quote:

ORIGINAL: Sinergy


Yeah!  All that money we spend in Iraq and Afghanistan while the US Government fucks over the people in New Orleans and other parts of Louisi...

Wait.  Sorry.

Nothing to see here.

Sinergy

quote:

ORIGINAL: SusanofO
I am not threatened. I actually do think he's a terrible debater. He began his comments all huffing and puffing and ready to blow someone down - but what he has to say simply does not stand up to very heavy intellectual scrutiny. That us what I believe is required for real debate. If he cannot take the heat himself - then he should not start the fire, IMO.

quote:

ORIGINAL: SugarMyChurro

I would say the facts of the Teresa case are basically these:
1. Teresa was a nun working for the Catholic church in India
This Order was started in Calcutta by Mother Teresa, and has two branches in Bangalore which takes care of the destitute, abandoned and dying of all Castes and Religions. It survives on loving care and by donations given by persons of all Faiths.  The only time she ever took off was a few weeks in the 1950s.  That lazy 90 year old working in extreme heat.
2. She collected loads of money, most probably millions of dollars
Most charities do.  However, I dont see Angelina Jolie trading in her designer duds for a cotton sack dress. I bet you some internet sites will claim she had Swiss bank accounts......whatever
3. She received good press and general acclaim for her efforts
agreed, but also backlashing. 
4. She was eventually made a saint by the Catholic church
Really, that's news to me........I know they have started the process of canonization but that takes quite a while to come into fruition.
5. She won the Nobel prize
6. About 13 years ago the humanitarian nature of work was severely criticized by several reputable sources
For every 13 "reputable" sources you can find there are 130 that say otherwise.
7. Her legacy of humanitarian aid is now in question
And some people question whether or not Elvis is still alive. Kind of a blanket statement, huh?

Beyond that some of us do have strong opinions. Some obviously thing the woman was rightfully made a saint while many of the rest of us either don't give a shit or think she was just another Catholic thug shoving religion down people's throats.

Uh huh, only Tupac and Mother Teresa can be lumped under one label together--both obvious thugs.....I think there are people who actually believe she organized the LA gangs.  Freedom of speech.....isnt life great?

On the side of knocking Teresa off her pedestal are these online sources:

quote:

ORIGINAL: UR2Badored
4. She was eventually made a saint by the Catholic church
Really, that's news to me........I know they have started the process of canonization but that takes quite a while to come into fruition.

quote:

ORIGINAL: UR2Badored
For every 13 "reputable" sources you can find there are 130 that say otherwise.

quote:



by Susan Shields
Is Mother Teresa's Missionaires of Charity really what it looks like, from outside? Find out the untold story of what goes on inside, as former nun Susan Shields unreveals secrets.
________________________________________
The following article has been published in arrangement with the Free Inquiry magazine, USA. We are grateful to them and Jahed Ahmed to make this article available to us.

