Was Hitchens right about Mother Theresa?

[porthos11]

The Government of India, a primarily Hindu nation, gave a state funeral to this minority Catholic nun. THEY seem to think that St. Teresa’s works were of value to their people and society.

This probably speaks more loudly (outside of her canonization) about the worth of her works than a single atheist (who probably could never match what she had done or offer the comfort she did), or the armchair apologists on this forum.

 

[1Lord1Faith]

No. I’m asking if there is any good resources to discredit Hitchens claim, because he did give evidence from sources. He must have got his accusations from somewhere… How about you give me some good evidence yourself before you accuse me

Hitchen’s book on Mother Teresa is intellectual garbage without a drop of scholarship. I hope your reading of it serves as a vaccine, or a lesson, against the spiritual attacks of ardent atheists against anyone who believes in love, faith and charity.

Please take 20 mins. to watch this refutation of mostly Hitchens, but also other critics of St. Teresa of Calcutta. The falsification of Dr. Fox’s testimony is specifically mentioned.

World Over - 2016-08-18 - ‘Unmasking Mother Teresa’s Critics’ author Bill Donohue & Raymond Arroyo
youtube.com/watch?v=7ODedIabWp4

 

[tomarin]

The real question should be, was Hitchens right about anything?

 

[NM505StKate]

Hitchen’s book on Mother Teresa is intellectual garbage without a drop of scholarship. I hope your reading of it serves as a vaccine, or a lesson, against the spiritual attacks of ardent atheists against anyone who believes in love, faith and charity.

Please take 20 mins. to watch this refutation of mostly Hitchens, but also other critics of St. Teresa of Calcutta. The falsification of Dr. Fox’s testimony is specifically mentioned.

World Over - 2016-08-18 - ‘Unmasking Mother Teresa’s Critics’ author Bill Donohue & Raymond Arroyo
youtube.com/watch?v=7ODedIabWp4

Let me get this straight. Are you implying atheists don’t believe in love and charity?

 

[1Lord1Faith]

Let me get this straight. Are you implying atheists don’t believe in love and charity?

Some of them, like Hitchens, do not. So, no…you have not gotten it straight, you have warped my statement, much the same way Hitchens would warp a statement in order to slander a woman who devoted her life to living with and helping the “untouchables”.

 

[NM505StKate]

Some of them, like Hitchens, do not. So, no…you have not gotten it straight, you have warped my statement, much the same way Hitchens would warp a statement in order to slander a woman who devoted her life to living with and helping the “untouchables”.

Hitchens didn’t believe in love an charity? Do you have proof of this please. Mr. Hitchens was a journalist. I believe that he would have vetted his sources. I was not attempting to “warp” your statement I was just asking because you painted with a huge brush.

 

[Tantum_ergo]

Hitchens didn’t believe in love an charity? Do you have proof of this please. Mr. Hitchens was a journalist. I believe that he would have vetted his sources. I was not attempting to “warp” your statement I was just asking because you painted with a huge brush.

Ah. I have a question. A couple actually.

If Mr. Hitchens as a journalist vetted his sources, does that mean that the sources themselves could not have been wrong?

If Mr. Hitchens as a journalist vetted his sources, does that mean that any journalist who vets his or her sources is automatically reporting truth, simply because ‘he has vetted them?’

If that is the case, what about for example this following:

Mark Steyn: America Alone: The end of the world as we know it.

Would you accord this work, and this author, the same kind of respect as you do Mr. Hitchens? Would you assume this person believed in love and charity? That he vetted his sources? That the book would thus represent truth?

If not, why not?

 

[1Lord1Faith]

Hitchens didn’t believe in love an charity? Do you have proof of this please. Mr. Hitchens was a journalist. I believe that he would have vetted his sources. I was not attempting to “warp” your statement I was just asking because you painted with a huge brush.

The proof is the book he wrote about Mother Teresa. His disdain for Catholicism was greater than his journalistic integrity. He was more of an author and a rhetorical speaker than a journalist anyway.

I understand why young people find him appealing - he was rebellious, flippant and intelligent. But I see him as a frustrated person who let pride get the best of him. I assume that’s why he drank so much - I can only have pity for someone like that. I have no respect for the arrogant, condescending, destructive criticism that he spewed every time I heard him speak. Like I said, it was easy for him to win over disgruntled people, especially young adults who are confused about the world.

 

[polki]

Hitchens didn’t believe in love an charity? Do you have proof of this please. Mr. Hitchens was a journalist. I believe that he would have vetted his sources. I was not attempting to “warp” your statement I was just asking because you painted with a huge brush.

His accusations certainly weren’t loving and charitable to MT.

