More Poop on the Fraud Bitch Mother Teresa
Posted by Jim Newman on March 7th, 2013 – 8 Comments – Posted in Catholic Church
Another study shows Mother Teresa to have been a fraud, less interested in helping the poor than proselytizing and fighting abortion. There seems to be little new here but the vastness of Teresa’s positive image requires a little adjustment still. It’s not merely to expose her more but to show the horror of withholding money, medicine, and material in the certainty that poverty and illness are god’s will and should not be challenged, just smile, smile, smile.
She was “anything but a saint,” the Canadian study authors found, as Newser reports. In fact, she found beauty in watching people suffer, the authors say.
It being a snow day yesterday and a late school start here I took the opportunity to revisit Hitchen’s “The Missionary Position.” She did indeed believe the poor were blessed, “kissed by Christ.” Nor did she believe they needed to be cured. Though she had access to millions, 100 or so, she refused to provide drugs or tests to evaluate care and cure. She eschewed cures for proof that there will be poor and as proof that god intervenes when he wants and to those upon whom he decides. We should not judge, only smile. We have no right to judge god’s plan with human intervention. Better make them worse to garner sympathy that the only happiness lies in promoting god’s will as perfect, untouched.
The research paper claims that the celebrated nun had 517 missions in 100 countries at the time of her death, but that the majority of patients were not cared for properly and many were left to die, according to the university website. In addition, the Vatican is said to have ignored a doctor’s assertions when it concluded that a Mother Teresa miracle healed a woman who had tuberculosis and an ovarian cyst.
Two-thirds of the people coming to these missions hoped to a find a doctor to treat them, while the other third lay dying without receiving apt care.
I have an Aunt who does not believe in welfare, social, or economic programs for the poor. There will always be poor means you can’t eliminate poverty. Such a pointless effort that only individual solicitations are possible. Teresa did not use the money she had to alleviate suffering. She did not believe there was any material answer to their plight. Rather an ongoing mumble jumble about love and forgiveness. Don’t judge apparently means don’t triage the disease.
According to the study, the doctors observed a significant lack of hygiene, even unfit conditions and a shortage of actual care, food and painkillers. They say that the problem was not a paucity of funds as the Order of the Missionaries of Charity successfully raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Researchers said that when it came to her own treatment, “she received it in a modern American hospital”.
What a great way to save money. We don’t need medicine, doctors, or even a yard and a fence. Just some nasty building and cots. Let them live out their fetid lives in misery and then refill the cots. Maybe this was her secret way of reducing population? Naww, she early on demeaned any temperance of the debate on abortion by insisting that any and all contraception was abortion. That even the many women raped in mideast wars should bear their children. Orphanages were her answer to unwanted children. Yet, her small orphanage did little to alleviate the many many children that remain on the street in permanent destitution. God’s will. If he wants them to have homes, they’ll appear.
The researchers say Muggeridge had decided to promote Teresa. In 1969, he made a eulogistic film on the missionary, promoting her by attributing to her the “first photographic miracle”, when it should have been attributed to the new film stock being marketed by Kodak.
Following her death, the Vatican decided to waive the usual five-year waiting period to open the beatification process. According to the researchers, one of the miracles attributed to Mother Theresa is the healing of Monica Besra, who suffered from intense abdominal pain, after a medallion blessed by her was placed on Besra’s abdomen.
Larivee said, “Her doctors thought otherwise: the ovarian cyst and the tuberculosis from which she suffered were healed by the drugs they had given her. The Vatican, nevertheless, concluded that it was a miracle. Mother Teresa’s popularity was such that she had become untouchable for the population, which had already declared her a saint.”
So when they did give drugs and the patient survived it was a miracle. Couldn’t it have been the drugs? Maybe they thought there weren’t drugs, the doctor was using a placebo. Good enough. Poof proof.
One of the more prophetic stories in Hitch’s book is the secret commission of baptisms. They would ask a dying person if they wanted a ticket to heaven, if the answer was yes, they would wipe their brow with a wet rag, mumble the creed, and baptize the Hindu or Muslim without their knowledge of a ceremony having been performed–after all baptism is the ticket to heaven–they said yes. Teresa’s monument says “Today I am going to heaven.” I guess that’s the sine quo non of the good life and any cheat to get there will do. Well, it probably was whistling in the grave yard since her private papers evidence doubt, much doubt as to why the poor aren’t cared for by god.
