Feet of Clay?

                    

Someone recently responded interestingly to a minor rant about the Church's dogmatism and man made decisions regarding what is and what ain't scripture.  My point is that a bunch of old guys decided 300 plus years after the alleged events what did and didn't happen. The response included a reference stating, in essence, that "Any woman, including Mother Theresa who speaks up is put in her place"

Would that it were so. Of the many Catholic women who have served the Church over the centuries, Mother Theresa was  absolutely the last one to speak up or take a stand. Her stance was conservative almost to the point of Mel Gibson's.  She is lionized in the west due largely to ignorance of what she did (and more importantly didn't) do.  While Mother Theresa was becoming  world  renowned figure, nameless nuns  (and priests) in El Salvador were preaching liberation theology and truly helping their charges at the cost,  sometimes of their lives. When whichever Gandhi who was in charge at the time declared suspension of Indian civil liberties at one time, Mother Theresa immediately fell in line and declared that the people were "happy and content now." 

The message seemed to me to be the same as was presented to slaves in the ante-bellum South before the Civil War. That message was that "Of course we are all equal in the eyes of God, just don't try to improve your lot on earth because we'll crush you" In the same way, mother Theresa seemed to glorify poverty and its cause, ignorance, as if somehow the poor were really better off and just didn't know it. There are some serious criticisms to be laid at the (fast track) "sainted"  feet of mother Theresa of Calcutta.  Among them are:

Christopher Hitchens:

            "MT 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. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order.

The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries of Charity," but they had no audience for their story.

One of the curses of India, as of other poor countries, is the quack medicine man, who fleeces the sufferer by promises of miraculous healing. Sunday was a great day for these parasites, who saw their crummy methods endorsed by his holiness and given a more or less free ride in the international press. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions."

“Everything everyone thinks they know about [Mother Teresa] is false. It must be the single most successful emotional con job of the twentieth century. It is often said, inside the Church and out of it, that there is something grotesque about lectures on the sexual life when delivered by those who have shunned it. Given the way that the Church forbids women to preach, this point is usually made about men. But given how much this Church allows the fanatical Mother Teresa to preach, it might be added that the call to go forth and multiply, and to take no thought for the morrow, sounds grotesque when uttered by an elderly virgin whose chief claim to reverence is that she ministers to the inevitable losers in this very lottery.”

Sanal Edamaruku:

When Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize, she used the opportunity of her worldwide telecast speech in Oslo to declare abortion the greatest evil in the world and to launch a fiery call against population control. Her charitable work, she admitted, was only part of her big fight against abortion and population control. This fundamentalist position is a slap in the face of India and other Third World Countries, where population control is one of the main keys for development and progress and social transformation. Do we have to be grateful to Mother Teresa for leading this worldwide propagandist fight against us with the money she collected in our name?

Mother Teresa did not serve the poor in Calcutta, she served the rich in the West. She helped them to overcome their bad conscience by taking billions of Dollars from them. Some of her donors were dictators and criminals, who tried to white wash their dirty vests. Mother Teresa revered them for a price. Most of her supporters, however, were honest people with good intentions and a warm heart, who fall for the illusion that the "Saint of the Gutter" was there to wipe away all tears and end all misery and undo all injustice in the world. Those in love with an illusion often refuse to see reality. 

 

Sarmila Bose:

 "Perhaps the greatest harm she did to the very poor she said she served was her total opposition to both abortion and contraception, in accordance with her orthodox Catholic faith. She worked in a sea of poverty that is India, yet opposed one of India’s most important anti-poverty policies — its population control programme. When I visited her orphanage I was grateful to her for taking in babies abandoned in the streets of Calcutta, but there would be fewer abandoned and unwanted babies all around if India’s family planning programme were more successful. She had the right to her own faith, but her public work based on that faith collided with what was better for society.
For someone about to become a saint, Mother Teresa was cosy with nasty dictators like the Duvaliers of Haiti and notorious swindlers like Charles Keating of the USA. She did not hesitate to declare that the Duvaliers loved the poor, and did not care that Keating had stolen a lot of money from people who weren’t rich, just because he gave her some. In fact, she received lots of money from lots of people and it is worrying that none of it is accounted for through any public audit. It is also true  that her institutions offer only simple, rudimentary service, so the vast funds do not seem to have been used to upgrade and modernise the care provided."

Michael Hakeem, PhD:

Mother Teresa is thoroughly saturated with a primitive fundamentalist religious worldview that sees pain, hardship, and suffering as ennobling experiences and a beautiful expression of affiliation with Jesus Christ and his ordeal on the cross. Hitchens reports that in a filmed interview Mother Teresa herself tells of a patient suffering unbearable pain from terminal cancer: "With a smile, Mother Teresa told the camera what she told the patient: 'You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.'" Apparently unaware that the response of the sufferer was a put-down, she freely related it: "Then please tell him to stop kissing me."  .

  In short, it seems the west was sold a con job with regards to Mother Theresa, while the Church studiously avoided dealing with the real brutality visited on  Nuns and priests by Latin American nations in their own self interest at retaining power. The USA openly funded the Contras in Nicaragua, know killers of clergy, until forced to stop, at which point Ronald Reagan found another way. Seems to me the church stands strong while in possession of the upper hand (Crusades, Inquisition) and goes along to get along when it doesn't (Pius XII during the Nazi era, El Salvador, Nicaragua, India)  But in no case does mother theresa get a pass for popularizing crushing poverty.