Mother Teresa is going to be declared a saint... and she shouldn’t be
I’m not shocked but honestly I’m so disappointed. I’m a girl who grew up in Kolkata, someone who grew up hearing about Mother Teresa and to be honest I hate the fact that the liberal, white, Western media has held this woman as some sort of paragon of virtue. And she really wasn’t. Here are some things she did:
She was so anti-abortion that she actually used her Nobel Peace Prize speech to rail against population control, family planning and abortion.
She supported Indira Gandhi’s declaration on the state of emergency in 1975, saying “People are happier. There are more jobs. There are no strikes.”
She idolised poverty and suffering, stating that she thought it was beautiful that the poor had accepted their lot in life. But when it came to her, she would check herself into expensive clinics, in the West, in order to treat her own illnesses.
She was also associated with and supported corrupt businessmen such as Charles Keating and Robert Maxwell, as well as the dictatorial Duvalier family and Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha.
She encouraged members of her order to secretly baptise dying patients with no regard for their own faiths.
Her public image was super misleading because only a few hundred people are served by even the largest of the homes. In 1998, among the 200 charitable assistance organisations reported to operate in Calcutta, hers wasn’t even ranked among the largest organisations- there were others doing a much better job.
In 1991, a journalist visited the home and described the medical care the patients received as “haphazard” and he observed that sisters, who had no medical knowledge, had to make decisions about patient care, because of the lack of doctors there.
Her order did not distinguish between curable or incurable patients, so that people who could otherwise survive would be at risk of dying from infections and lack of treatment. She herself described her houses as the Houses of the Dying.
She reinforced the popular colonialist image of the white woman giving up her life to save the souls of the “wretched” brown people.
There are more shady things about her but I’m over this beatification of Mother Teresa. I’m over her, and I’m over this constant fawning. Kolkata isn’t the “city where Mother Teresa lived”. It has it’s own identity and Mother Teresa doesn’t, at least in my opinion, deserve this honour that the Catholic Church is bestowing on her.