_______________________________________
Some years after I became a Catholic, I joined Mother Teresa's congregation, the Missionaries of Charity. I was one of her sisters for nine and a half years, living in the Bronx, Rome, and San Francisco, until I became disillusioned and left in May 1989. As I reentered the world, I slowly began to unravel the tangle of lies in which I had lived. I wondered how I could have believed them for so long.
Three of Mother Teresa's teachings that are fundamental to her religious congregation are all the more dangerous because they are believed so sincerely by her sisters. Most basic is the belief that as long as a sister obeys she is doing God's will. Another is the belief that the sisters have leverage over God by choosing to suffer. Their suffering makes God very happy. He then dispenses more graces to humanity. The third is the belief that any attachment to human beings, even the poor being served, supposedly interferes with love of God and must be vigilantly avoided or immediately uprooted. The efforts to prevent any attachments cause continual chaos and confusion, movement and change in the congregation. Mother Teresa did not invent these beliefs - they were prevalent in religious congregations before Vatican II - but she did everything in her power (which was great) to enforce them.
Once a sister has accepted these fallacies she will do almost anything. She can allow her health to be destroyed, neglect those she vowed to serve, and switch off her feelings and independent thought. She can turn a blind eye to suffering, inform on her fellow sisters, tell lies with ease, and ignore public laws and regulations.
Women from many nations joined Mother Teresa in the expectation that they would help the poor and come closer to God themselves. When I left, there were more than 3,000 sisters in approximately 400 houses scattered throughout the world. Many of these sisters who trusted Mother Teresa to guide them have become broken people. In the face of overwhelming evidence, some of them have finally admitted that their trust has been betrayed, that God could not possibly be giving the orders they hear. It is difficult for them to decide to leave - their self-confidence has been destroyed, and they have no education beyond what they brought with them when they joined. I was one of the lucky ones who mustered enough courage to walk away.
It is in the hope that others may see the fallacy of this purported way to holiness that I tell a little of what I know. Although there are relatively few tempted to join Mother Teresa's congregation of sisters, there are many who generously have supported her work because they do not realize how her twisted premises strangle efforts to alleviate misery. Unaware that most of the donations sit unused in her bank accounts, they too are deceived into thinking they are helping the poor.
As a Missionary of Charity, I was assigned to record donations and write the thank-you letters. The money arrived at a frantic rate. The mail carrier often delivered the letters in sacks. We wrote receipts for checks of $50,000 and more on a regular basis. Sometimes a donor would call up and ask if we had received his check, expecting us to remember it readily because it was so large. How could we say that we could not recall it because we had received so many that were even larger?
When Mother spoke publicly, she never asked for money, but she did encourage people to make sacrifices for the poor, to "give until it hurts." Many people did - and they gave it to her. We received touching letters from people, sometimes apparently poor themselves, who were making sacrifices to send us a little money for the starving people in Africa, the flood victims in Bangladesh, or the poor children in India. Most of the money sat in our bank accounts.
The flood of donations was considered to be a sign of God's approval of Mother Teresa's congregation. We were told by our superiors that we received more gifts than other religious congregations because God was pleased with Mother, and because the Missionaries of Charity were the sisters who were faithful to the true spirit of religious life.
Most of the sisters had no idea how much money the congregation was amassing. After all, we were taught not to collect anything. One summer the sisters living on the outskirts of Rome were given more crates of tomatoes than they could distribute. None of their neighbors wanted them because the crop had been so prolific that year. The sisters decided to can the tomatoes rather than let them spoil, but when Mother found out what they had done she was very displeased. Storing things showed lack of trust in Divine Providence.
The donations rolled in and were deposited in the bank, but they had no effect on our ascetic lives and very little effect on the lives of the poor we were trying to help. We lived a simple life, bare of all superfluities. We had three sets of clothes, which we mended until the material was too rotten to patch anymore. We washed our own clothes by hand. The never-ending piles of sheets and towels from our night shelter for the homeless we washed by hand, too. Our bathing was accomplished with only one bucket of water. Dental and medical checkups were seen as an unnecessary luxury.
Mother was very concerned that we preserve our spirit of poverty. Spending money would destroy that poverty. She seemed obsessed with using only the simplest of means for our work. Was this in the best interests of the people we were trying to help, or were we in fact using them as a tool to advance our own "sanctity?" In Haiti, to keep the spirit of poverty, the sisters reused needles until they became blunt. Seeing the pain caused by the blunt needles, some of the volunteers offered to procure more needles, but the sisters refused.
We begged for food and supplies from local merchants as though we had no resources. On one of the rare occasions when we ran out of donated bread, we went begging at the local store. When our request was turned down, our superior decreed that the soup kitchen could do without bread for the day.
It was not only merchants who were offered a chance to be generous. Airlines were requested to fly sisters and air cargo free of charge. Hospitals and doctors were expected to absorb the costs of medical treatment for the sisters or to draw on funds designated for the religious. Workmen were encouraged to labor without payment or at reduced rates. We relied heavily on volunteers who worked long hours in our soup kitchens, shelters, and day camps.
A hard-working farmer devoted many of his waking hours to collecting and delivering food for our soup kitchens and shelters. "If I didn't come, what would you eat?" he asked.
Our Constitution forbade us to beg for more than we needed, but, when it came to begging, the millions of dollars accumulating in the bank were treated as if they did not exist.
For years I had to write thousands of letters to donors, telling them that their entire gift would be used to bring God's loving compassion to the poorest of the poor. I was able to keep my complaining conscience in check because we had been taught that the Holy Spirit was guiding Mother. To doubt her was a sign that we were lacking in trust and, even worse, guilty of the sin of pride. I shelved my objections and hoped that one day I would understand why Mother wanted to gather so much money, when she herself had taught us that even storing tomato sauce showed lack of trust in Divine Providence.
________________________________________
For nearly a decade, Susan Shields was a Missionaries of Charity sister. She played a key role in Mother Teresa's organization until she resigned.

