Pope Francis has just taken the final step making Mother Theresa a saint. Her record is at best mixed. On the positive side she did take in the sick and dying from the streets of Calcutta and provided them with some minimal care. On the negative side, in order to raise money for her work, she hobnobbed with some of the worst people in the world like the Duvaliers in Haiti and praised them, thus providing them with cover for their misdeeds. She also was an implacable foe of contraception and abortion and seemed to have this bizarre love for suffering for its own sake, seeing it as somehow ennobling and bringing you closer to god. As one critic said, she was not a friend of the poor so much as a friend of poverty.
Some people are upset about this development, suggesting that she is undeserving of sainthood. But this whole business of sainthood, deserving or undeserving, is as ridiculous as so many of the other doctrines that Catholics believe in, so the most appropriate response is laughter that anyone takes it seriously at all
I wrote some time ago about the process by which the Catholic church gathers evidence of saintliness. At one time it considered as evidence if their dead bodies not decomposing as much as those of mere sinners. That struck me as a particularly pointless way of showing god’s power, since absolutely no one benefitted from it. The church later abandoned that type of evidence.
There is a basic requirement for sainthood of at least two miracles occurring in their name and the church has a process for establishing that that I wrote about before in the context of Jaclyn Duffin, a hematologist who describes herself as an atheist, who was invited by the church to investigate claims of miracles. She later wrote a book Medical Miracles (2009) that said there was something to it and that she now believes in miracles. In that post and in a subsequent one, I criticized the reasoning that she used for asserting the validity of miracles.
Jesus and Mo summed up the whole business best.
I remember reading a story in the news about a pilot landing safely after an equipment malfunction. One passenger was quoted saying they thanked God. I remember thinking that this one was definitely on the pilot.
Teresa was a wackaloon. Listen to this story about a former member of her order (who is now non-religious):
http://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2016/09/07/saint-teresa-johnson
Catholic “saints” are simply the Christian version of the deified humans of the Greco-Roman cultures. We even recognize those demigods today by using “July” and “August,” months named for the deified Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar. One basis for the origin and theology of Protestantism was the rejection of the idea of saints as being basically a pagan idea that was adopted by the Church at some point. The various founders of Protestantism believed that the Catholic clergy as a group were the Anti-Christ, and therefore servants of Satan, because he supposedly infiltrated and corrupted the early Church by introducing pagan ideas, such as the cult of saints.
Cyrillus of Alexandria, the guy who send a mob to lynch Hypatia, is a saint. So why not Theresa?
It’s good the catholics take that idolatry and “no other gods” thing seriously.
Christopher Hitchens has some good stuff about how Malcolm Muggeridge was shooting footage of MT, and was using a new film with a different light response, and got lovely exposures (because the new film’s color latitude was better) And Muggeridge concluded that it was “holy light” rather than tab-grain silver halides. The rest, as they say, is bullshit.
DonDueed,
Thanks for that link. The interview sheds an interesting light on her thinking.
Your FtB colleague Arun — who happens to be an MD — didn’t think there were any miracles going on.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/arun/2016/09/04/sham-miracles-an-affront-to-scientific-temper/
She is being called a “saint” by the same people who wanted “sainthood” for Pius XII, the Nazi collaborator who was a participant in the deaths of countless jews. (If you can taste the bile in my words, I don’t apologize for it. I’m tempted to break my personal “no profanity” rule and call her what Penn Jillette used to call her.)
“Provided minimal care” would infer that her “hospitals” in some way tried to alleviate suffering and disease. In reality, those Black Holes of Calcutta spread disease and inflicted agony on the poor to further her cult of personality.
https://mic.com/articles/28746/mother-teresa-not-a-saint-new-study-suggests-she-was-a-fraud#.KC9h42FWj
If her “hospitals” offered such great care, she should have been forced into them herself instead of travelling to Europe and the US for a quality of medical care that she intentionally denied to others.
That’s putting it mildly. She would have given absolution (and probably did) to every catholic Latin American dictator, just as the current pope gave absolution to the pilots who threw people into the ocean during Argentina’s “dirty war”.
She knowingly took US$20 million that Charles Keating stole from Savings and Loan depositors, and felt no moral obligation to return people’s savings. She was nothing but a thief and a fraud acting solely for her own inflated ego.