OK, so I was wondering people's views on Mother Teresa after seeing her name mentioned on the board. There are two sides to her life and what I know of her I find very interesting.

She was beautified by the Catholic church upon her death and holds the title Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. During her life she was also a Superior General within the church.

 

She is well known for her kind heart and missions, tending to the needs of the poverty stricken and starving through her schools. Her work began as a small order with 13 members in Calcutta; today it has more than 4,000 nuns running orphanages, AIDS hospices and charity centers worldwide, and caring for refugees, the blind, disabled, aged, alcoholics, the poor and homeless, and victims of floods, epidemics, and famine.

 

She made many people aware of the suffering in her country and this drew donations from many people in order to help which saved large amounts of people and helped them in their time of need.

 

She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1980 for her humanitarian work.

 

On the other hand some argue that Mother Teresa limited herself to keeping people alive rather than tackling poverty itself. She has also been criticized for her view on suffering: according to an article in the Alberta Report, she felt that suffering would bring people closer to Jesus.

 

Another criticism was the way in which she allowed religion to obstruct the well being of her patients. She was notorious for her strong views on abortion and contraception, so much so that she has been accused of refusing to treat people who didn't have their hearts open to Catholicism.

 

Her order did not distinguish between curable and incurable patients, so that people who could otherwise survive would be at risk of dying from infections and lack of treatment.

 

The spending of the charity money received has been criticized by some. Christopher Hitchens and the German magazine Stern have said Mother Teresa did not focus donated money on alleviating poverty or improving the conditions of her hospices, but on opening new convents and increasing missionary work. These new convents only spread the word of Catholicism, and although the money donated was largely expected to pay for hospitals and care for the sick she spent a great deal on convents instead.

 

Additionally, the sources of some donations accepted have been criticized. Mother Teresa accepted donations from the autocratic and corrupt Duvalier family in Haiti and openly praised them. She also accepted 1.4 million dollars from Charles Keating, involved in the fraud and corruption scheme known as the Keating Five scandal and supported him before and after his arrest. The Deputy District Attorney for Los Angeles, Paul Turley, wrote to Mother Teresa asking her to return the donated money to the people Keating had stolen from, one of whom was "a poor carpenter". The donated money was not accounted for, and Turley did not receive a reply.

 

Hitchens asserts that Mother Teresa behaved like a political opportunist who adopted the guise of a saint in order to raise money to spread an extreme and aggressive version of Catholicism.

 

Mother Teresa obviously had a positive impact on many people's lives, but what are your views on her? Do you agree that she should be remembered as a Saint, or do you feel that she will only be remembered that way by Catholics because she did so much for that Church?

i really know few about her / her work, but i had always had a good feel for her.

 

i don't know if she preached and wanted to benefit the catholics or not, but all we mostly have seen is she indeed tried to make the world a bit better and fair place, helping people that nobody wanted to help, may be she could had done it better and caring for better conditions, but at least she tried.

To me she has always been and will ALWAYS be the great inspiration.

 

Mother Teresa herself had her moments of doubts about God even though she had had deep religious experiences that urged her to set out on her great mission among the poorest of the poorest in Calcutta, India.

 

Therefore her very long period of doubts was very remarkable. This doubt is documented in letters between her and religious superiors and religious advisers - letters that she wanted destroyed after her death, but they were not. But these doubts did not deter her from continuous work for the poorest of the poorest.

 

And then a link and the first part of a very long article in TIME MAGAZINE:

 

Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith

 

By David Van Biema Thursday, Aug. 23, 2007

 

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html#ixzz12AbpSs9l

 

Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.

— Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September 1979

 

On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters," went to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. "It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had "[made] himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what "you and I must find" and alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug addiction in the West. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world "that radiating joy is real" because Christ is everywhere — "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive."

Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "[but] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand."

The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction — that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.

And in fact, that appears to be the case. A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."

