Let’s play a fun game called “everything you know about Mother Teresa is shit.”
She baptized Hindu and Muslim people on their death beds, regardless of their wishes.
She supported Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and his family, who ran Haiti as a police state, who she said “loved their poor” even when he had stolen tens of millions of dollars from them.
She was friends with Charles Keating, a Catholic fundamentalist who was convicted of fraud, racketeering and conspiracy for his involvement in a scam where customers were deceived into buying worthless junk bonds, resulting in many of them losing their life savings. Even though she renounced money, Keating donated $1.25 million to her in the 80′s, and she wrote a letter to the court on his behalf asking for clemency. The prosecuting attorney wrote her back, encouraging her to return the money as it was stolen, but she never replied.
When the International Health Organization honoured Teresa in 1989, she spoke at length against abortion and contraception and called AIDS a “just retribution for improper sexual conduct”. Similarly, when Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, she proclaimed in her acceptance speech that abortion was the greatest threat to peace in the world. In 1992, she appeared at an open-air Mass in Ireland and said, “Let us promise Our Lady who loves Ireland so much that we will never allow in this country a single abortion. And no contraceptives.” She also campaigned in Ireland to oppose the successful 1995 referendum to legalize divorce in that predominantly Catholic country.
Only 7% of the funds donated to her went to her were used for charity. The rest were funnelled into secret bank accounts or used to build more missions. There are reports of unruly children being strapped to beds and being beaten. Outdated equipment was not replaced. Needles were reused, even in areas with high HIV transmission rates like Haiti, until they were so blunt that they caused pain. Many sisters and volunteers at her Home for Dying Destitutes in Calcutta had no medical training and were required to make important patient care decisions due to the lack of doctors. Her order did not distinguish between curable and incurable patients, meaning that people who could otherwise survive were at risk of dying from infections and a lack of treatment. Some facilities lacked strong analgesics, and needles were rinsed in warm water, leaving them inadequately sterilised. Patients with tuberculosis were not quarantined. Some missions wouldn’t buy food for the people who needed their help, relying instead solely on donated food. The first home that she set up had a mortality rate of 40%.
The motivations of her charity work are questionable. None of the eight facilities run by the Missionaries of Charity in Papua New Guinea have any residents in them, and are solely there for the purpose of converting local people to Catholicism. At a 1981 press conference, she was asked: “Do you teach the poor to endure their lot?” She replied, “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.”
In 2013, in a comprehensive review covering 96% of the literature on Mother Teresa, a group of Université de Montréal academics reinforced the foregoing criticism, detailing, among other issues, the missionary’s practice of “caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it, … her 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”. Questioning the Vatican’s motivations for ignoring the mass of criticism, the study concluded that Mother Teresa’s “hallowed image—which does not stand up to analysis of the facts—was constructed, and that her beatification was orchestrated by an effective media relations campaign" engineered by the anti-abortion BBC journalist Malcolm Muggeridge.
Historian Vijay Prashad wrote, “Mother Teresa is the quintessential image of the white woman in the colonies, working to save the dark bodies from their own temptations and failures. […] The Euro-American-dominated international media continue to harbor the colonial notion that white peoples are somehow especially endowed with the capacity to create social change. When nonwhite people labor in this direction, the media typically search for white benefactors or teachers, or else, for white people who stand in the wings to direct the nonwhite actors. Dark bodies cannot act of their own volition to stretch their own capacity, for they must wait, the media seem to imply, for some colonial administrator, some technocrat from IBM or the IMF to tell them how to do things. When it comes to saving the poor, the dark bodies are again invisible, for the media seem to celebrate only the worn out platitudes of such as Mother Teresa and ignore the struggles of those bodies for their own liberation. To open the life of someone like Mother Teresa to scrutiny, therefore, is always difficult. […] Mother Teresa’s work was part of a global enterprise for the alleviation of bourgeois guilt, rather than a genuine challenge to those forces that produce and maintain poverty.”
So yeah, sorry. I’m going to call trash trash when I see it.
-V