 

[boomerang]

Every vocal critic of Mother Theresa that I’ve ever heard was a militant atheist. Consider the source. Would you expect a Nazi to say anything nice about Jews?

 

[tomarin]

Right, and good catch. The Hitchens book is ‘God is Not Great.’

 

[TK421]

Hitchens was an aggressive materialist and confronted Mother Teresa’s mission from a purely materialistic perspective, or a purely sensual perspective. Hitchen’s once mocked in a televised sitting concerning Mother Teresa:

“Oh look at me! I’m too holy to eat! I’m too holy to take proper care of myself!”

As you can see, Hitchens was deeply offended by her work because it had a strong spiritual dimension. Although St Mother Teresa’s Houses of the Dying did provide some level of medical care, providing medical care was not her primary mission but only something attached to it. You must also understand that in the places she was active, such as in India or Nicaragua and eventually even the Soviet Union (once she was allowed to enter), hospitals were/are incapable of providing for all of the dying on the streets anyway, so it isn’t as though the dying were getting stuck with the Sisters of Charity when they could have been in a nice, clean hospital. There was no alternative. The sisters purposely went into impoverished ghettos that were riddled with filth and noise and grime, where such facilities were not available, and they did so without the funding or resources to provide a high level of medical care. A lot of time was spent washing their religious attire, scrubbing floors, scrubbing toilets, cleaning people, praying, and attending daily Mass. What they did was comfort the dying, and when possible, provide for them the sacraments with the help of brother priests. The great majority of people the saint comforted were Hindus, especially the untouchables in the lowest caste of society.

St Mother Teresa also understood that there was a poverty in Europe & America that exceeded the poverty of Calcutta, because it was primarily a spiritual poverty, though there can also be a hidden material poverty that is living in the shadow of prosperity. That is why the Sisters of Charity operate everywhere and not just in materially poor countries, because material poverty is the lesser aspect of their vocation.

 

[Wampa]

The OP corrected that (and named the book in question as ‘The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice’) in post #15:

UPDATE: I didn’t realize I made an error. I said Christopher hitchens’ book was called the God delusion. That’s actually a book by Dawkins. The book is actually called the missionary position

 

[Bradski]

The sisters purposely went into impoverished ghettos that were riddled with filth and noise and grime, where such facilities were not available, and they did so without the funding or resources to provide a high level of medical care.

I don’t think that ‘a high level of medical care’ was to be expected. But I’m pretty certain that you are fully aware that the standards were a very long way indeed from even being considered ‘medical care’ in the first instance.

If the hospices were simpy a place where people could go to die and there was no money for anything more than basic sanitation, nonvash for disposable needles, analgesia and no prospect of even basic diagnostics or triage, then no-one would have the right to complain.

But that was not the case. They were awash with funding and resources. They simply chose not to use them.

 

[punisherthunder]

Hitchens was a smug atheist who took a particular glee in destroying the religious faithful whenever he got a chance to. I’m sorry that he died of cancer a while back, but I can’t help but think that all that hate somehow did him in too.

 

[TK421]

I don’t think that ‘a high level of medical care’ was to be expected. But I’m pretty certain that you are fully aware that the standards were a very long way indeed from even being considered ‘medical care’ in the first instance.

If the hospices were simpy a place where people could go to die and there was no money for anything more than basic sanitation, nonvash for disposable needles, analgesia and no prospect of even basic diagnostics or triage, then no-one would have the right to complain.

But that was not the case. They were awash with funding and resources. They simply chose not to use them.

It was the case. Resources given to them were used to spread new Houses of the Dying and for Sisters of Charity to become active in new countries. St Mother Teresa spent the vast majority of the elder part of her life doing nothing but flying around in order to set up and oversee these houses. The donors, of course, had this in mind and never expected the money to be used to set up a clinic. Any government or profit-based entity can set up and run an effective clinic, though in the case of these impoverished areas, a profit-based clinic would be unsustainable, leaving only clinics set up by government funds, and said government funds may or may not be there. They weren’t, because these people had little education or future prospects or much of anything to offer in utilitarian value.

Now, she could have taken some money off the top in order to provide for some extra supplies to each house, but (controversially) she didn’t, and that is because her houses were set up for the express purpose of her volunteers encountering the dying, and for the dying to encounter Christ. So yes, missionary in nature, and therefore offensive to Hitchens. This spiritual act of mercy was about preparing the soul for the hereafter and healing the dehumanization that exists towards the poor and the dying, and certainly existed in India where most of these people were untouchables. It likewise would have strongly existed in the utilitarian Soviet Union, where charitable institutions were illegal, and those who were deemed incapable of life were - roughly translated - “idiots”.