That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'" Says the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit magazine America and the author of My Life with the Saints, a book that dealt with far briefer reports in 2003 of Teresa's doubts: "I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented." Recalls Kolodiejchuk, Come Be My Light's editor: "I read one letter to the Sisters [of Teresa's Missionaries of Charity], and their mouths just dropped open. It will give a whole new dimension to the way people understand her."

The book is hardly the work of some antireligious investigative reporter who Dumpster-dived for Teresa's correspondence. Kolodiejchuk, a senior Missionaries of Charity member, is her postulator, responsible for petitioning for her sainthood and collecting the supporting materials. (Thus far she has been beatified; the next step is canonization.) The letters in the book were gathered as part of that process.

The church anticipates spiritually fallow periods. Indeed, the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross in the 16th century coined the term the "dark night" of the soul to describe a characteristic stage in the growth of some spiritual masters. Teresa's may be the most extensive such case on record. (The "dark night" of the 18th century mystic St. Paul of the Cross lasted 45 years; he ultimately recovered.) Yet Kolodiejchuk sees it in St. John's context, as darkness within faith. Teresa found ways, starting in the early 1960s, to live with it and abandoned neither her belief nor her work. Kolodiejchuk produced the book as proof of the faith-filled perseverance that he sees as her most spiritually heroic act.

Two very different Catholics predict that the book will be a landmark. The Rev. Matthew Lamb, chairman of the theology department at the conservative Ave Maria University in Florida, thinks Come Be My Light will eventually rank with St. Augustine's Confessions and Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain as an autobiography of spiritual ascent. Martin of America, a much more liberal institution, calls the book "a new ministry for Mother Teresa, a written ministry of her interior life," and says, "It may be remembered as just as important as her ministry to the poor. It would be a ministry to people who had experienced some doubt, some absence of God in their lives. And you know who that is? Everybody. Atheists, doubters, seekers, believers, everyone."

Not all atheists and doubters will agree. Both Kolodiejchuk and Martin assume that Teresa's inability to perceive Christ in her life did not mean he wasn't there. In fact, they see his absence as part of the divine gift that enabled her to do great work. But to the U.S.'s increasingly assertive cadre of atheists, that argument will seem absurd. They will see the book's Teresa more like the woman in the archetypal country-and-western song who holds a torch for her husband 30 years after he left to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned. Says Christopher Hitchens, author of The Missionary Position, a scathing polemic on Teresa, and more recently of the atheist manifesto God Is Not Great: "She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself." Meanwhile, some familiar with the smiling mother's extraordinary drive may diagnose her condition less as a gift of God than as a subconscious attempt at the most radical kind of humility: she punished herself with a crippling failure to counterbalance her great successes.

Come Be My Light is that rare thing, a posthumous autobiography that could cause a wholesale reconsideration of a major public figure — one way or another. It raises questions about God and faith, the engine behind great achievement, and the persistence of love, divine and human. That it does so not in any organized, intentional form but as a hodgepodge of desperate notes not intended for daylight should leave readers only more convinced that it is authentic — and that they are, somewhat shockingly, touching the true inner life of a modern saint.

 

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html#ixzz12AcQo9AK

I don't want to get into an argument but you should read Christopher Hitchens' Missionary Position, where he exposes Mother Teresa.

 

 

To me she has always been and will ALWAYS be the great inspiration.

 

Mother Teresa herself had her moments of doubts about God even though she had had deep religious experiences that urged her to set out on her great mission among the poorest of the poorest in Calcutta, India.

 

Therefore her very long period of doubts was very remarkable. This doubt is documented in letters between her and religious superiors and religious advisers - letters that she wanted destroyed after her death, but they were not. But these doubts did not deter her from continuous work for the poorest of the poorest.

 

I hope you are not implying that you need religion and/or God to be a good "moral" person.

I don't want to get into an argument but you should read Christopher Hitchens' Missionary Position, where he exposes Mother Teresa.

 

 

 

 

I hope you are not implying that you need religion and/or God to be a good "moral" person.

 

 

I am not.

