21 Dec 2015 ariel wrote:
All this even though there's been a lot of controversy in recent years surrounding her 'saintliness'. What do folk think about this?
I think the woman herself did an awful lot of good for individuals and for humanity as a whole. It is when 'she' became an 'organization' that holes began to appear. It is the people involved in running that organisation - and most significantly the Catholic Church's involvement, that are the cause of the controversy.
The Study carried out by three researchers (Serge Larivée, Department of psychoeducation, University of Montreal, Carole Sénéchal, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, and Geneviève Chénard, Department of psychoeducation, University of Montreal) was allegedly 'ignored' by the Vatican in their official biography of Mother Teresa:
[Only admins are allowed to see this link] ... sa_en.html
Skeptic, Christopher Hitchens, however, leapt on it, seizing the opportunity to focus on and add to the then current exposés of the dubious workings of the Catholic Church and religion as a whole. Hitchens used the media to spread exaggerated and out of context material amongst the skeptic community - who in turn typically lapped it up and further spread and added to Hitchens' quotes without exploring any further into the origin and source of the subject - and again, typically, the details get added to and changed with each passing on (Chinese Whispers) - e.g. The events connected to the first 'miracle' attributed to Mother Teresa are different, depending on where you read it.
(Interesting to note also that the Canadian Study quotes Hitchens in a number of places).
The report concluded that Mother Teresa's beatification was orchestrated by an effective media relations campaign. According to the three researchers:
her meeting in London in 1968 with the BBC's Malcom Muggeridge, an anti-abortion journalist who shared her right-wing Catholic values, was crucial. Muggeridge decided to promote Teresa, who consequently discovered the power of mass media. In 1969, he made a eulogistic film of 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. Afterwards, Mother Teresa travelled throughout the world and received numerous awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance speech, on the subject of Bosnian women who were raped by Serbs and now sought abortion, she said: “I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing—direct murder by the mother herself.”
[Only admins are allowed to see this link] ... saint.html
The Study also accepts that there is - and focuses on, the positive effect of the Mother Teresa "myth":
Despite Mother Teresa's dubious way of caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it, Serge Larivée and his colleagues point out the positive effect of the Mother Teresa myth: “If the extraordinary image of Mother Teresa conveyed in the collective imagination has encouraged humanitarian initiatives that are genuinely engaged with those crushed by poverty, we can only rejoice. It is likely that she has inspired many humanitarian workers whose actions have truly relieved the suffering of the destitute and addressed the causes of poverty and isolation without being extolled by the media. Nevertheless, the media coverage of Mother Theresa could have been a little more rigorous.”
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