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7/07/2003 07:40:00 PM | Timothy

Mother Theresa: Should we call her a saint or a worse consorter with dictators than French President Chirac?
Emmett Hogan praises Mother Theresa and her likely canonization, linking to this article. I wonder what Hogan has to say to Christopher Hitchens talking about her consorting with dictators, gathering millions of dollars, and doing little to nothing to prevent the death of poor people. Here’s Hitchens in an interview about his book on Mother Theresa:
[I also had] a sort of journalistic curiosity as to why it was that no one had asked any serious questions about Mother Teresa's theory or practice. Regarding her practice, I couldn't help but notice that she had rallied to the side of the Duvalier family in Haiti, for instance, that she had taken money - over a million dollars - from Charles Keating, the Lincoln Savings and Loans swindler, even though it had been shown to her that the money was stolen; that she has been an ally of the most reactionary forces in India and in many other countries; that she has campaigned recently to prevent Ireland from ceasing to be the only country in Europe with a constitutional ban on divorce, that her interventions are always timed to assist the most conservative and obscurantist forces.
Emmett also says: “The article shows, too, how the suffering created by doubting the existence of God can be spiritually edifying, as it was for the nun of Calcutta.” Well Hitchens claims that Mother Theresa thought the suffering of the poor was also beautiful:
I hesitated to cover this in my book, but I decided I had to publish that she has said that the suffering of the poor is something very beautiful and the world is being very much helped by the nobility of this example of misery and suffering.
Hitchens talks about looking into Mother Theresa’s facilities for the poor:
The care facilities are grotesquely simple: rudimentary, unscientific, miles behind any modern conception of what medical science is supposed to do. There have been a number of articles - I've collected some more since my book came out - about the failure and primitivism of her treatment of lepers and the dying, of her attitude towards medication and prophylaxis. Very rightly is it said that she tends to the dying, because if you were doing anything but dying she hasn't really got much to offer. This is interesting because, first, she only proclaims to be providing people with a Catholic death, and, second, because of the enormous amounts of money mainly donated to rather than raised by her Order. We've been unable to audit this - no one has ever demanded an accounting of how much money has flowed in her direction. With that money she could have built at least one absolutely spanking new, modern teaching hospital in Calcutta without noticing the cost.
If it need be said, I don’t agree with everything Hitchens says in the interview, but take a look. And Emmett can tell me, for we are engaged in reasoned debate now, how Hitchens is mistaken or what else makes him think of Mother Theresa that “Her life gives the lie to the notion that the Church is ‘too old to produce heroic saints.’”



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