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Mother Teresa was a vile, horrible woman basing her work on white privilege
Mother Teresa: Why the Catholic missionary is still no saint to her critics: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/mother-teresa-why-the-catholic-missionary-is-still-no-saint-to-her-critics-a6778906.html
In India, where Mother Teresa carried out the majority of her work, that legacy has already been called into question once this year. In February, the head of the Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) sparked outrage when he criticised her intentions.
“It’s good to work for a cause with selfless intentions. But Mother Teresa’s work had ulterior motive, which was to convert the person who was being served to Christianity,” RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said at the opening of an orphanage in Rajasthan state, the Times of India reported. “In the name of service, religious conversions were made. This was followed by other institutes, too.”
In 1994, Hitchens and British Pakistani journalist Tariq Ali wrote an extremely critical documentary on Mother Teresa titled “Hell’s Angel.” The documentary, which drew heavily from the account of Aroup Chatterjee, an Indian-born British writer who had worked briefly in one of Mother Teresa’s charitable homes, listed a catalog of criticisms against her. It found fault with the conditions in the facilities of her Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, which one journalist compared to the photographs she had seen of Nazi Germany’s Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and Hitchens rallied against what he called the “cult of death and suffering.”
In India, where Mother Teresa carried out the majority of her work, that legacy has already been called into question once this year. In February, the head of the Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) sparked outrage when he criticised her intentions.
“It’s good to work for a cause with selfless intentions. But Mother Teresa’s work had ulterior motive, which was to convert the person who was being served to Christianity,” RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said at the opening of an orphanage in Rajasthan state, the Times of India reported. “In the name of service, religious conversions were made. This was followed by other institutes, too.”
In 1994, Hitchens and British Pakistani journalist Tariq Ali wrote an extremely critical documentary on Mother Teresa titled “Hell’s Angel.” The documentary, which drew heavily from the account of Aroup Chatterjee, an Indian-born British writer who had worked briefly in one of Mother Teresa’s charitable homes, listed a catalog of criticisms against her. It found fault with the conditions in the facilities of her Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, which one journalist compared to the photographs she had seen of Nazi Germany’s Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and Hitchens rallied against what he called the “cult of death and suffering.”
The Complicated Pasts of 6 Trailblazing Women: https://www.history.com/news/mother-teresa-6-trailblazing-women-complicated-pasts
Why She’s Complicated: Even sainthood doesn’t spare one from criticism. The facilities Mother Teresa raised millions to build were rundown and unsanitary, some charged (she advocated reusing hypodermic needles) and she refused an audit that would explain how that could be. Medical treatment was often grossly insufficient, and needed care sometimes proved secondary to the goal of converting souls to Catholicism, critics said. At her Nobel acceptance speech, she condemned abortion as “the greatest destroyer of peace,” and later, she advocated codifying a ban on divorce in the Irish constitution. In both cases, her positions were extreme, even for the Catholic Church—and widely perceived to further disadvantage poor women. Her very presence as a white European Catholic “savior” in India (she was born in Macedonia of Albanian descent), others point out, embodies a long tradition of political and spiritual colonialism.
Why She’s Complicated: Even sainthood doesn’t spare one from criticism. The facilities Mother Teresa raised millions to build were rundown and unsanitary, some charged (she advocated reusing hypodermic needles) and she refused an audit that would explain how that could be. Medical treatment was often grossly insufficient, and needed care sometimes proved secondary to the goal of converting souls to Catholicism, critics said. At her Nobel acceptance speech, she condemned abortion as “the greatest destroyer of peace,” and later, she advocated codifying a ban on divorce in the Irish constitution. In both cases, her positions were extreme, even for the Catholic Church—and widely perceived to further disadvantage poor women. Her very presence as a white European Catholic “savior” in India (she was born in Macedonia of Albanian descent), others point out, embodies a long tradition of political and spiritual colonialism.
Mother Teresa Was No Saint: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/krithika-varagur/mother-teresa-was-no-saint_b_9470988.html
To canonize Mother Teresa would be to seal the lid on her problematic legacy, which includes forced conversion, questionable relations with dictators, gross mismanagement, and actually, pretty bad medical care. Worst of all, she was the quintessential white person expending her charity on the third world — the entire reason for her public image, and the source of immeasurable scarring to the postcolonial psyche of India and its diaspora.
A 2013 study from the University of Ottawa dispelled the “myth of altruism and generosity” surrounding Mother Teresa, concluding that her hallowed image did not stand up to the facts, and was basically the result of a forceful media campaign from an ailing Catholic Church.
Although she had 517 missions in 100 countries at the time of her death, the study found that hardly anyone who came seeking medical care found it there. Doctors observed unhygienic, “even unfit,” conditions, inadequate food, and no painkillers — not for lack of funding, in which Mother Theresa’s world-famous order was swimming, but what the study authors call her “particular conception of suffering and death.”
To canonize Mother Teresa would be to seal the lid on her problematic legacy, which includes forced conversion, questionable relations with dictators, gross mismanagement, and actually, pretty bad medical care. Worst of all, she was the quintessential white person expending her charity on the third world — the entire reason for her public image, and the source of immeasurable scarring to the postcolonial psyche of India and its diaspora.
