A lot of flak coming from all sides today: Mother Teresa is being accused of most heinous things at the same time...

Originally shared by Radoslav Dejanović

A lot of flak coming from all sides today: Mother Teresa is being accused of most heinous things at the same time she was being declared a saint.
The controversy is huge, and the opportunity to attack religions as breeding grounds for psychopaths and abusers of other people.

But, do we understand the acts and motives of Mother Theresa or do we judge them from the moral high ground built on foundations of not exactly knowing what was going on?

This article is my opinion, and not an apology for Mother Theresa; you might or might not agree with it. What I believe was the underpinning of the whole thing is a simple fact: yes, indeed - Mother Theresa was a religious fundamentalist. She took the religion above everything else and did not bother with mundane things. She was also deeply devoted to the church.

All of that wouldn't be a problem if her fundamentalism wasn't of medieval type. And back then in the medieval times, all of her actions could be justified and even cheered on: for in that time, the life was all about preparing for the afterlife, from a simple peasant to the king himself: whatever one does, it has to be done to get better chances of gaining access to the heaven, and everything else was not important - including pain and suffering.

In the medieval times, pain and suffering were seen as a curse placed upon someone by God, or a gift from God himself for those pious to make them even better; of course, the reward is the express train to heaven.

Why would she take upon such retrograde view of the religion? Keep in mind that she was an Albanian, born on Balkans, in what is today's the capital city of Macedonia; at that time it was a part of the Ottoman empire.
And Balkans area is somewhat backwards when it comes to religion. I know it because I live there, and even today the religious figures are sometimes acting like they're living in pre-renaissance times, declaring women second to men, etc.

Now, imagine little Theresa being raised as a Catholic in what was back then aMuslim empire: I think that the formative years of her life primed her for the very notion of pain and suffering as a gift from God. I wouldn't be surprised if she was openly taught that by her parents and clergymen: it's a rationalisation that could be found in many places like that, the one that rationalises the underdog position of a "chosen people" as an act bestowed upon them by the God, so that they have "their cross to carry" (a common idea in Christianity that reflects Christ's suffering under the cross: when a man is in a difficult position, "he has his cross to carry").

There I think is the basis of the very fundamentalist view of the religion by Mother Theresa, and her embracing of the idea of the suffering as something positive, an act that she will carry on and impose on others not out of sadism as the linked article implies, but out of love.

It does sound strange, to help the people in such an unusual way, but what Mother Theresa probably believed was that it truly is the best thing she could do for those people. For her, if a man is dying, the best thing one can do is to help that person enter the heaven; and if she could convert what she had seen as a heathen, that would virtually guarantee saving that person's soul.

Was it morally wrong to take those poor people in a helpless state and try to convert them because they were vulnerable and would do anything to feel better?
By the modern standards, indeed - but for beliefs Mother Theresa held, it would be a sin not to try to save another soul from eternal damnation. Her duty was to save as many people as she could, and she tried doing exactly that - using methods that are incompatible with modern word views, but fully in accordance with her religion.

What about the people she saved or destroyed? The linked article is quick to cite St. Hitchens' famous attack on her work: "Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of Mother Teresa: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud..."

Where St. Hitchens is right is that she indeed was a fundamentalist, and arguably even a fanatic. But where the argument fails is that people are poor and sick because of her. That's an attack that is unjustified and indeed has no evidence to offer.
Mother Theresa's mission was to help sick and dying (especially the dying) to do just one thing: save their souls. Her mission was not to provide medical services (mainly because of her medieval understanding of religion and the view of suffering as a gift from God) but to give comfort to the dying.

It was never her idea to build hospitals proper and to nurse the people back into health; for that, there were real hospitals, private and those run by the state, it was their purpose to cure people from illnesses. Those who couldn't afford hospitals or were simply abandoned on the street (and we see no condemnation of the society that can just leave people on the street to die, do we?) were taken by her - again, not to cure them but to save their souls.

If the pain and the suffering are from the God, then God is the one who will decide who is going to live and who is going to die. Mother Theresa did not want to meddle with God's business. Instead, she did what she believed is the right thing to do: give those people consolation until the God's will is acted out: they either walk out, or they go to their grave.

The money from the donations, you ask? Probably gone to the church, in another display of Mother Theresa's devotion to Catholicism: the Church will know how to best use that money. (yup, open to the argument)

Would that money be better spent by spending it in proper hospitals? Probably, but the fact that donations did go to Mother Theresa and not to the hospitals argues against that: people wanted to give donations to her, and not to hospitals; therefore, we can not conclude that the money would be spent for better medicinal care of the poor people if the donors did not donate to her, because donors might not donate the money anywhere else. Rationally, we can argument that, if Mother Theresa re-donated that money to hospitals it would be better spent, but two things we should keep in mind: she did believe in God-sent-suffering, and we can't know if that money would be spent for the poorest of the poor or just dissolved in medicinal treatments of those who already could afford some medical care.

And of course, we have to think about the conditions that truly enabled her work: she couldn't have picked up the sick and the dying from the streets if they weren't abandoned right there by the society and left to die on the street.
It was the very heartlessness of the community, of the state and of the very people living there that enabled Mother Theresa to do her mission so efficiently. Were the state of the affairs different, if there were clinics who would accept those people and nurture them back to health, then Mother Theresa wouldn't have a place for her mission. Indeed, she was attracted there by the immense suffering of the people, created not by her or by her mission, but by the government and the society. Calling her sadistic without first calling that society sadistic is a result of poor understanding of what was going on there. Blaming her for taking in abandoned people and giving them relatively poor treatment (but still better than what the society gave them: a bitter nothing) just because she would have a chance to convert them to Christianity is an attack on a religion and not a criticism of her work.

There's just one criticism that truly does hold the water: faced with her serious illness, she underwent modern medicinal procedures instead of embracing her failing body as a gift from the God; instead of embracing her pain and sickness, she failed in her belief and underwent a medical procedure. That was a choice her mission so many times denied to those she cared for, despite the fact that money wasn't a problem. If we could speak of a great sin committed by Mother Theresa, then this would be the one.

Mother Theresa had a medieval understanding of Christianity, and from that stems her rather fundamentalistic and out-of-time approach to the people. But in her mind, it was the right thing to do, and indeed she was doing it out of love, not out of sadism or some sinister motivations. That left her flank open to attacks from people who couldn't or wouldn't see the affairs from her point of view, but I guess she didn't care.

Let us not forget that the conditions that enabled Mother Theresa to fulfil her duty are still present: sick and dying people are still being discarded by the society and taken care of the Missionaries of Charity. Don't criticise the nuns - criticise the culture that creates those conditions; yet, I think that St. Hitchens liked to attack the work of Mother Theresa, but kept mum about the fact that it was the cruelty of the very society that fueled her work.

#motherteresa   #christianity  
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2016/09/sadistic-religious-fanatic-mother-teresa-was-no-saint/