Mother Theresa: Exemplar, or Scoundrel?
You can't always judge a saint by her publicity.
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by Robert Casserly

N SUNDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2003, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, commonly known as Mother Theresa, was beatified by Pope John Paul II at a ceremony in the Vatican, a step millions of Catholics worldwide assume to be a preliminary step toward her eventual sainthood.

Beatification occurs when a Pope declares a person to have attained the blessedness of heaven and authorize the title "Blessed" and limited public religious honor. To become Blessed Mother Theresa, the Vatican had to ascribe at least one miracle to her; the curing, through prayer, of a woman with a tumor. If a second miracle can be ascribed to Blessed Mother Theresa, she will become eligible for sainthood.

Mother Theresa's beatification is extraordinary in three respects:

• She is the 1,350 person to be beatified by the current Pope -- more than all of the 500 Popes who came before him, COMBINED
  
• She became Blessed only after the Pope waived the traditional five-year waiting period following a person's death before they can be beatified
  
• Her beatification is regarded by many Catholics as an example of the systemic corruption of the Vatican.
  

As surprising as the two first points above may be to non-Catholics and Catholics alike, the last point will certainly raise the most eyebrows, because Mother Theresa is frequently listed alongside people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. as belonging to the pantheon of virtuous exemplars. Millions of people think of her as a morally superior being, so far above the pale of ordinary human compassion we have special names for such persons -- saints.

How did Mother Theresa ever get so generally well regarded? I believe her name is a veritable by-word for selfless dedication in the service of humanity because people have unquestioningly accepted a vigorous Vatican campaign to promote her as such. In fact, I believe, when examined, her life serves as a warning beacon of moral corruption, not a clarion call to saintly virtue.

This is a critically important issue because saints are not merely people who did things. They are people we are expected, and expect ourselves, to imitate. Do we really want anyone to imitate Mother Theresa? I propose everyone takes a closer look this assumption before accepting it.

Christopher Hitchens, a renowned journalist, has written "One of the most salient examples of people's willingness to believe anything if it is garbed in the appearance of holiness is the uncritical acceptance of the idea of Mother Theresa as a saint by people who would normally be thinking -- however lazily -- in a secular or rational manner. In other words, in every sense it is an unexamined claim".

In fact, since Mother Theresa's death, more and more investigations into her Missionaries of Charity, which is one of the richest, fastest growing (703 houses in 132 countries) and thus most powerful missions in the Catholic Church have spotlighted her proselytization for religious fundamentalism and begun to crumble the unquestioned perception of her as a saint.

Examining Mother Theresa's morality more closely, we should consider the facts that she supported the brutal dictatorship of Duvalier in Haiti; she "accepted over a million dollars from Charles Keating, the Lincoln Savings and Loans swindler, even though it had been shown to her that the money was stolen" (Hitchens); she vigorously campaigned to prevent divorce from becoming legal in Ireland; she squirreled away millions of dollars of donations in bank accounts while the children she was supposedly attempting to save starved to death; she stated on many occasions that human suffering was intrinsically good; and perhaps most damning of all, she was a tireless birth-control opponent who used her power against the humanists of India struggling to end the vicious cycle of over-population, poverty, and misery.

Such acts in the name of God demean true religious and ethical ideals. Rational, moral Catholics do not hold with a sadistic God who promotes suffering in a twisted conception of "suffer the little children to come unto Him."

If you preach the evil of birth control and abortion to people who cannot afford to have children, and then, when they have the children they cannot support, give them a few crumbs in a Mission of Charity to make their lives more bearable, is this laudable? Mother Theresa did indeed help a small amount of poor people, but did so while helping to create the much larger cause of their suffering.

Mother Theresa's means was salvation, and the end was a life of suffering.