re: #497 Mich-again

How about like this. Or is that just another face of evil ?

Actually, yes that IS the face of evil…

Stop reading now if you’ll be offended by strong criticism of this “saint”.

Mother Teresa was a conservative Catholic who supported the evil Pope’s hard line on abortion, contraception, divorce, women priests, and generally had very bad ideas about women. A woman’s highest virtue was to do her duty to the church and her husband – to be a “good” wife and mother and to serve the Catholic church.

She built up and ran an international corporation using slave labour. It was not slave labour in the legal sense, of course, but the psychological reality was precisely that of slave labour. She chose India as her base and got many young girls for her convents. Those young girls/women were not there voluntarily in the psychological sense, they were there because their parents put enormous psychological pressure on them to become nuns. Mother T had a hideously austere set of rules for them, summed up by chastity, obedience and suchlike, and that meant obedience to the church, i.e., her. (One wonders what happened when chastity and obedience came into conflict. I’ll bet it was chastity that got sacrificed.)

She got off on playing the part of the ministering angel, and chose to save the souls of the lowest of the low – the people who were dying. The problem is that she was not interested in curing anyone. As Christopher Hitchens has said, an English nurse actually left after Mother Teresa had refused to help a child who would certainly have lived had he had a course of antibiotics. Her response was that it was irrelevant because he was going to meet God anyway! She wasn’t interested in the living or potentially living, only the dying, and she was only interested in the dying for her own selfish pleasure in getting off on playing the ministering angel. She wasn’t interested in helping them to get better, only to save their souls.

She betrayed the dying too. What she was doing was incompatible with having moral relationships with people. When you develop a relationship with someone, you thereby acquire an obligation to treat that person differently from how you might treat a complete stranger. A parent who has a child adopted at birth does not raise obligations to that child, but a parent who chooses to parent does thereby raise an obligation to the children she chooses to bring up. To the extent that Mother Teresa developed relationships with people in her care, she was acting immorally in not using the available money to treat them where that would have made a difference to whether they live or die, for example.

In her own case, when she got sick, she took herself straight to the best heart specialist in New York. There is nothing wrong with that! It was right for her to spend that money on curing herself, but it was wrong of her not to find a few dollars for a course of antibiotics to save a sick child with whom she had developed a relationship.