James, I think it's self-defeating for the more militant of modern atheists to launch organized attacks against entrenched believers' heros, even if those heros are exposed frauds.
Instead of focusing on the many documented negatives, we agnostics would do better to focus on the profound *positives* of post-deity secular living here-and-now in the 21st century, and moving forward.
How many here would do that? would do the one thing that a leper has the least of, the pleasure of human touch.
PSacramento, I love your question.
Father Damien! He "won recognition for his ministry to people with leprosy, who had been placed under a government-sanctioned medical quarantine on the island of Moloka'i in the Kingdom of Hawai'i."
Author Robert Louis Stevenson's defense of the man, regardless of Damien's certain human flaws, is well worth a read.
But Mother Teresa? Like the many sad RC nuns my ancestors knew, she was a dysfunctional unit. On overdrive. That wretched witch became drunk on her growing power to deceive the faithful. I regard her in the same "class" as Judge Rutherford: Deliberate Psychopath.
Although I no longer count myself amongst "believers," I am willing to give credit where due for selfless acts, for lives given over in service and sacrifice to help others who are doomed not by their own hand, but by circumstances they cannot fix, change or control.
Father Damien appears (to me) to have achieved that as best he could, and if he was able to accomplish so much within the framework of a church that pretty much abandoned him as an individual, well, no one else was stepping up to the plate. The government's penal colony solution was less a solution than a further punishment when you examine the particulars.
Stevenson was a man after my own heart. He CHOSE not to differentiate. Yet held the naysayers to task, on just the same exact same PERSONAL level that they attacked Damien. When he SAW Damien's miserable lifework, he recognized what it meant to be a human helping humans regardless of church affiliation. I'd like to think that today, I could add "or none at all" to that last sentence: Church affiliation, or none at all.
Damien ran the race, may he rest in peace. There is no doubt in my mind, that he too came full circle to understand that "God" was not there in the end.
Teresa, that hustler and swindler? She figured it out early and knew it all along.