 

[Sirach2]

OP, this should tell you exactly what you wish to know about the author.
amazon.com/God-Not-Great-Religion-Everything/dp/0446697966

 

[Mike_from_NJ]

For anyone interested the “Hell’s Angel: Mother Teresa of Calcutta” can be viewed here. It’s about 24 minutes long and touches on some of the things he mentions in the book.

Here are a few key points:
1:35 - The story of Malcolm Muggeridge and the BBC visitng the Calcutta shrine.
3:00 - After receiving a new type of Kodak film the producers at the BBC were surprised to see how much detail it gave despite the low light. Despite the fact this was an advancement in film, Malcolm Muggeridge claimed it was “divine light” and that it was the first televised miracle.
3:55 - “Give a man a reputation as an early riser, and that man can sleep 'til noon.” – Mark Twain
4:48 - Mary Loudon, writer and former volunteer, describes the Home for the Dying like pictures she’s seen of places like Belsen. There are no chair, just a spread of mats on the floor. The patients were not given painkillers beyond aspirin and on occasion brufen despite the pain that comes with terminal cancer.
5:30 - Mother Teresa said she wanted to give poor people what the rich people get with money.
5:50 - The nuns were reusing needles and rinsing them under cold water. When asked why she was told there’s no point.
6:48 - Mary Loudon tells the story of a boy at the Home of the Dying who a visiting American doctor there was trying to treat for a simple kidney complaint that was getting worse because he wasn’t getting antibiotics. The doctor was angry yet resigned because they wouldn’t take him to the hospital because if they did it for one they would have to do it for all of them.
9:39 - Hitchens notes that Mother Teresa maintained that she had no politics, yet bent the ear of Margaret Thatcher on a bill limiting abortion. The sponsors of the bill who set up the meeting certainly did so for political reasons.
12:24 - “Why do the rulers of this sinful and selfish world find her so awfully congenial? Is it because she returns the compliment? She may or may not comfort the afllicted, but she has certainly never been known to afflict the comfortable.” - Hitchens
12:38 - Clip of Mother Teresa receiving an award from Ronald Reagan despite having armed and payed for the death squads in Central America who killed many including 4 nuns and the Archbishop of San Salvador. She praised Reagan saying, “I never knew you loved the people so much.” Mother Teresa when touring the killing fields of Guatamela saw no problem.
13:39 - Clip of the Union Carbide accident in India that killed about 2,500 people. Mother Teresa’s advice to the victims was to forgive. Mihir Bose, author and journalist, notes that Mother Teresa’s actions indicate that she doesn’t believe the poor have the ability to effect change, to better their situation.
15:15 - Hitchens says Mother Teresa is an ally of the status quo and when the status quo is threatened she is an ally of the conservative forces. This differs from those, including the faithful, who reject the fatalistic and submissive conclusions about poverty.
15:40 - A clip from Fr. Jean-Bertrand Aristide (who was the legally elected leader of Haiti until a junta took over) who talks about not only asking for justice and freedom, but taking it as well, since it’s not something given.
16:03 - Only the Catholic Church recognized the junt that took over Haiti.
16:30 - Mother Teresa accept an award in Haiti from Baby Doc Duvalier. Astonishly she praised the Duvaliers despite their murder of thousands of Hatian citizens.
17:38 - Mother Teresa visited her home Albania. Mother Teresa praised the orphanages there while keeping quiet as to why the regime has so many orphans.
19:25 - As she toured the globe for the Vatican she visited Lebanon, home of the Sabra and Shatila massacre to Nicaragua “where the Cardinal was the patron of the Contras”
19:55 - Newspaper clips of the link between her and [ (famous for fraud and misuse of his company’s pension fund) for fundraising.
20:32 - Mother Teresa accepted over a million dollars from Charles Keating and use of his private plane. Keating got his money from others via the S&L scandal.
21:47 - Hitchens says she has spread her brand wide and very thin.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_MaxwellRobert Maxwell[/url)

 

[Sirach2]

For anyone interested the “Hell’s Angel: Mother Teresa of Calcutta” can be viewed here. It’s about 24 minutes long and touches on some of the things he mentions in the book.

What makes you think that a forum of Catholics would be interested in a denigrating defamation of one of their saints?

 

[Mike_from_NJ]

What makes you think that a forum of Catholics would be interested in a denigrating defamation of one of their saints?

I would imagine it’s many of the same people who visit this thread. There are people here who noted that they read his book. It helps to dispute accusations when you know in detail what those accusations are. It’s even possible to say Mother Teresa was overall good but perhaps made some missteps.

I’m in no way saying that it’s necessary to watch the video, but I imagine there are those who do which is why I provided the link as well as listed a few key points.