God needs the poor in order for us to choose. That’s it. Unlike Jesus that just wanted to help the poor, faking a few miracles himself, god allows the poor that we might see goodness. She did not say AIDs was the scourge of god but she did say that it seemed like divine retribution for sinful sex. In the midst of religious disease all roads lead to god’s perfect goodness.
The Times of India, reporting on the controversial essay, wrote that the authors asserted Mother Teresa saw beauty in the downtrodden’s suffering and was far more willing to pray for them than provide practical medical care. Meanwhile, researchers say, the Vatican engaged in a PR ploy as it threw aside concerns about her suspicious financial dealings and contacts to forgo the five-year waiting period to beatify her.
Quick, the church is dying in Rome and moving to Africa and the America’s. They needed another Euro Saint quick. Of course John Paul created so many saints during his tenure the bar was very low. Who would pick on a little old lady that constantly spoke of love, forgiveness, and attended only to the poor? Miracles be damned, full steam ahead.
Pray your hate away yields to pray your disease away. Too bad the poor can’t sue or find enough pro bono lawyers to extract some of that fortune for malpractice, neglect, and abuse. No, it’s abortion that’s evil; now, there’s some materialism she can get behind. From her Nobel speech.
Today, abortion is the worst evil, and the greatest enemy of peace.
Huhh? They wonder why we call her a crazy bitch.
One summer the sisters in a Rome novitiate chose to can their bounty of surplus tomatoes. Mother Teresa on a visit was displeased. Missionaries of Charity do not store things but must rely on God’s providence. This Jesuit and Franciscan attitude of going into the wilderness without concern and counting on god’s providence causes a lot of missionaries to die but the certainty of their supposed care converts many. It’s a great PR message if you suspend the need for sanity. Unfortunately this virus of faith causes others to assume they will be cared for and to deny any kind of material support–give em a bible and not a blanket. Seek death and be free.
It’s not over. I am betting on the new pope being a black man who is homophobic, anti contraception, and pro poverty.
Commentaries note that she inspired humanitarians. Isn’t that why they invented the devil? Let’s acknowledge that Teresa is satanic and then I can go on with how she inspires goodness–go the other way.
Here’s Hitch on the bitch. Just so we never forget.
Jim Newman, bright and well
While it is completely legitimate to criticize the actions of Mother Teresa, and society’s continued perception of them, calling her a gendered slur is unnecessary and bigoted. Her actions and their outcomes have nothing to do with her gender, so using it as a weapon against her – in a way that does not address the real ramifications of valorizing her – only serves to reveal your hateful attitudes towards woman that you disagree with.
Furthermore, I question the judgement of any blog admin that would find this hateful, unnecessary rhetoric to be appropriate content that needs to be shared. How does calling any women a “bitch”, no matter how dangerous or hurtful her actions, further the conversation that we should be having about her?
While the term may generally be considered a gender slur, her irresponsible behaviour justifies any abhorrent opinions about her and her fallacious existence.
“may be generally considered”
It is. A bitch is a woman. A man called a bitch is acting like a woman. “Bitch” means that there is something bad about being a women, about the nature of womanhood. Or it means that there is a right way to be a woman and a wrong way, and a bitch does it the wrong way. Either way, her gender has no place in this discussion of her actions or their consequences.
Use of bigoted and hurtful slurs is not acceptable, even against really terrible people. Because slurs, by their very nature, reduce an individual to a set of despised characteristics and erase their personhood; in the discussion of a bad person, their actions are what make them bad, not their membership in a group of people that the speaker is biased against.
“Use of bigoted and hurtful slurs is not acceptable, even against really terrible people”
I don’t agree with you on this point. For example, calling Hitler a baseless ‘prick’, which could be considered sexist bigoted and hurtful, not to mention misandric based purely on his gender (if you agree that the term is sole used to denigrate males), is applicable. The term not only reflects his behaviour, but is also applicable to his character as a male.
In regards to mother teresa, I would also characterise her, as a baseless misanthrop in conjunction with a sadistic self-centred ‘bitch’ meaning she did things ‘her’ way and didn’t care about the suffering ‘she’ was causing or prolonging. Her actions did nothing but propagate a hateful ideology which was something SHE took great pleasure from and ‘she’ did it at an immense costs to others. Does that mean that EVERY female in the world is a bitch? Of course not, but in this particular case, the term is rightfully applicable.
Fantastic! As a farmer using the vulgate a bitch animal is a female, or male, that responds too quick, too mean, that cuts deep but not mortally. A female dog that is quitting or starting heat has a way of acting anthropomorphically, because for gods same we can’t ever act like animals, where the unusualness of the negative response and its rapidity places estrogen on the par with testosterone.
A prick or dick which also can be male, female, or even androgenous, thrusts hard and deep without care of the others’s pleasure.
To relegate cuss words to near uninteliginle jingos of facile platitudes belies the true complexiy and depth of expression within a vernacular that is finally more accessible to a so called lowbut nevertheless educated or intellectual class.
It’s true I echoed Hitchen’s use of the term, “the old bitch got it anyway,” and he also used it against Richard Armitage’s aide, calling him a bitch, “Powell’s bitch.” Gore Vidal called himself a “gentleman bitch.”
Hitchens did apologize for using the term in another Teresaism ““a fanatic and a fundamentalist and a fraud, and millions of people are much worse off because of her life, and it’s a shame there is no hell for your bitch to go to.”
The ubiquitous use of bitch slap…an immediate, sharp, negative response.
I felt positively restrained in saying poop instead of shit, fearing for Search engine bots finding an obvious cuss word.
My mother admonished me not to insult female dogs but then she was fond of exclaiming “Jesus H Christ on a crutch,” so go figure.
The use of cuss words is important; I would never limit the vernacular in promulgating my esoteric cogitations. Charles Bukowski is a great, foul poet. Catullus probably used more foul sexual language than any other Latin writer yet we swoon over his love poems in sterile translation.
I can only say the platitudes that sanctify her wretchedness drove me to madness in the employ of common pejoratives–regular words are not strong enough in evoking the feelings I have. Considering how insane the world is it’s not likely to stop soon.
I am not criticizing your use of a curse word for it’s own sake, but because it is a specifically gendered word which is problematic in light of the historical and contemporary reality of violence against and dehumanization of women because of their woman-ness. Bitch just means “woman I disagree with, woman I think is bad”, but her being a woman has nothing to do with why you think she’s bad and has no place in the discussion. She was an awful woman, or a woman who did awful things, but calling her a bitch attacks her womenhood before her character or her actions, which is unacceptable. Her womenhood has nothing to do with anything, and when you attack it you attack womanhood in general.
Men can call themselves or other men bitches, and argue all day long about what that means, but what they’re really saying is that there is something fundamentally detestable in the nature of womenhood. When a man is a bitch he is like a women, and that’s bad because it’s bad to be like a woman.
There are all sorts of ways to convey that someone and/or their actions are truly detestable, to say that they are fucking selfish deluded monsters, to say that their self-aggrandizing continues to lead to the suffering and death of countless innocent people, that don’t require reliance on tired, violent, hurtful ideas about gender.
Anon (I assume that is short for anonymous) I am delighted that you have visited the blog and made a comment. As a personal note I tend to discount the opinions of people that are not willing to include their real name. I find that people tend to be more civil and less combative when they are not hiding behind the veil of the internet.
I will (for now) assume you are well intended and desire to engage in consciousness raising and not a “Poe”.
You have said a lot and I would like to discuss a few of them…
“I am not criticizing your use of a curse word for it’s own sake…”
I think you are! Not that there is anything wrong with that but let’s be honest – that IS what you are doing.
“Men can call themselves or other men bitches, and argue all day long about what that means…”
Here, you are engaging in discounting the opinion of men simply because they are men. Your are employing the very thing you claim to have and imply that that the author had intentionally done.
The word “bitch”. I do not like the idea that there are “bad” words that should never be used and I will not start telling other writers for my blog what words they can or cannot use.
I also disagree with your definition of the word bitch. “…there is something fundamentally detestable in the nature of womenhood.”
I do not in anyway think that there is any thing wrong with being a woman nor do I think that any woman or any person is doing it wrong. Each person is unique and should be free to live their own life.
Words often have several different meanings and context and tone (very hard to see in text) matter.
What I do have a problem with is broad a sweeping accusations against me and my bloggers. They are unproductive and and in this case distract from the argument you are trying to make. Here are examples….
“…only serves to reveal your hateful attitudes towards woman that you disagree with.”
“I question the judgement of any blog admin…”
These comments do not address your concern but are baseless claims against the character of the very people you wish to communicate with.