Saint or celebrity? Cult of Mother Teresa faces tough questions

[IndianaGreen]

Saint or celebrity? Cult of Mother Teresa faces tough questions
Phil Reeves reports from Calcutta on a controversial beatification
19 October 2003

Two cities, both former imperial capitals, will today usher the late Mother Teresa along a step on the path to sainthood. One, the headquarters of the Roman Catholic church, will do so with unabashed enthusiasm. The other, her home for 68 years - and the chief beneficiary of her charitable work - will be strangely patchy in its applause.

The beatification of the Albanian nun is the fastest in the Vatican's history. The convents of Rome are packed with pilgrims eager to witness the great event, none of whom doubt the "miracle" that triggered the process.

But Calcutta - or Kolkata, as India's great eastern city is officially known - is different. Questions have arisen about the miracle and there is a certain ambivalence towards the woman known only as Mother. In this poverty-hardened society - inured in the fatalism of Hinduism - she was not seen as especially saintly.

No Calcuttans dispute that she is one of their biggest celebrities. On her death in 1997, she was given a state funeral. A boulevard will soon be named after her, and she is to have a statue. Indians speak admiringly of her as a strong, good person.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=454851

Related discussion:

Doubt over Mother Teresa's miracle

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=111&topic_id=8753

[pfitz59]

1. Free birth control........

would've been a better service to the poor of Calcutta than ANYTHING that glory-hog Theresa did!

[Paschall]

2. "Mother" indeed

"America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father’s role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts—a child—as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered domination over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters. And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners."

-- Amicus curiae brief, before the U.S. Supreme Court, in the cases of Loce v. New Jersey and Krail et al. v. New Jersey, filed by Mother Teresa

http://www.castletown.com/teresa2.htm


"These are things that break peace, but 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. ... And today the greatest means - the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion. And we who are standing here - our parents wanted us. We would not be here if our parents would do that to us. Our children, we want them, we love them, but what of the millions. Many people are very, very concerned with the children in India, with the children in Africa where quite a number die, maybe of malnutrition, of hunger and so on, but millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today. Because if a mother can kill her own child - what is left for me to kill you and you kill me - there is nothing between. "

-- Mother Teresa's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1979
http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1979/teresa-lecture.html

[Lexingtonian]

3. It's all beside the point

Yes, she didn't like abortion or divorce. Maybe she was a willing if limited political tool of the Vatican in the U.S. and Ireland, and she certainly took money from Saddam Hussein iirc. But don't forget that her frame of reference was 1930s rural Albania, the Church of that time, and the Calcutta slums unchanged over her lifetime.

The Church has had problems discovering miracles associated with its obvious saints since the Middle Ages ended. Basically, all of the ones canonized in recent times have stories of miracles of similar levels of dubiousness as this one. Yet in the end it doesn't really for purposes of the Church matter whether the matter is objectively true or untrue, it matters only whether it is subjectively sufficiently true.

A lot of people get awards and prizes for things that look important to outsiders, when for insiders some other thing too tedious to explain to the layfolk is what their accomplishment really consists of. Einstein got his Nobel Prize nominally for his work on the photoelectric effect because the Prize Committee wasn't completely sure at the time that his Theory of Relativity would really hold up.

I agree that Mother Teresa did not contribute greatly to the rise of India from Third World to First World nation status. What she did is live in the spirit and the method and the way of her chose namesake, Teresa of Avila and her order of nuns the Discalced Sisters of Mount Carmel. Mother Teresa showed something of the unique power of the contemplative way of life to act in the world so as to consecrate. It may not be right to assign her therefore the role of a minor deity in the Pantheon of them of the Church, but if anyone should be assigned a role of the sort (and there is a need for it in the Church) it would be least wrong to confer it to a person like her. Because despite the need to write Church dogma that way in order to preserve itself and its power, no one really wants the (self)revelation of the Divine in human life and deeds to not be happening somewhere, through someone's humble and simple life.

The rest is just politics.