The dark side of Mother Teresa
May 21st, 2008 by Erich ViethThe next time someone gets all misty-eyed when talking about the saintliness of Mother Teresa, have them read this post by Ebonmuse at Daylight Atheism. Here’s an excerpt:
Teresa was a friend to vicious dictators, criminals and con men. As Christopher Hitchens documents in his book The Missionary Position, Teresa was acquainted with a startling number of unsavory characters. Two such were the Duvaliers, Jean-Claude and Michelle, who ruled Haiti as a police state from 1971 until they were overthrown in a popular uprising in 1986. (They looted the country of most of its national treasury when they fled.) Teresa visited them in person in 1981 and praised the Duvaliers and their regime as “friends” of the poor, and her testimony on their behalf was shown on state-owned television for weeks. Bizarrely, she also visited the grave of brutal Communist dictator Enver Hoxha in 1990, laying a wreath of flowers on the tomb of a man who had viciously suppressed religion in Teresa’s native Albania. The list also includes the Nicaraguan contras, a Catholic terrorist group who unleashed death squads on the civilian population in their bid to conquer the country.
Teresa was also a friend to Charles Keating, a conservative Catholic fundamentalist who served on an anti-pornography commission under President Nixon. Keating would later become infamous for his role in the Savings & Loan scandal, where he was convicted of fraud, racketeering and conspiracy for his involvement in a scam where customers were deceived into buying worthless junk bonds, resulting in many of them losing their life savings. Keating had donated $1.25 million to Mother Teresa in the 1980s, and as he was awaiting sentencing, she wrote a letter to the court on his behalf asking for clemency.
The above post is a potent counter-balance to all the Mother Teresa hype.
My biggest concern with Mother Teresa was her destructive approach to family planning. How is it possible that she didn’t see the connection between the out-of-control birth rate and the resulting poverty? I suspect that she did see the connection, but was unwilling to speak the obvious. That would have caused people to stop adoring her. Further, Mother Teresa was far too enamored with the rich and famous and she was unwilling to give up that limelight. In the meantime, her irresponsible approach to family-planning created an ocean of grief which she tried to clean up, a teaspoon at a time.
Simple-minded self-ignorant acts of kindness can be destructive in the aggregate. Mother Teresa’s advocacy of the lack of family planning is on a continuum with all of those politicians who kiss all those babies (perhaps because they really do like babies), but then go back to Washington to rip away their health care coverage.
To cap it all off, Mother Teresa was intellectually dishonest, living a closeted a life as an agnostic while publicly proclaiming her alleged great faith.
There’s not nearly as much work for saints to do when we all start living responsibly and honestly, focusing on the root causes of problems.
May 21st, 2008 at 8:35 am
In effect, Mother Theresa was human. We get it. She had a kind of power, and power is as power does. Her education was through faith, and her power come from the external posture of that faith.
If one were trying to get support from brutal regimes to alleviate the suffering caused by said regime, one would necessarily make an effort to stay on the good side of said regime, to say whatever pleases it. The same goes for economic despots.
The foot soldier never has the vantage to change the direction of a battle once engaged. Had the general/Pope spoken out against the regime, the soldier/nun could have taken a different position with impunity.
As a member of an oppressed minority in the organization (female), Theresa had little choice about her expressed position on birth control, if she would continue helping people on the front lines. Had she taken the long-term view in defiance of her church, she would not still be a celebrity eligible for eventual Sainthood.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:33 am
—My biggest concern with Mother Teresa was her destructive approach to family planning. How is it possible that she didn’t see the connection between the out-of-control birth rate and the resulting poverty?—
Of course she did. Such is the basis for a long-standing posture on the sanctity of tragedy fomented in Christianity and other religions—that this is “our lot” and is therefore the focus of pity, of pleading, of a kind of grace through misery that is subtext to much theological sophistry. People who act to circumvent the causes, if successful, would somehow make it possible for people to feel some control over their own lives rather than always relying on the church.
The Catholic Church has long held that an excess birth-rate is a problem, but it is the natural consequence of Original Sin—sex. People should stop fucking. That is the only solution. Yielding to temptation brings misery, a connection they are loathe to abandon by suggesting that science can offer solutions.
Ironically, in conversation once with a devout Catholic over exactly this issue, the response I got was that it is the responsibility of scientists to come up with ways to feed and clothe all those people, rather than work to curtail an exploding birth-rate.
There is no hypocrisy in this when you grasp the fundamental embrace of human tragedy innate in so much theology. It is, as I say, “our lot” and therefore we must see to it that it is inevitable.
May 21st, 2008 at 6:37 pm
This post reminds me of the way the Bush Administration tries to demonize its enemies by declaring (always without specific evidence) that someone or some group “has links to al Qaida.” I’ve always believed that such allegations should have little bearing on foreign policy decisions, because just about anyone (even Mother Theresa) can be shown to have “links” to *some* disreputable person or group. Indeed, the old ’seven degrees of Kevin Bacon’ has taught us that we are all “linked” to others in some way. Yet, amazingly, a large percentage of the American population jumped right on Bush’s bandwagon, and proudly supported his scapegoating. Though, of course, they didn’t call it scapegoating, they called it “patriotism.”
May 22nd, 2008 at 3:14 am
I told you she is a hypocrite. [here's the link]
I’m sure anybody can be connected somehow with some morally dubious person and everybody has made the wrong decision in a weak moment, but Mother Theresa repeatedly displayed a close affinity to dictators. Or maybe these were just more examples of her extreme positions, next to extreme “compassion” we have an extreme appeasement policy. Let’s kiss some dictator’s ass and thus we will be able to protect and help the suffering population. Or maybe it was extreme hubris, maybe she believed with her visits she could induce some kind of moral change in her hosts.
May 29th, 2008 at 10:54 am
As a Catholic, I carry no bill for the holiness of Mother Teresa. I do not believe she is qualified to be canonized a Saint by the Catholic Church. However, I see Mr. Hitchens’s book as a rant against God more than a critique of Mother Teresa. He makes a couple of valid points that the Vatican needed to give a better response to than the one they offered. Equally, Mr. Hitchens needed to slice through the data with a verbal carving knife not the broad sword he employed. The Keating case is his best argument.
If you are interested in learning more about the real Mother Teresa, I have written a book, Mother Teresa: The Case for The Cause. My book is an intensively researched book exploring the faith and morals of Mother Teresa as compared to Catholic and Christian standards. My book is unique in that there is no book currently in print that explores the faith Mother Teresa practiced in light of the faith she professed. My book fills in the gaps of facts and issues Mr. Hitchens only alludes to in his book.