I've been reading Christopher Hitchen's Love Poverty, and War. It's a pretty good book that puts a lot of things in perspective regarding Iraq, Iran, Pakistan...there's even a section on Mother Teresa. This section...was probably the most interesting part of the whole book I have read so far. I thought some of this stuff was interesting....
pg 311 - "...where awarded the nobel prize for peace, she announced that the greatest threat to world peace was .... abortion. And on other occasions she had proclaimed that abortion and contraception were morally equivalent. Logically, this would mean she believed that contraception was also a great - if not indeed the greatest - threat to world peace."
pg 312 - "When asked if I knew anything about her work among the poor, and whether I had ever met her, I replied that I had walked around Calcutta in her company and formed the conclusion that she was not so much a friend of the poor as a friend of poverty. She praised poverty and disease and suffering as gifts from on high, and told people to accept these gifts joyfully. She was adamantly opposed to the only policy that has ever alleviated poverty in any country-that is, the empowerment of women, and the extension of their control over their own fertility. Her famous Calcutta clinic was in fact nothing more that a primitive hospice-a place for people to die, and a place where medical treatment was vestigial or nonexistent (when she became ill herself, she flew first-class to a private clinic in California) The vast sums of money she raised were spent mainly on building convents in her own honor. And she had befriended a whole series of rich crooks... from Charles Keating to the hideous Duvalier dynasty in Haiti, having accepted from both large donations of money that had actually been stolen from the poor."
pg 313 - "She had written to a judge in the case - a certain Lance Into - pleading that Keating was a good man. He'd been good to her all right, lending her a private jet and handng her $1.4 million."
pg 313 - "In 1995 the people of Ireland held a referendum on whether to allow divorce and remarriage. Mother Teresa intervened forcibly on the side of the "no" campaign. An irishwoman, if married to an alcoholic, incestuous abuser, was suppose to put up with it, or offer it up. But in the same year, Mother Teresa gave an interview to ladies' Home Journal saying she was glad to hear her friend Princess Diana was getting divorced, since the royal marriage was so obviously an unhappy one. I said I hoped this was hyporisy, since otherwise it would look like the medieval church, preaching strict morals to the poor and offering indulgences to the rich"
Hitchens was allowed to give testimony for the Vatican regarding the case for her sainthood...I wonder how his testimony went? It sounds like she could of been a great JW elder....