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ORIGINAL: Sinergy
...but I think the good she did far outweighs the negative.

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ORIGINAL: kittinSol
Here's a first person account from a woman who worked under Theresa's orders (literally and figuratively):

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ORIGINAL: SugarMyChurro

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ORIGINAL: kittinSol
Here's a first person account from a woman who worked under Theresa's orders (literally and figuratively):

Source?

[:D]

Anyway, this is just one woman's opinion. It doesn't count, obviously. She's clearly not a true believer...

Can Susan Shields find the Pope in the Pizza?

quote:



Dr. Robin Fox, the editor of Lancet, perhaps the world's leading medical journal, visited the Calcutta operation in 1994 and published his impressions.  He expected to be impressed, but after remarking on the philosophical approach there that was anti-medical, Fox stated,

"Finally, how competent are the sisters at managing pain?  On a short visit, I could not judge the power of their spiritual approach, but I was disturbed to learn that the formulary includes no strong analgesics [painkiller - Ed.].  Along with the neglect of diagnosis, the lack of good analgesia marks Mother Teresa's approach as clearly separate from the hospice movement.  I know which I prefer."
 

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ORIGINAL: LaTigresse

The reality is that the world is shades of gray. That is the case with most of the criminal element we have locked up in our prison system and that is also the case with those in great power in this world, in addition to all of us somewhere in the middle of the extremes. All human beings have degrees of good and evil within them.

I cannot imagine Mother Theresa was any different.

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ORIGINAL: Sinergy

quote:

ORIGINAL: popeye1250

Well, "Mother Susan", my point is that if India can afford upwards of $100 Billion dollars on a nuclear arsenal why can't they afford to take care of their own people?
Was that by design? "We'll let guilt-afflicted foreigners take care of our poor and we'll have the money for nuclear weapons."

Yeah!  All that money we spend in Iraq and Afghanistan while the US Government fucks over the people in New Orleans and other parts of Louisi...

Wait.  Sorry.

Nothing to see here.

Sinergy

quote:

ORIGINAL: kittinSol


by Susan Shields
Is Mother Teresa's Missionaires of Charity really what it looks like, from outside? Find out the untold story of what goes on inside, as former nun Susan Shields unreveals secrets.
________________________________________
The following article has been published in arrangement with the Free Inquiry magazine, USA. We are grateful to them and Jahed Ahmed to make this article available to us.

quote:

ORIGINAL: velvetears

quote:

ORIGINAL: kittinSol


by Susan Shields
Is Mother Teresa's Missionaires of Charity really what it looks like, from outside? Find out the untold story of what goes on inside, as former nun Susan Shields unreveals secrets.
________________________________________
The following article has been published in arrangement with the Free Inquiry magazine, USA. We are grateful to them and Jahed Ahmed to make this article available to us.

Yes very reliable source - wonder what religion Ahmed is and what possible motivation there could have been there [8|]