Posted by:
blindguy
(
)
Date: September 05, 2016 12:28PM
I heard an interesting interview on this subject yesterday morning on the BBC. The Brittish news network was interviewing a Roman Catholic church historian (and Mother Teresa critic) who noted that prior to Pope John Paul II, those who wanted to make certain Roman Catholic persons saints had to wait at least 100 years after the person's death before the honor would be considered. The historian thought this was actually a good idea, because it allowed for a full judgment of the person by history (assuming the candidate had gained enough notoriety to gain the attention of historians during his/her lifetime) to determine whether whatever he/she did was good or bad, and that there were not living people from his/her time who would be able to contradict the church's view of that person.
But John Paul II changed all of that, and the result has been the naming as saints both Mother Teresa and John Paul II shortly after their passings, and critics who worked alongside them do live to tell the world differently about each person.
As for me, I find myself in agreement with Dagny--I have a lot of mixed views. Given her religious beliefs (which she wasn't going to challenge, no matter how bad they might have been) and how the people her charity looked after would have been treated in Indian society if that charity had not existed, I think Mother Teresa did some excellent work. Did she have to deal with some very unscrupulous people to get the money she needed to keep her charity going? You bet! But again, given the work of her charity and its perceived mission, the need for the necessary funding ultimately justified (at least to Mother Teresa) her seeking of funds from dictators such as Jean Claude Duvalier of Haiti, among others.
Was Mother Teresa good enough to be A Catholic saint? Yes, because she represented, to the best of her ability, the values that the Roman church holds, values that many Roman Catholics aspire to but cannot reach. Is she a saint for everybody? Probably not, because not everybody holds the same values as the Roman church holds.
This same argument applies in spades to another recent Roman Catholic saint, mentioned in the first Guardian article above. Father Junipero Serra is now considered a saint by the Roman church for his conversion of native Americans to his religion. For the Roman church, that is enough. However, from what we now know, much of his work actually involved destroying native American cultures in order to adapt them to the European religion and lifestyle in which he was raised. And Father Serra never considered that the native Americans under his "care," might have the ability to someday rise up and govern themselves--this was out of his purview. However, for the Roman church, these criticisms are secondary and do not really represent church values, especially during that time, and so they were placed on the back burner when Father Serra was made a Roman Catholic saint.