Cofty, it's like wanting to study Hitler and the Nazis by reading American and English literature on the subject. Hitchens was an atheist and antitheist. One of his books is called: "God is not great. How religion poisons everything." Do I spy a tad bias there? Of course you will believe every word he said/wrote but that's expected.
"Mother" Teresa—a Fraud?
by Saename 48 Replies latest social current
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cofty
it's like wanting to study Hitler and the Nazis by reading American and English literature on the subject
Are you sure you wanted to make that comparison?
Are you suggesting the accounts of the holocaust are American and English lies?
If you think M.T. was a friend of the poor then you have been duped by the RC publicity machine. Don't be so gullible and check the facts. The dying of Calcutta passed away without even basic hygiene and pain control while millions of dollars of donations were spent on MTs empire.
Of course when she got sick she immediately rushed off to the best medical care the west could offer.
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Hiemere
I am a Roman Catholic, and even I have some complaints about canonization of saints, like Mother Teresa.
First of all, I can say that technically speaking, canonized saints are not supposed to be example of perfect people. In very simple terms they are supposed to be examples of how very imperfect even heavily flawed people can be examples of what it means to follow Jesus, at least in Catholic terms.
In all fairness, the public (including Catholics, I can attest) are often very wrong when they expect canonized saints to be models of perfection. That's not what it is supposed to be about.
However, what Lisa Rose said is unfortunately too often very true in most cases:
The idea that Mother Teresa was not the paragon of virtue that people believed her to be is not new to me. She was a marketable product, packaged and promoted like any other product.
While canonized saints are not necessarily required to be a "paragon of virtue," for too long "canonized saints" have been a real "marketable product" of the Catholic Church, "packaged and promoted" as if they were nothing more than a "product."
Pope Francis has been intervening to stop the current canonization process which is filled with abuses and demands for money. Did you know that for some time now if someone lived a truly virtuous life but did not have anyone to pay the Vatican for their sainthood process after their death, they would not be canonized as a saint, even if they performed great miracles and were truly a "paragon of virtue"? Unfortunately the answer is "yes, sadly, it is true."
Mother Teresa's case is one of the last of the pre-Francis saints to get canonized (her case began at the time of her death in 1997). It costs large amounts of money to pay the Vatican and its investigators to ensure a person qualifies as a "canonized saint." So if a real saint doesn't start a movement while they are alive, they will probably have no one to pay for their canonization process and they probably won't be named a saint--at least in the past. Pope Francis has recently announced that this must stop.
"In the early church, saints were often made by papal decree or popular acclaim," states an article about this problem from USNews & World Report. "Over the centuries, the process has become far more detailed, legalistic, time-consuming and costly." While the report claims that it can cost around $500,000 U.S. dollars when all is said and done, the Church can spend a lot more in the way some of these canonizations have been handled.
Granted, not everyone is religious or even if they are believes in saints. But what everyone pretty much can agree on is that such a process where the guy with the most money can literally "buy" his sainthood after death is quite disgusting. Still, not everyone is happy that the current pope is turning his attention to canonize as saints those who do not have the money, bringing back a process in which the people of the Church are the ones who basically declare that a saint has lived among us. As you can imagine, calling for an end to the hoary process which was hidden behind doors by those who demand fees for their work is one of the reasons Pope Francis has some very loud enemies in the Church.
While there might be very legitimate reasons why Mother Teresa should be canonized as a saint, the fact that her case began before the abuses in this process were made apparent to the Church shows that the views of many critics is not unwarranted.
Again it is not about being perfect or even nice, for that matter, but I am sure even the most staunch atheist knows of or has even met a person that has given them pause enough to say: "You know, if there is a God, that person is real example of what it means to be a saint." I am sure whatever our experience, we can all point to someone like that, someone the world overlooks, someone who was never in the limelight or sought it, and someone you might even say was a "paragon of virtue," for real. But where is their canonization? If saints are real, isn't that the one you want on your side praying for you?
While I am happy to know there is finally a pope who wants to things the right way, I am very much angry (and often fighting) with those in my Church who won't let go of old ways while holding out a palm and expecting to get paid for their stubborn attitude. The Catholic Church still has too many of the kind of people who care little about doing the right thing and more about protecting their position and power. The good news is that unlike in the Witness religion, you can fight such people and even help bring them down and out. Today, more than ever, Catholics get to decide who runs their Church and who doesn't, but those old cronies are still stuck in their crevices hissing at us as we approach. Even Francis can't do it with all his authority, and he's the Pope!
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Finkelstein
Mother Teresa could be recognized as being devoutly unscrupulous when it came to cultivating money toward the Church's hospice care facilities and other branches of the Catholic church's purse but failed when it came to bring into these facilitates proper medical care ( drugs etc ) which could have saved lives.
The disparately poor and ill were methodically exploited for drawing in charity denotations but most of the money wasn't directed to these facilities and used proficiently to actually save lives.
She went about with her hand out for money and received a lot but what she did with that money was morally questionable.
It was better to have ill people on hand and use these ones to convert them into Catholicism.
