Mother Teresa was a vile, horrible woman basing her work on white privilege [View all]

[ProudLib72]

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.”

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.

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.”

Blech!