babble is rabble.ca's discussion board but it's much more than that: it's an online community for folks who just won't shut up. It's a place to tell each other — and the world — what's up with our work and campaigns.
Mother Teresa - anything but a saint
February 23, 2013 - 10:49am
*
Communiqué issued by l'Université de Montréal
In French only, as far as I can see...
A study by UdeM researchers, to be published in the March issue of Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses, "debunks the myth of altruism and generosity" surrounding this individual.
The study analyses in detail "her debatable method of healing the sick; her dubious political contacts; her curious management of the huge sums of money she received; and an excessive dogmatism, especially with regard to abortion, contraception, and divorce."
Lots more in the linked article. I'm surprised that I can't find anything in English-language media about this. Perhaps others will?
I'm sure we've had this discussion before - and also about Pope John Paul II. The Catholic faithful would just put their fingers in their ears at any suggestion that Mother Theresa and JPII were anything but the holiest of people.
Not all of them. I have a friend who is a nun - she taught in Haiti for a couple of decades and is very involved in solidarity with that country - who is extremely critical of that old bat, JP2 and the current white-beanied geezer.
My friend is elderly too - I'm sure that if she were a couple of decades younger, she'd have left her order. She lives with other sisters in an ordinary house where they take turns with domestic tasks and their duties in the "world", teaching, social services etc. The frail sisters move back into the mother house which is now also a residence where parents of sick children at St-Justine hospital, temporary students (such as nurses upgrading their qualifications) etc can stay for a modest fee; there is a cafeteria with plain but nutritious food. And of course everything is of a gleaming cleanliness we could only dream of.
Alas the poor sick people at Mummy Dearest's slum of a hospital had no such conditions...
I know health workers who had volunteered at the Cardinal Léger hospitals, where the conditions for the patients are much, much better. (Not that I'd try to go there for contraception... but who knows, sometimes healthcare workers are very pragmatic indeed.
I think there are many Catholics who are a bit more critical than that, BB.
As well, Chris Hitchens did a nice hatchet job on whatshername. It covers most of the bases:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/m...
JPII, Mother Theresa, and Ratzinger all express, to me, very fundmentalist old line hard core religious right wing conservatism. Another Pope like Ratzinger will probably hasten the decline of that sorry od institution.
Well, if that sorry relic Marc Ouellet de la Motte gets the white smoke, perhaps I can make some spare change tossing off articles on how out of touch the old fart* is with contemporary Québécois society.
-----
*not ageist. One can be an old fart at any age. I'm sure Stephen Harper was one at 20.
and speaking of right-wing, sky-pilots, Rabbi Ovadia Josef former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel is right out there too..
http://www.infiniteunknown.net/tag/ovadia-yosef/
Developing nations is where the focus of the church is these days. Places where poverty exists in the extreme, where educational standards are low if they exist at all, and where the ground had long ago been paved for the church to enjoy it's presence, by way of colonialism. Soft core religion though, at least in the western context, tends to de-emphasize hard core dogma as a recruiting and retention strategy. The question then becomes; which element, hard or soft core, is being more deceitful?
I think I get the picture: MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit.
especially for lagatta!
New Pope, old Church
excerpt:
For the many who wish the Catholic Church ill, including numerous Catholics, Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Quebec would be a welcome choice as the next Pope. It was priests like Mr. Ouellet who helped estrange the faithful in once-Catholic Quebec and there is little reason to think he would not make the same contribution to the church universal.
As Quebec church historian and priest Benoit Lacroix puts it, Cardinal Ouellet represents "a very, very conservative current of Catholicism," just as John Paul II and Benedict XVI have done. And Ouellet makes no bones about it. On women's equality, birth control, divorce, ordaining women clergy and married priests, he is a proud relic. On abortion, he takes an extreme position, opposing it even in cases of rape. His statements implying that a rape victim who gets an abortion is a murderer earned him harsh condemnation in Quebec. He considers gay marriage "a big crisis…. We don't know what it means to be human anymore." Someone should tell him it means love triumphing over cruel dogma.
excerpt:
The protection of perverts and pedophiles within the Church remains the priority.
excerpt:
What my class now knows is what Rwandans have known since 1994: The Catholic Church was deeply complicit in their genocide. This may seem a controversial assertion, but it is the consensus of those who have studied or suffered from the genocide. In a powerful 2004 book co-edited by Carol Rittner, Genocide in Rwanda: Complicity of the Churches? 20 mostly Catholic writers including Ms. Rittner, who is a nun, and several Rwandans overwhelmingly agreed that the Church was indeed complicit.
excerpt:
Benedict's shaky years as Pope have hardly restored the Church's moral standing. Like John Paul II before him, at every opportunity he has appointed extremely conservative, rigidly sexist priests to high positions. He maligned the entire Muslim religion and then clumsily strived to undo the damage. He embraced an excommunicated bishop widely known as a raving Holocaust denier.
On his first visit to Africa, he made the wild assertion that condoms actually exacerbated the AIDS crisis, only later reversing his position. He fiercely reprimanded American nuns for spending too much time promoting social justice, like battling poverty and racism, instead of issues "of crucial importance to the life of the church and society," namely abortion and gay marriage.
If chosen the new Pope, Cardinal Ouellet would move seamlessly into the Vatican. Given his record, the Church would more and more resemble a living museum. Its anachronistic structures and codes would be zealously preserved while its soul continues to shrivel.
They make it sound as if most criminals naturally gravitate toward likeminded institutions, or to places where they can prey upon the unsuspecting in concert with others. The fast track to sainthood is a sick demonstration to show that elevation is possible for women who serve.
Interesting!
Obviously Pope Francis hasn't been reading babble:
Mother Teresa to be made a saint of the Catholic Church
A birthday miracle! This Bergoglio character is a real piece of work.
How polite the CBC is with these people who commit crimes against humanity.
Describing a person in the last agonies of cancer, she “told the camera what she told this terminal patient: ‘You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.’ Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer’s reply: ‘Then please tell him to stop kissing me.’”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/27/was-mother-teresa-reall...
Beatification is all just politics, man. It's not what you know, it's who you know. A blessing here, some silver coins there... know what I mean?
Saint Cinnamon has been waiting, and waiting. He's now reduced to selling loaves just to get by.