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Vidqun
Thanks Hiemere, there is always two sides to a story, depending on who the narrator is. The versions of atheists, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims will differ widely. One will wonder: Are they talking about the same person?
Cofty: Are you suggesting the accounts of the holocaust are American and English lies?
Read again: "If you want to study Hitler and the Nazis...." If I wanted to study Hitler and the Nazis and their effect on the German people, I would ask a German, that were there, first. He would be able to tell it first hand. From there I would examine other sources and compare them with what I know. The Germans did lose the war, you know? So the version of the victor will always be slanted in his favor.
Why don't you study American and British movies of the war, during and after the war? These were not very objective, were they? The Americans and British were the goodies, and the Germans and Japaneses were the baddies.
Who said anything about the holocaust? You are determined to put words in my mouth. Why would you want to do that? Again I ask: Do I spy a measure of bias here?
Finkelstein, who would be in charge of Mother Teresa's missions and financing? She was but a small cog in the Catholic machinery, and she would not be allowed to handle her own finances. The Vatican has specialized people taking care of the finances (similar to the WT Organization). She would get but a small allowance. In one documentary of her early days she complained that she needed more funds to complete her projects.
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cofty
If I wanted to study Hitler and the Nazis and their effect on the German people, I would ask a German, that were there, first. He would be able to tell it first hand
Check out accounts of catholic volunteers who were horrified at the total lack of compassion and basic nursing care in MTs houses of death.
I am talking about first hand accounts. She taught that human suffering was a blessing. She was a sadist!
In one documentary she complained that she needed more funds to complete her projects.
She was also a liar and a fraud.
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Vidqun
I saw a documentary of her early days. She was so horrified at what was happening to the sickly and poor in Calcutta, she started helping them. She went against her own Mother Superior and some of the priests in charge. She was not popular and they opposed her all the way. As I said: There's always two sides to a story. Here the objective journalist would go to the poor people that received help from her missions. Always good to hear it from the horse's mouth first?
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Hiemere
I am talking about first hand accounts. She taught that human suffering was a blessing. She was a sadist!
Cofty is correct, except that she was not the only one in the Catholic Church that taught that. In fact, it is a basic tenet of Catholicism--but not in the way it is being argued about here.
In Catholic theology Christ turned human values upside down, at least the way Catholics understand Jesus. Instead of being a royal born into the rich and powerful family of Herods, Jesus was born in a very questionable situation to a woman who was pregnant before marriage and was born in poverty. Instead of teaching people that persuading others to accept a particular doctrine was the measure of salvation, Jesus taught that how you cared for the poor, the naked, the thirsty, the jailed and the stranger was how people will be judged for life. And instead of promising happiness from living a pious life of religious ritual, Jesus demanded his followers to take up their cross and expect a life of suffering.
This reversal of circumstances is what Mother Teresa and all of Catholicism teaches: suffering can be a path to life and blessing.
But not universally so and neither is suffering itself a blessing. I am sure if you go back to Mother Teresa's exact words and examine her teachings, she was not contradicting Catholic doctrine and advocating that suffering was a blessing from God. If she had advanced this view, she would be disqualified from canonization. One cannot publicly teach as a representative of the Church that which contradicts Catholic doctrine without being guilty of heresy.
However, this does not mean that Cofty may not have an argument. As I mentioned in my previous post, I myself as a Catholic am somewhat wary of many of the saints canonized up till recent times. It's all been based on money. Mother Teresa had a movement that paid for her status of becoming a canonized saint to be advanced, investigated and approved. She is one of the last of these type of "saints" since Pope Francis has called for an end to such abuse of the Church's sainthood process, but this one got through because it started before Francis became pontiff.
While I cannot fully concur with all that Cofty sets forth, I am one that stands with Pope Francis that "saints" are those who are called such by the Church, meaning the general consensus of the people within and not by a specialized group of clergy that gets money to do so.
Cofty and others have every right to question those who have been raised to sainthood by such an unfair process. It's hard not to be a questionable figure because even if all the critiques are unfounded, because the bottom line is that your status as saint was based on whether you left a group of organized cheerleaders behind who had the funds to see you get your sainthood.
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Finkelstein
Finkelstein, who would be in charge of Mother Teresa's missions and financing? She was but a small cog in the Catholic machinery, and she would not be allowed to handle her own finances.
She saw that the money wasn't going toward uplifting the medical operations of those Hospice facilities, such as bringing in professional doctors and nurses, rather the people there were mostly practicing nuns.
She could have been used and exploited herself by the church's own money handlers.
She could be blamed for putting forth more of her own religious beliefs ahead and above of actual modernized and appropriate medical care toward those unfortunate people.
I doubt that she alone was responsible for misappropriation of those charitable funds, the church mostly skimmed off a lot of it.
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Vidqun
If you as an "untouchable" was lying in the street, dying in your own excrement, it would be a saint that would come and pick you up, take you under roof, wash you, cover you with a gown, put you in a clean bed and feed you. I would be thankful for such a person. By Western standards, that's not much, but for that "untouchable," being allowed to die with dignity, it would certainly be highly appreciated. Would he/she be better off? I think so. So, yes, I do view things differently.