Mother Teresa's Canonization: Controversy Mars Nun's Work

[yortsed snacilbuper]

On Sunday, the eve of the 19th anniversary of her death, Mother Teresa's sanctity will be sealed with a canonization Mass led by Pope Francis at the Vatican's St. Peter's Square.

"She was very cruel in how she treated people at her home for the dying. she preached a very negative, very medieval, obscurantist ideology."

A 1994 study by the UK-based The Lancet medical journal reported that even the most basic, life-saving drugs were not administered to salvageable patients who should have been admitted to a hospital rather than Mother Teresa's famous home for the dying.

Researchers at the University of Montreal and University of Ottawa examined nearly 300 documents belonging to the elderly nun.

The report noted "her rather dubious way of caring for the sick, questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce."

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/mother-teresa-s-canonization-controversy-clouds-nun-s-work-n641181

[Freddie]

1. She said it is preferable for a woman to die young

From years of constant childbearing than to use contraception. Saint? I'd like to think it's quite warm where she is right now.

[Monk06]

2. Having grown up the son of a Catholic who was physically abused by nuns in a convent school

I can honestly say Nuns have no business in education, maternity or hospice care

They have a very high tolerance for other peoples suffering

They almost savour it

[Freddie]

3. My husband is an ex-Catholic

Often tells the story of an incident in his classroom at St. Pius in the early 70's.
The nun's favorite form of punishment was slamming a kid's head against the blackboard. One day she slammed a kid's head so hard that he dropped to the floor. An ambulance was called. The next day the kid was back in school. No police called. No charges filed. Can you imagine if that happened today?
I promised him early on that our kids would never set foot in a Catholic school.

[Monk06]

4. My dad was a rebel and he paid for it by having to stand on his desk while and nun whipped him

on his achilles tendons with a bamboo stick

He was so bitter about it he quit the church and joined the Orange Order

[smirkymonkey]

6. She was a sadist.

She reveled in the suffering of other people. Thought it brought them closer to Jesus or something. Meanwhile, she was raking in tons of cash for her mission and hoarding it. Of coarse when it came for her time to get sick and suffer, she afforded herself the best health-care that money could buy. The fact that she is being canonized is a joke.

[Monk06]

8. It's more a travesty than a joke IIRC she spent her last days in a hospital in Switzerland

Meanwhile the Dalits had to choke on their last breath in Calcutta with no medication for pain

[smirkymonkey]

9. Christopher Hitchens wrote on her, very accurately:

"This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction."

[smirkymonkey]

12. I am sure there are many kind and devoted nuns out there who perform

their services selflessly and with only the best interest of the patient in mind. However, Mother Teresa was not one of them. Do a little research. She was a horrible person.

[Monk06]

15. My remark was in response to the thread on Mother Teresa, who did savour suffering as a gift from

god

My father received a good education given that he was brought up on Poplar Street on the London Docklands during the thirties

Doesn't change the fact that the nuns were sadistic in their treatment of children in my father's diocese, where Catholics were Yorkshiremen or Irish both reviled by protestant east enders

As a result my father grew up to be very tough but also exceedingly cruel to children

My post was about my father's experience and my own as well indirectly

[bhikkhu]

5. Like that awkward moment when you realize that most people before 1950

were racist misogynistic homophobes, and many people who were otherwise admirable had their dark and unexpected sides. Not that we have come so far, but how looking forward is generally more hopeful than looking backward. I have a few old heroes, but just a few.

[Warren DeMontague]

7. Another example of a terrible human who had good PR people

but, you know, if some folks wear a cloak of piety long enough, they can get away with being real jerks.

[smirkymonkey]

11. Read this. It will show you exactly how evil she was.

http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/religion/mother-teresa/

"She had other questionable supporters as well. Charles Keating, who stole in excess of $252 million in the Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980s, donated $1.25 million of his loot to Mother Teresa. When he was eventually caught, M.T. interceded on his behalf and wrote a letter to the court urging leniency. When the district attorney wrote back informing her that the money she had received was stolen money, she made no attempt to reply. She also accepted money from the embezzler Robert Maxwell, who stole £450 million from his employees' pension funds (and committed suicide rather than face Scotland Yard).

In fact, the Missionaries of Charity probably garner annual donations in excess of $100 million worldwide. (It's only "probably" because her organization patently refuses to release their financials.) Where does all that money go?

It certainly doesn't go into health care for her wards. People get the misconception that her facilities operate as hospices or medical clinics. This is not so. Those facilities are devoted to giving people someplace to lay down and die. M.T. herself named them "Houses of the Dying." Over the years, her organization has grown to support a worldwide network of schools and soup kitchens, but these are rather modest affairs and require very little cash to maintain. In fact, one former staffer of the New York branch revealed that although there was more than $50 million sitting in the bank, the local subsidiary continued to appeal to the public for more donations. There is no telling how much money resides in all their other accounts around the world.

Of course, when she required her own medical care, only the best would do. In public, she declined a 1984 offer for free cataract surgery from the St Francis Medical Center, worth $5,000. But the following year, she quietly received the same treatment at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York. Not to mention visits to the Scripps Clinic and the Gemelli Hospital, and numerous visits for cardiac care at the Birla Heart Institute in Calcutta. At some point she got a pacemaker installed."

[True Earthling]

13. MT told sick people to suffer and reject treatment, yet went to a hospital the moment she fell ill

good read...

Mother Teresa: Anything but a saint…
https://scienceblog.com/60730/mother-teresa-anything-but-a-saint/

‘The sick must suffer like Christ on the cross’
At the time of her death, Mother Teresa had opened 517 missions welcoming the poor and sick in more than 100 countries. The missions have been described as “homes for the dying” by doctors visiting several of these establishments in Calcutta. Two-thirds of the people coming to these missions hoped to a find a doctor to treat them, while the other third lay dying without receiving appropriate care. The doctors observed a significant lack of hygiene, even unfit conditions, as well as a shortage of actual care, inadequate food, and no painkillers. The problem is not a lack of money—the Foundation created by Mother Teresa has raised hundreds of millions of dollars—but rather a particular conception of suffering and death: “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering,” was her reply to criticism, cites the journalist Christopher Hitchens. Nevertheless, when Mother Teresa required palliative care, she received it in a modern American hospital.

Mother Teresa’s questionable politics and shadowy accounting
Mother Teresa was generous with her prayers but rather miserly with her foundation’s millions when it came to humanity’s suffering. During numerous floods in India or following the explosion of a pesticide plant in Bhopal, she offered numerous prayers and medallions of the Virgin Mary but no direct or monetary aid. On the other hand, she had no qualms about accepting the Legion of Honour and a grant from the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. Millions of dollars were transferred to the MCO’s various bank accounts, but most of the accounts were kept secret, Larivée says. “Given the parsimonious management of Mother Theresa’s works, one may ask where the millions of dollars for the poorest of the poor have gone?”

[REP]

14. Beauty is skin deep; she was ugly from the inside out

I'm surprised that there's anyone left who believes in the lie of Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu.