User:Aplank/Criticisms of Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa's critics

From the early 1970s Mother Teresa began to attract critical comment, partly because of her outspoken advocacy of Catholic Doctrine, especially abortion(many people believe that abortion only kills the possibility of a person, not a person). In 1975 she supported Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's suspension of democracy in India. She also supported Gandhi's son, Sanjay Gandhi, in his highly unpopular population control campaign, which involved forcible sterilisation. She was critized for this stand in many media, including some Catholic ones.

In 1981, Teresa flew to Haiti to accept the Legion d'Honneur from the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. There she said that the Duvaliers "loved their poor," and that "their love was reciprocated." Shortly afterwards the Duvaliers were overthrown and went into exile, having stolen millions of dollars from their impoverished country. In 1987 Teresa visited Albania for the first time, and drew criticism when she visited the grave of the former Communist dictator Enver Hoxha.

Criticism of Teresa in the United States grew sharper after it was revealed that Charles Keating, who stole in excess of US$252 million in the Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980s, had donated $1.25 million to Mother Teresa's order. Teresa interceded on his behalf and wrote a letter to the court urging leniency. She also accepted money from the British publisher Robert Maxwell, who stole UK£450 million from his employees' pension funds.

An Indian-born writer living in Britain, Dr Aroup Chatterjee, who had briefly worked in one of Mother Teresa's homes, began investigations into the finances and other practices of Teresa's order. In 1994 two British journalists, Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ali (the latter a prominent Trotskyist), produced a critical Channel 4 documentary Hell's Angel, based on Chatterjee's work. The next year, Hitchens published The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, a pamphlet which repeated many of the accusations in the documentary.

Hitchens described Mother Teresa's organisation as a cult which promoted suffering and did not help those in need. Hitchens said that Teresa's own words on poverty proved that her intention was not to help people. He quoted Teresa's words at a 1981 press conference in which she was asked: "Do you teach the poor to endure their lot?" She replied: "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people."

Over the past decade a series of specific criticisms have been made of the conduct of Mother Teresa's operations:

The Missionaries of Charity do not disclose either the sources of their funds or details of how they are spent. In 1998 an article in the German magazine Stern estimated that the order received about US$50 million a year in donations. Other journalists have given estimates of US$100 million a year. Critics have argued that this money cannot have all been spent on the purpose for which it was donated - aid to the sick and the poor - because the order's facilities, staffed by nuns and by volunteers and offering little in the way of medical facilities, are very cheap to operate and cannot cost anything like these sums to maintain.

Critics have maintained that the majority of the money donated to the order is transferred to the Vatican Bank in Rome, where it is used by the Catholic Church for its general purposes, or is transferred to non-Christian countries for missionary work.

In Britain, where the law requires charitable organisations to disclose their expenditures, an audit in 1991 concluded that 7% of the total income of about US$2.6 million went into charitable spending, with the rest being remitted to the Vatican Bank.

Related to this is the accusation that funds donated for relief work for the sick and poor were actually diverted to missionary work in non-Christian countries. Chatterjee alleged that many operations of the order engage in no charitable activity at all but instead use their funds for missionary work. Most agree that this missionary activity was part of Teresa's calling and that there was nothing wrong with using donated funds for this purpose.

Louden believed that Mother Teresa and her sisters declined to use their influence and income to finance a properly equipped hospital, instead devoting their efforts to ensure that everyone (regardless of creed) recieved eternal salvation.

Charity is a duty imposed on Christians by scripture, and in the case of Catholics the performance of good works is also a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition of salvation.

From Mother Teresa's point of view, the point of her charitable work was not to provide western style social services, western style medical care (or indeed any kind of medical care), or even western style hospice care. It was to bring relief and spiritual peace to the dying person, and if possible to asist that person to die "a good Catholic death" and to receive "a good Catholic burial."