^ excellent :)

Holy Shnit, I should have added Pope John Paul to the list as I meant to as well....

 

but as for Mother Teresa, 'Saint":angel:

Holy Shnit, I should have added Pope John Paul to the list as I meant to as well....

 

but as for Mother Teresa, 'Saint":angel:

which list?

my list in the "Who would you bring back" thread.

Holy Shnit, I should have added Pope John Paul to the list as I meant to as well....

 

A man opposed to homosexuals?

I don't really know because I'm not really religious. I mean she did do some great work and as mentioned was a big inspiration. So I guess it's fine that she becomes a saint.

 

But isn't it also true that people don't become saints until like a hundred years or so after they've died?

;)ha, I knew you would bite.

;)ha, I knew you would bite.

 

Only asking.

She also fed poison milk to school children.

Did she ? I was thinking that was Thatcher....

No she just fucked over a load of coal miners.

wtf

My hero Christopher hitchens's view;

 

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeS0MHl5xTM]YouTube - Christopher Hitchens on Hardball[/ame]

A man opposed to homosexuals?

 

The whole Catholic faith is opposed to homosexuals. Not to mention, Stem cell research, condoms and abortion, they are even sexist when it comes to Catholic female priests. Utter madness! But I mustn't grumble because I might offend somebody, not that the offensiveness of any of the above matters though...

The whole Catholic faith is opposed to homosexuals. Not to mention, Stem cell research, condoms and abortion, they are even sexist when it comes to Catholic female priests. Utter madness! But I mustn't grumble because I might offend somebody, not that the offensiveness of any of the above matters though...

 

Offensiveness doesn't matter anyway, for the most part. Obviously there are certain taboo's and some subjects I wouldn't choose to offend people over but when people say they are offended that doesn't give them any extra rights over anybody else. Others shouldn't change their opinions or necessarily make an effort to apologise or backtrack. They are the ones who are offended. It doesn't really mean anything.

Offensiveness doesn't matter anyway, for the most part. Obviously there are certain taboo's and some subjects I wouldn't choose to offend people over but when people say they are offended that doesn't give them any extra rights over anybody else. Others shouldn't change their opinions or necessarily make an effort to apologise or backtrack. They are the ones who are offended. It doesn't really mean anything.

 

yeh i agree, i was being sarcastic because nobody ever seems to criticise religion in the media etc..

yeh i agree, i was being sarcastic because nobody ever seems to criticise religion in the media etc..

you don't read or watch spanish media, do you? :thinking:

 

there's a huge anti-religion stuff in some medias here, at least believers feels like that, plus there are a lot of websites on the net against religion, and so far are more popular than religious ones.

you don't read or watch spanish media, do you? :thinking:

 

there's a huge anti-religion stuff in some medias here, at least believers feels like that, plus there are a lot of websites on the net against religion, and so far are more popular than religious ones.

 

The Catholic Church sure feels that Britain is anti-religion (but by that I think they mean anti-Catholic). According to one of the Pope's advisors we are like a Third World country due to our multi-culturalism and amount of Atheists.

 

I think one of the main mistakes people make when defending religion is presuming that there would not be good people without religion. Mother Teresa could have done what she did without her faith (as is proved from her letters which showed she had no faith for a considerable amount of time). Had she acted as though religion was not the reason for her actions more people would have been saved as the money donated would have actually gone to people who needed it rather than the spread of Catholicism through scare tactics.

 

She still did a lot of good work though, obviously. It's just a shame she needlessly restricted herself.

Good point, Braddock...I'm impressed.

 

God bless you.

i don't think she's been the only person that tried to do something good but had to restrict her progress a bit.

 

what i care about her is she tried to make the world a better and fairer place, off course didn't do it all perfectly, but at least she tried to, for whatever her motivations were i don't care much, i care for the results.

 

on what christopher martin said, is not true, people can criticise religion and people do criticise it, there's nothing bad in it, unless it cross the line of discrimination or respect.