Mother Teresa, a Catholic nun most known for her charity work and “homes of the dying” campaign in India from the 1950s–1990s, was officially named a saint on Sept 4, 2016.
Yet through the championing of her as the core by which all morality begins and ends in the world, she was actually a pretty shitty person.
To be named a saint by the Catholic Church, a person must have enacted at least two miracles posthumously:
According to Pope Francis, the disappearance of a Brazilian man’s brain tumors was the work of Mother Teresa’s divine intervention — even though she’s been dead since 1997. This qualifies as the second of her post-mortem “miracles," thus making her a saint in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Her first surrounds a highly contested claim from a woman in India, who says Teresa's spirit shot rays of light into her stomach, curing her of cancer.
Which sounds like a miracle, sure, but the woman’s own doctor is adamant that she never even had cancerous tumors in the first place. Dr. Ranjan Mustafi claims the woman absolutely never had those problems, but instead had an ovarian cyst. Besra’s doctor and her husband both stated that this cyst was cured by the prescription she was given and had nothing to do with any beams of light entering her chest. In an interview with Time magazine, her husband was even quoted as saying, “My wife was cured by the doctors and not by any miracle.” Which sounds a lot more feasible.
So while Mother Teresa’s zombie “miracles” seem made-up and shouldn’t garner her acknowledgment as a saint per the Vatican’s own rules, it’s really her horrible track record that should discount her as one even further.
Her facilities are shit
Mother Teresa’s whole shtick was helping poor and sick people in India. However, most accounts of her facilities show that they did a horrible job of actually helping anybody. There was often no medication for the people there and workers would regularly refuse to give pain medications to people dying of terminal illnesses. Also, her centers were known to rinse off used needles with cold water and repeatedly use them on different patients.
She hid a ton of money
Despite raising hundreds of millions of dollars for her Missionaries of Charity congregation, Mother Teresa was notoriously suspect with her use of the funds. Reports show that only about 7 percent of the money she raised was actually used in her congregations. The other 93 percent of the funds was funneled back into the Catholic Church and hidden in secret bank accounts that weren’t discovered until her death in 1997. but, yeah, why use the money to actually help people?
Honestly felt abortion is equal to war
Mother Teresa won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, but during her acceptance speech, she ranted against abortion, stating that it was equivalent to war. Specifically she said, “I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing — direct murder by the mother herself.”
By her logic, people need to suffer
Mother Teresa thought that the people she treated needed to suffer to get closer to her God. She even went so far as saying, “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's Passion. The world gains much from their suffering."
Often rubbed elbows with criminal elite
Mother Teresa regularly took money from and associated with known criminals and publicly called for them to not be prosecuted. The main examples of this are the dictator of Haiti Jean-Claude Duvalier who killed thousands of innocent people and Donald McGuire, a convicted pedophile and serial rapist.
She forced religion down people’s throats
India has never been a historically Catholic country, ever, but that didn’t stop Mother Teresa from trying to forcibly convert and baptize dying people to her religion of choice. Oftentimes, nuns of her congregation would baptize terminally ill Hindi and Muslim patients when they had no idea they were actually being baptized.
She never practiced what she preached
Mother Teresa was a huge proponent of suffering and enduring the life that God chose for you. This is part of the reason her “clinics” treated their patients so poorly. However, when Mother Teresa was sick herself, she secretly sought treatment in modern medical facilities in California to prevent her own suffering. She also regularly doubted her belief and faith in God, which is probably less than ideal when you're running hundreds of Catholic congregations across the globe.
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