Daniel Allot
Washington Examiner
Pope Francis will canonize Mother Teresa at the Vatican on Sept. 4. She will thus be officially recognized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.
At a time when the defining traits of many of the world's most prominent leaders are dishonesty, cruelty, hubris and selfishness, one would think that recognition of someone who personified charity and selflessness and who devoted her life to the care of some of the world's most vulnerable people would be something to celebrate.
But not everyone is happy that Mother Teresa is about to receive the highest tribute that the Catholic Church can bestow.
Mother Teresa was born Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in 1910 in what is today the Republic of Macedonia. At 18 she joined an Irish religious order before moving to India to teach at the order's schools.
She founded the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata in 1950 to serve the poorest of the poor - "the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people who have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone."
Today the order has some 6,000 nuns working in orphanages, clinics, schools, hospices in about 140 countries.
But Mother Teresa's impending canonization has prompted a remarkable amount of criticism. One prominent CNN piece was headlined, "'Troubled individual:' Mother Teresa no saint to her critics." It includes an interview with "disillusioned former volunteer Hemley Gonzalez," who in 2008 spent two months volunteering at Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata. Teresa had been dead for over a decade, but Gonzalez said he now suffers from the "horrific remnants of [Teresa's] legacy."
Gonzalez was "appalled" that there was little vetting of clinic volunteers and a shortage of trained doctors and nurses. He was taken aback by the poor hygiene he saw there. "It was a scene out of World War II concentration camp," he said. What's more, the sisters there seemed reluctant to change how things were done.
But the Missionaries of Charity never aspired to be the Cleveland Clinic, and the people they served didn't have access even to "concentration camp" medicine. They give basic care to people with nowhere else to turn - in India, to people who in those days were not just poor but also faced the additional hardship of being widely shunned due to Hinduism's harsh caste system. the Missionaries of Charity were all that was available to most of the people they served, and they often remain so today.
The New York Times ran a profile of Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, who "has spent a good part of his life [being] one of the most vocal critics of Mother Teresa." What's his problem with Teresa? Partly it's that her work in Kolkata meant his city was depicted as "one of the most desperate places on earth, a 'black hole.'"
This clashed with Chatterjee's experience of the city. A doctor, Chatterjee saw the city as "cosmopolitan, even moneyed" and didn't like that, through the attention Teresa's work garnered, the world saw it as abjectly poor. He's also bitter because he never saw any Missionaries of Charity nuns in the slums he worked in.
Chatterjee said he was baffled by the vaunted reputation Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity had gained in the West and said he found a "cult of suffering" in the Missionaries of Charity's homes. This echoed Christopher Hitchens, who mocked Teresa's (very Catholic) belief that suffering was a gift of sorts because it can be redemptive.
I'm in favor of giving full and honest accounts of celebrated people, especially those who are held up as saints. To whitewash their lives does a disservice to their legacy and an injustice to the truth. It can also make sainthood seem unattainable, whereas in fact every Catholic is expected to pursue it. There is a certain tendency to allow only the good and great qualities of historic figures to define them, while letting their weaknesses fade over time. Saints are said to embody certain "heroic virtues" that the faithful are called to emulate. But it's important to let would-be emulators know that saintliness does not require perfection.
But too often it seems that attacks on Mother Teresa are ideological - merely a way for people to attack the church's teachings on sexuality and human life. Most of the accounts note that Teresa was an outspoken proponent of Catholic teachings on contraception, abortion and divorce, which are almost always described as controversial, even within the church.
Other attacks on her seem to be a way for people to air their grievances with the Catholic Church generally. A Toronto Star opinion piece noted that Teresa's canonization "will take place in a Vatican in possession of wealth through paintings, manuscripts, statues and investments that is beyond comprehension ... The glaring juxtaposition between what the tiny Albanian woman was at least supposed to represent and the Roman reality is, frankly, scandalous."
Yes, and Saint Dominic made a similar remark to the Pope himself about nine centuries ago, and he had a point then. But the real scandal is that Teresa's critics can't seem to put aside their distaste for Catholicism, not even to recognize the undeniable good that she did for people who had nowhere to turn.
