Mother Teresa by Christopher Hitchens
“a cruel exploitation of a simple and honest woman”
even-handedness, impartiality, putting both sides ——— “Objectivity, the search for truth, even if it leads you to unwelcome conclusions”
“the most successful confidence trickster of the last century”
“poverty is a gift from God”
C4 Right to reply
and here
links with the Duvalier family and Charles Keating
“She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/10/the-fanatic-fraudulent-mother-teresa.html
from wikipedia
Inadequate care and alleged cruelty
According to a paper by Canadian academics Serge Larivée, Geneviève Chénard and Carole Sénéchal, Mother Teresa's clinics received millions of dollars in donations but lacked medical care, systematic diagnosis, necessary nutrition, and sufficient analgesics for those in pain.[125]
In the opinion of the three academics, "Mother Teresa believed the sick must suffer like Christ on the cross".[126] It was said that the additional money might have transformed the health of the city's poor by creating advanced palliative care facilities.[127][128]
One of Mother Teresa's most outspoken critics was English journalist Christopher Hitchens, who wrote in a 2003 article:
"This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction."[129]
Hitchens accused her of hypocrisy for choosing advanced treatment for her heart condition.[130][131] Hitchens said that "her intention was not to help people" and that she lied to donors about how their contributions were used. "It was by talking to her that I discovered, and she assured me, that she wasn't working to alleviate poverty. She was working to expand the number of Catholics. She pursued, 'I'm not a social worker. I don't do it for this reason. I do it for Christ. I do it for the church'".[132]
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Fr Des Wilson, who had hosted her in Belfast in 1971,[64] argued that "Mother Theresa was content to pick up the sad pieces left by a vicious political and economic system" and he noted that hers was a fate very different to that of Archbishop Óscar Romero of El Salvador. While she got the Nobel Prize, "Romero, who attacked the causes of misery as well as picking up the pieces, was shot in the head".[137]
Defence of priest accused of molestation
In 1994, Mother Teresa argued that the sexual abuse allegations against Jesuit priest Donald McGuire, her confessor, were untrue. When he was convicted of sexually molesting multiple children in 2006, Mother Teresa's defence of him was criticised.[138][139]
Opposition to abortion
Abortion-rights groups have also criticised Mother Teresa's stance against abortion and contraception.[140][141][142] Mother Teresa promoted Catholic moral teachings on abortion and contraception. She singled out abortion as "the greatest destroyer of peace today. Because if a mother can kill her own child – what is left for me to kill you and you kill me – there is nothing between."[143] At the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, Mother Teresa said: "[W]e can destroy this gift of motherhood, especially by the evil of abortion, but also by thinking that other things like jobs or positions are more important than loving."[144]
Barbara Smoker of the secular humanist magazine The Freethinker criticized Mother Teresa after the Peace Prize award, saying that her stance against abortion and contraception diverted funds from effective methods to solve India's problems.[145]