I am wondering if there is any response from, say, well-known Catholic apologists, regarding secular criticisms of Mother Theresa. In particular those coming from Christopher Hitchens.
How about conceding that critics have some point? Please let me recycle an old post of mine:
Mother Theresa has been made saint while alive, which unfortunately precludes honest discussion of her failings.
One thing that should be observed is that MT’s critics have never suggested she lacked self-sacrifice. Instead, the critics essentially say that her efforts were misguided. I’ve spoken with a member of the order, and I’ve read memoirs of an ex-nun. Interestingly, both accounts largely agreed on basic facts, which has forced me to conclude that critics have some point.
In a nutshell, the problem with MT was that she was uneducated herself, and never saw value in education, and so her response to any problem was the same: throw at it unqualified nuns. Unfortunately, no amount of good will and self-sacrifice (both of which the MC sisters have in truly unmatched quantities) will offset the lack of training and equipment.
NB the memoir of an ex-nun mentioned above is
this one. I really recommend that you read it – it’s not what you expect.
This book addresses one of better known claims of Hitchens, which is that Mother Theresa was flying around in business class and private jets. The author says she was travelling with MT, and MT was buying economy tickets – but the airlines were automatically upgrading her to first / business to avoid causing commotion in the economy class. (As a frequent economy traveller I can completely understand this decision; the crew is overworked enough without having to handle 300 people trying to touch the living saint). Similar thing with using business jets – the author says that the rides were offered by rich businessmen MT was meeting with. The book does not address Hitchen’s claim that MT was treating herself in the best private hospitals, but one can imagine that the funding mechanism was the same.
On the other hand, Hitchens was correct to point the obvious paradox of MT’s operation, which is this: the order gets enough donations to build one state-of-art hospital a year, but the poor are still being housed in abysmal conditions, so where is the money? (OK, maybe the conditions have been improved since Hitchens’ book was written, but you get the point). Hitchens’ problem was that he did not dig deep enough and simply assumed that MT was spending the money on herself. The ex-nun does not address that point, but she describes the culture of the order in depth. So if the order indeed operates the way she claims, then the solution is surprising: the money is sitting unused in bank accounts, because the rules of the order prohibit their use.
Was MT willingly hoarding the money? Well, if the ex-nun is to be believed, MT was simply not the kind of person who would worry about accounts. I can honestly believe that she had no idea about the pile of money the order was sitting on. MT has written the rules for an order running on a razor-thin budget, and this order has suddenly started getting millions in donations. To give you an example, the ex-nun claims that the order’s culture rejects
buying food, because the idea is that the sisters should live on
donated food. And, according to her, the nuns are very strongly indoctrinated that they must live by MT’s original vision, and any dissenters will be rather kicked out then promoted. My conjecture is that this, coupled with the
Peter Principle, and a couple of other pathologies present in hierachical organizations, has produced an organization which has long outgrown MT’s original vision, but is unable to move behind it.
MT’s order was created to comfort the dying; wealthy Westerners gave it a pile of money big enough to actually cure many of the dying, but the order will not do that since that was never the mission. And the order will not consider expanding the mission, because to its leadership the mere thought of doing so is heretical.
I wonder where people are getting the idea that the saint must be perfect in every regard. How does the fact that MT has created a grossly ineffective organization diminish her qualifications for sainthood? She became a saint for her self-sacrifice, not her managerial skills.
Let’s finally admit that MT’s order has some deep problems, fix these, and move on.
