am aware, never made any attempt to conceal her extremely dogmatic and conservative agenda. Nor was she ever shy about her choice of rich, unscrupulous, authoritarian patrons. Some of her more awe-struck apologists argue that Jesus, too, was criticized for keeping bad company. Still, I do not recall him ever doing anything like kissing the feet of the Duvaliers."

Hitchens seems to get off on going after sacred cows and just pis*ing people off in general so of course all this should be taken with a big grain of salt. He's also notoriously hostile to religion. But it's something to at least consider the next time someone forwards you a Mother Theresa quote. Not that you should need any extra reason to be irritated with those people.

[Tiger Beer]

Not that surprising. The rich and wealthy and powerful are always attracted to any kind of 'celebrity' of any nature.

It doesn't mean Mother Theresa was crusing around on yachts and sipping champaign six months of the year with them however.

[mindmetoo]

She collected millions around the world and still let her sick to die in filth. She was more concerned with getting them baptized catholic before their death.

[Tjames426]

She collected the funds so that she could bring in milliions from the streets to die in dignity.

She was able to love the unloved. She was able to give trash of the world a safe and dry place. She was able to put a roof over their heads. She was able to wash them. Many of them rank of disease and death. She was able to provide simple medicine to ease their suffering.

Why criticize something as beautiful as what she did? No one else cared about those forgotten souls.

She did recieve a Nobel prize for her work. Indla will not let any "christian" missionary societies inside their country. But they did let Mother Theresa continue. That says something about the power of her testimony and life.

If she was able to use the "devil's" money to help the forgotten poor, even better. Money can be a tool for good as well as evil.

___
Concerning Albania...

At the time in which Albania was an communist and "official" atheistic nation, she was its' most famous daughter. Her dedication for Christ's work of compassion was a spit in the eye of the Albanian leadership!Enough said.

[mack4289]

The point wasn't to trash her legacy, just to suggest that it's more complicated than we've been led to believe. Maybe she provided better conditions for those people than would've been provided otherwise. But maybe she could've done a lot better but instead used the funds donated to help the poor for missionary work:

http://famous.y2u.co.uk/F_Mother_Teresa.htm

"Neither Mother Teresa nor the Vatican has ever revealed how much money her order received, nor what it was spent on; estimates range into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Hitchens alleged that Teresa was glad to suggest to donors that the money went to aid and the building of healthcare facilities for the poor in India and elsewhere, while evidence points instead to it being spent largely on missionary work in Africa, with large funds at Teresa's discretion. No hospitals were ever built."

... "Many of Teresa's donors were evidently under the impression that their money was being used to build hospitals. In 1991, Dr. Robin Fox, then editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, visited the Home for Dying Destitute in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and described the medical care the patients received as "haphazard". He observed that sisters and volunteers, some of whom had no medical knowledge, had to make decisions about patient care, because of the lack of doctors in the hospice. Dr. Fox specifically held Teresa responsible for conditions in this home, and observed that her order did not distinguish between curable and incurable patients, so that people who could otherwise survive would be at risk of dying from infections and lack of treatment.

Fox conceded that the regimen he observed included cleanliness, the tending of wounds and sores, and kindness, but he noted that the sisters' approach to managing pain was "disturbingly lacking". The formulary at the facility Fox visited lacked strong analgesics which he felt clearly separated Mother Teresa's approach from the hospice movement. There have been a series of other reports documenting inattention to medical care in the order's facilities. Similar points of view have also been expressed by some former volunteers who worked for Teresa's order. Mother Teresa herself referred to the facilities as "Houses of the Dying".

In contrast to the conditions at her homes, Mother Teresa sought medical treatment for herself at renowned medical clinics in the United States, Europe, and India, drawing charges of hypocrisy from critics such as Hitchens."


Also, if this source is accurate, other people did care about those people:

"Chatterjee added that the public image of Mother Teresa as a "helper of the poor" was misleading, and that only a few hundred people are served by even the largest of the homes. According to a Stern magazine report about Mother Teresa, the (Protestant) Assembly of God charity serves 18,000 meals daily in Calcutta (now called Kolkata), many more than all the Mission of Charity homes together."

[Big_Bird]

[Cheonmunka]

She made her income from the poor, basically.

[mindmetoo]

[ED209]

There's a good episode of Bull$hit on her and an interview on the skeptics guide with James Randi recounting the time he meet her in a green room with Erther Kitt.

But if I had to say anything about Mother Trucking Theresa it's 'Nice Buns'.

[VanIslander]

She was a tyrant and a bully. I wrote an academic paper on how she works with others for a class on Conflict Resolution. I compared and contrasted her style with that of Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams. It was like night and day.

Mother Teresa berated and belittled several nuns in the Church, at least two of which left the service altogether after being so shaken up by how they were treated. Mother Teresa was quite authoritarian and often cited God's divination to justify silencing all dissent and shouting people down into submission to her will.

My university prof for that course was a Christian and horrified by my paper and its presentation to class. But I provided references to EVERY statement about her.

She was a poor role model for mediation. Her style of conflict resolution was counter to the movement of that name.

(But, oh yeah... she did some good things for poor people.)

[CentralCali]