At a time when the defining traits of many of the world's most prominent leaders are dishonesty, cruelty, hubris and selfishness, one would think that recognition of someone who personified charity and selflessness and who devoted her life to the care of some of the world's most vulnerable people would be something to celebrate.
But not everyone is happy that Mother Teresa is about to receive the highest tribute that the Catholic Church can bestow.
Mother Teresa was born Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in 1910 in what is today the Republic of Macedonia. At 18 she joined an Irish religious order before moving to India to teach at the order's schools.
She founded the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata in 1950 to serve the poorest of the poor - "the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people who have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone."
Today the order has some 6,000 nuns working in orphanages, clinics, schools, hospices in about 140 countries.
But Mother Teresa's impending canonization has prompted a remarkable amount of criticism. One prominent CNN piece was headlined, "'Troubled individual:' Mother Teresa no saint to her critics." It includes an interview with "disillusioned former volunteer Hemley Gonzalez," who in 2008 spent two months volunteering at Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata. Teresa had been dead for over a decade, but Gonzalez said he now suffers from the "horrific remnants of [Teresa's] legacy."
Gonzalez was "appalled" that there was little vetting of clinic volunteers and a shortage of trained doctors and nurses. He was taken aback by the poor hygiene he saw there. "It was a scene out of World War II concentration camp," he said. What's more, the sisters there seemed reluctant to change how things were done.
But the Missionaries of Charity never aspired to be the Cleveland Clinic, and the people they served didn't have access even to "concentration camp" medicine. They give basic care to people with nowhere else to turn - in India, to people who in those days were not just poor but also faced the additional hardship of being widely shunned due to Hinduism's harsh caste system. the Missionaries of Charity were all that was available to most of the people they served, and they often remain so today.
The New York Times ran a profile of Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, who "has spent a good part of his life [being] one of the most vocal critics of Mother Teresa." What's his problem with Teresa? Partly it's that her work in Kolkata meant his city was depicted as "one of the most desperate places on earth, a 'black hole.'"
This clashed with Chatterjee's experience of the city. A doctor, Chatterjee saw the city as "cosmopolitan, even moneyed" and didn't like that, through the attention Teresa's work garnered, the world saw it as abjectly poor. He's also bitter because he never saw any Missionaries of Charity nuns in the slums he worked in.
Chatterjee said he was baffled by the vaunted reputation Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity had gained in the West and said he found a "cult of suffering" in the Missionaries of Charity's homes. This echoed Christopher Hitchens, who mocked Teresa's (very Catholic) belief that suffering was a gift of sorts because it can be redemptive.
I'm in favor of giving full and honest accounts of celebrated people, especially those who are held up as saints. To whitewash their lives does a disservice to their legacy and an injustice to the truth. It can also make sainthood seem unattainable, whereas in fact every Catholic is expected to pursue it. There is a certain tendency to allow only the good and great qualities of historic figures to define them, while letting their weaknesses fade over time. Saints are said to embody certain "heroic virtues" that the faithful are called to emulate. But it's important to let would-be emulators know that saintliness does not require perfection.
But too often it seems that attacks on Mother Teresa are ideological - merely a way for people to attack the church's teachings on sexuality and human life. Most of the accounts note that Teresa was an outspoken proponent of Catholic teachings on contraception, abortion and divorce, which are almost always described as controversial, even within the church.
Other attacks on her seem to be a way for people to air their grievances with the Catholic Church generally. A Toronto Star opinion piece noted that Teresa's canonization "will take place in a Vatican in possession of wealth through paintings, manuscripts, statues and investments that is beyond comprehension ... The glaring juxtaposition between what the tiny Albanian woman was at least supposed to represent and the Roman reality is, frankly, scandalous."
Yes, and Saint Dominic made a similar remark to the Pope himself about nine centuries ago, and he had a point then. But the real scandal is that Teresa's critics can't seem to put aside their distaste for Catholicism, not even to recognize the undeniable good that she did for people who had nowhere to turn.
