Mother Teresa

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Mother Teresa in 1988.
Mother Teresa disguising herself as a cinnamon bun.

Mother Teresa (real name: Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu), was an Albanian nun who, depending on your level of cynicism, is one of the following:

  1. The most recent example of a saintly person,
  2. The greatest con artist, sham charity embezzler, and sadist the world has seen in the last 50 years, or
  3. A deeply misguided person who put the perceived spiritual needs of those she served over their real, tangible physical needs, or
  4. A very real, very human combination of some or all of the above.

Contents

[edit] Protestant fundamentalism

Teresa’s life is a great teaching aid for Protestant apologists, who point out that despite a lifetime of good works, she is burning in hell right now because she never said the magic words, "I Accept the Risen Jesus Christ as my Personal Lord and Savior!" Even Ted Bundy[wp] did that before he died.[1][2][3]

[edit] Politicizing the Nobel

She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. Being all modest and not wanting to take the money credit, she immediately thanked God for it and proceeded to characterise abortion as the greatest threat to world peace.[4]

[edit] The Missionary Position

In his book, The Missionary Position, author Christopher Hitchens — gasp, shock, horror! — dared criticise Mother Teresa for her work. His accusations include that she was primarily a political opportunist, abusing her fame and charity to spread her religious message, rather than help her humanitarian work.[5]

[edit] Suffering for Jesus

Mother Teresa is thoroughly saturated with a primitive fundamentalist religious worldview that sees pain, hardship, and suffering as ennobling experiences and a beautiful expression of affiliation with Jesus Christ and his ordeal on the cross. Hitchens reports that in a filmed interview Mother Teresa herself tells of a patient suffering unbearable pain from terminal cancer: "With a smile, Mother Teresa told the camera what she told the patient: 'You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.'" Apparently unaware that the response of the sufferer was a put-down, she freely related it: "Then please tell him to stop kissing me."[6]

Well-meaning people donate money to Mother Teresa's organisation and imagine that they are helping people. Few realise that donations sometimes help Mother Teresa's order of nuns to hurt people rather than help them.

[edit] Support of Albanian nationalism

Mother Teresa visited her ancestral homeland of Albania in August 1989, four years after the death of Enver Hoxha, a brutal Stalinist dictator who turned Albania into the "world's first atheist state". Rather than take this as an opportunity to denounce the Hoxha regime's suppression of religion and the murder of her own people, Mother Teresa practically endorsed it.[7] She was received by Hoxha's widow, Nexhmije, who later described Mother Teresa as a "true patriot" and a "great Albanian" who "came with an open mind and praised our achievements".[8] She subsequently laid a bouquet on Hoxha's grave, and placed a wreath on the statue of Mother Albania, which according to Hitchens:

The ‘Mother Albania' monument, it might be worth emphasizing, is not an abstract symbol of sentimental nationhood. It is the emblem of the cause of Greater Albania. A nearby museum displays the boundaries of this ambition in the form of a map. ‘Mother Albania' turns out to comprise — in addition to the martyred province of Kosovo — a large piece of Serbia and Montenegro, a substantial chunk of formerly Yugoslav Macedonia and most of that part of modern Greece now known as Epirus.[7]

Mother Teresa herself never offered any excuse for these actions, and had furthermore nothing to say when her portrait was being flouted by pro-Greater Albania zealots in Macedonia and Kosovo.[7]

[edit] Unpopularity

This made Hitchens deeply unpopular with people who simply couldn't get their heads around the idea that Mother Teresa might be anything other than an absolutely perfect and spotless saint, even causing him to be angrily cut-off during an interview on Fox News (so much for "Fair and Balanced").[9] Criticisms similar to those made by Hitchens were made in the "Holier Than Thou" episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit! in 2005.

[edit] Beatification based on a phony miracle

(…) Following her death, the Vatican decided to waive the usual five-year waiting period to open the beatification process. [JAC: As I recall, it took only a year.] The miracle attributed to Mother Theresa was the healing of a woman, Monica Besra, who had been suffering from intense abdominal pain. The woman testified that she was cured after a medallion blessed by Mother Theresa was placed on her abdomen. Her doctors thought otherwise: the ovarian cyst and the tuberculosis from which she suffered were healed by the drugs they had given her. The Vatican, nevertheless, concluded that it was a miracle. Mother Teresa’s popularity was such that she had become untouchable for the population, which had already declared her a saint. “What could be better than beatification followed by canonization of this model to revitalize the Church and inspire the faithful especially at a time when churches are empty and the Roman authority is in decline?
[10][11]

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

SpanishWiki.png
Se procurava Madre Teresa de Calcutá, há um artigo na RacionalWiki em Português.
  1. Mother Teresa: In Heaven or Hell?
  2. Is Mother Teresa in Hell and Jeffrey Dahmer in Heaven?
  3. Mother Teresa Sent To HellHere's The Onion's take.
  4. Nobel Prize.org — Mother Teresa
  5. Wikipedia — The Missionary Position
  6. http://www.holysmoke.org/hs02/teresa0.htm
  7. 7.0 7.1 7.2 Hitchens, Christopher (2012), The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Atlantic Books, ISBN 085789840X
  8. Orizio, Riccardo (2003), Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators, Walker and Company, pp. 102-103
  9. YouTube — Hitchens cut-off
  10. Mother Teresa: Anything but a saint
  11. Pope John Paul II Gives Approval to Miracle Attributed to Mother Teresa
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