Mother Teresa, Saint or ain't?

[rowan]

Mother Teresa was born in Kosovo in 1910 in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire. But she was a Christian, of course, and spent most of the adult life in Calcutta, where she set up hospitals for the dying. According to many accounts, however, the hospitals were poorly run and operated on a minimal budget. There were fifty or sixty people in a room, lying on camp beds, there was a scarcity of medicine, and hygiene standards were poor. This despite the fact Mother's Teresa's charity organization received millions in donations. Among her benefactors was American real estate mogul Charles Keating, who turned out to be a fraud and a crook, and was eventually sent to prison. Yet Mother Teresa continued to sing his praises. & what did she do with all this money? Build better hospitals, perhaps? No chance. Instead she spent it on building convents all over the world - more than 500 of them in fact. She was also good friends with American president Ronald Reagan, whose countless victims in Central America included four nuns and a bishop (the culprits stated they were under CIA orders), along with British PM Margaret Thatcher and Haitian military dictator Francois 'Papa Doc' Duvalier. These war criminals and others she publicly applauded as well. After the 1984 Bhopal Disaster, in which a chemical spill at a multi-national company killed thousands of people and affected hundreds of thousands more, Mother Teresa had just one word for the victims: 'Forgive!' In fact, she was as much a politician as a charity worker, spreading a Western Catholic agenda as she campaigned arduously against abortion and birth control. For the West her popular image as the 'Great White Hope' rescuing the Third World appeased egoes and allayed guilty consciences. Mother Teresa died on September 5, 1997.

Half a million people are expected to attend the canonisation of Mother Teresa at the Vatican on Sunday, in a ceremony transmitted live to her adopted home of Kolkata and Catholic audiences worldwide.

The two-hour mass in St Peter’s Square, led by Pope Francis almost 19 years after she died, will transform the diminutive nun who became a global icon for her work with the poor into Saint Teresa of Kolkata. But it will also reignite deep criticism of the order she founded, the Missionaries of Charity, which according to detractors focused on the elevation, rather than the relief, of suffering.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/s ... ?CMP=fb_gu

[cashead]

Canonisation means diddly-shit. They also canonised JPII, who shoved his fingers in his ears and screamed "I can't hear you! Aaaaaah!" when faced with the amount of child rapists in the priesthood.

Yeah, pretty good company you're keeping there, Anjeze. Mother Teresa was a hypocrite and a charlatan, and not much else. A saint? Fuck off.

[Lizard]

Yep. Fetishising poverty and campaigning against the best means of ameliorating it. Fuck "Mother" Teresa.