A 2013 study from the University of Ottawa dispelled the “myth of altruism and generosity” surrounding Mother Teresa, concluding that her hallowed image did not stand up to the facts, and was basically the result of a forceful media campaign from an ailing Catholic Church.
Although she had 517 missions in 100 countries at the time of her death, the study found that hardly anyone who came seeking medical care found it there. Doctors observed unhygienic, “even unfit,” conditions, inadequate food, and no painkillers — not for lack of funding, in which Mother Theresa’s world-famous order was swimming, but what the study authors call her “particular conception of suffering and death.”
Blech!
33 replies
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And those she supposedly cared for did suffer. 
Maybe this is something the Rump should be aiming for instead of the Nobel? 
Foundations of Holocaust: American eugenics and the Nazi connection (Jerusalem Post)
https://www.jpost.com/Blogs/The-Jewish-Problem---From-anti-Judaism-to-anti-Semitism/Foundations-of-Holocaust-American-eugenics-and-the-Nazi-connection-364998
Introduction: If America’s response to the unfolding Holocaust is characterized as passive, its role in promoting the science behind Nazi racism, justification for the Holocaust, was active, even aggressive. American participation in the evolution of Germany’s rassenhygiene took place on many levels from biologists to physicians, from academicians to philanthropists. Two presidents supported the goal of a pure American race, and the US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in a majority decision wrote, “`It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.''''
Returning to Edwin Black’s observation,
“[T]he concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn''t originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States.”
As I allowed Black to introduce last weeks discussion so will I do in the present:
“Germany’s budding eugenicists became desirable allies for the Americans. A clear partnership emerged in the years before World War I. In this relationship however, America was far away the senior partner. In eugenics, the United States led and Germany followed. “This relationship continued during the Third Reich. During the 1920s, the politically neutral Rockefeller Foundation played a major role in establishing and sponsoring major eugenic institutions in Germany, and during the Hitler years it funded Nazi-controlled institutions both in Germany and Austria until 1939. The Carnegie Foundation continued to fund the [Long Island, New York-based] Eugenic Records Office until 1939, despite the office’s support for the Nazi persecution of the Jews. In 1935, Hitler thanked Leon Whitney of the American Eugenics Society for sending him a copy of “The Case for Sterilization,” a 1934 book that promoted the idea of using sterilization to protect the racial health of Anglo-Saxon America.”
snip
"We do not stand alone": Nazi poster from 1936 introducing compulsory sterilization legislation. First flag on the poster is that of the United States, Germany’s teacher and sponsor, and world leader of Eugenics.
https://www.jpost.com/Blogs/The-Jewish-Problem---From-anti-Judaism-to-anti-Semitism/Foundations-of-Holocaust-American-eugenics-and-the-Nazi-connection-364998
“Most of all, American raceologists were proud to have inspired the strictly eugenic state the Nazis were constructing."
“Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.”
“Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.”
Introduction: If America’s response to the unfolding Holocaust is characterized as passive, its role in promoting the science behind Nazi racism, justification for the Holocaust, was active, even aggressive. American participation in the evolution of Germany’s rassenhygiene took place on many levels from biologists to physicians, from academicians to philanthropists. Two presidents supported the goal of a pure American race, and the US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in a majority decision wrote, “`It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.''''
Returning to Edwin Black’s observation,
“[T]he concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn''t originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States.”
As I allowed Black to introduce last weeks discussion so will I do in the present:
“Germany’s budding eugenicists became desirable allies for the Americans. A clear partnership emerged in the years before World War I. In this relationship however, America was far away the senior partner. In eugenics, the United States led and Germany followed. “This relationship continued during the Third Reich. During the 1920s, the politically neutral Rockefeller Foundation played a major role in establishing and sponsoring major eugenic institutions in Germany, and during the Hitler years it funded Nazi-controlled institutions both in Germany and Austria until 1939. The Carnegie Foundation continued to fund the [Long Island, New York-based] Eugenic Records Office until 1939, despite the office’s support for the Nazi persecution of the Jews. In 1935, Hitler thanked Leon Whitney of the American Eugenics Society for sending him a copy of “The Case for Sterilization,” a 1934 book that promoted the idea of using sterilization to protect the racial health of Anglo-Saxon America.”
snip
"We do not stand alone": Nazi poster from 1936 introducing compulsory sterilization legislation. First flag on the poster is that of the United States, Germany’s teacher and sponsor, and world leader of Eugenics.
I never liked her much. I always thought her charity was geometrically variable, and reserved her consideration for the rich and mighty.
The word “charity” I purposely use. I dislike the meaning the word has taken on gradually, as it involves a certain contempt and pity.
“Caritas” in Latin expressed kindness, love for one's fellow human beings, empathy, caring for others.
I don't want to be charitable, but I want to help those who need it, as I would like to be if fortune turns its back on me.
I always preferred Sister Emmanuelle. She did a lot for the poor in Egypt. She had a cheerful personality and was sincerely devoted to the most needy. I don't remember whether she was known in America.
Yes, I agree with you about the word "charity". There are charitable works that are performed out of a sense of moral obligation even though the person doing them holds those he/she is serving in contempt. Then there are those charitable works that are performed because a person feels empathy.
