How is Mother Teresa connected to Jeffrey Epstein?

@ArishMell I agree that it's not a direct connection, it's just interesting. I'm sure Epstein never met Mother Teresa.

Mother Teresa has her own problems, as documented by Christopher Hitchens and Dr. Aroup Chatterjee. She supported dictators like Muammar Khaddafi, Baby Doc Duvalier, and Enver Hoxha, and her "clinics" lacked painkillers and even skimped on basic hygiene. She was one of the truly evil people of the 20th century, and the damage she did by opposing birth control and abortion in poor countries may be responsible for the needless suffering and death of millions of people.

@LeopoldBloom Thank you.

Yes, I was aware that the nun was not quite the saintly figure she liked everyone to think, but "truly evil" is very harsh, suggesting she has a place with Hitler and the even more murderous Mao and Stalin.

I have not read anything by Mr. Hitchens or Dr. Chatterjee, but the former is reputed for pushing only his own and sometimes destructive views rather than objective analysis.

I do not condone Mother Theresa's wrongs but I think justice requires asking her motives and who was really to blame - her ot others. The obstacles she faced were formidable.

Firstly she had to face the suspicious, fearful, tinpot little men who ran their poverty-riddled countries.

The greatest though would have been a Vatican that at the time was very callous, ignorant of human relationships and sexuality, and with little respect for women and children.

If she had spoken out for birth-control and abortion she would have been thrown out of the Catholic countries, if not into their prisons, and very possibly excommunicated; and then no-onw would have been helped at all. It was not her who was in the wrong but the Chairman and Managing Director, a.k.a. The Pope.

Also so many of the ordinary people and certainly many local priests in the countries under the Vatican's strongest grip would themselves have been brain-washed by the Church into seeing birth control as wrong. So simply swanning into some God-abandoned country ruined by its rulers and factions, and preaching contraception, would not have got her very far; certainly nowhere with the authorities.

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I'm surprised any strongly-religious person would have supported Enver Hoxha, as he was an extreme Communist and atheist, but did Theresa really support him? Did she manage to visit Albania? What was the relationship, if any, between Albania and the Vatican? Hoxha made Albania so hermetic very, very few foreigners other than diplomats from her few allies were allowed in; and then only very closely guarded.

Do we know if Theresa's apparent support for such tyrants was real, something Hitchings wants us to think she held, or a front she needed carefully to construct and maintain to gain any access at all to countries suspicious of all "Westerners"?

What Mother Theresa upheld was very wrong but she was a prioduct and representative of her time, background and crucially, her organisation. If she had tried to be more up-to-date and liberal she would not have achieved anything at all, in some of the poorest and most badly-run nations on Earth.

Mother Theresa may have been very misguided and we don't know how, and how much, she may have been manipulated by Rome; but I think she genuinely meant well by her standards, and she was not "evil".

The evil ones were the tacky little men who ran her Church and those States at the time.

Not that Christoper Hitchings, safely in a cosy office within London's coralling ring-roads, would have cared.

@ArishMell I suppose you can make a case that as a Catholic nun, MT couldn't very well promote contraception and abortion. However, she could have just kept her mouth shut. She spent considerable resources campaigning against the referendum in Ireland to legalize divorce, then when her friend Princess Diana divorced Prince Charles, expressed her approval because the divorce would make Diana "happy." The word for that is hypocrisy.

And while I understand why MT had to support the Congress Party in India since she lived there, there was no reason for her to support dictators in other countries just because they were anti-abortion. Even the Pope calls out foreign leaders when he disapproves of them. But the worst thing was how she ran her clinics, with painkillers unavailable and a disregard for sanitary practices. The reason she gave for this was that suffering was good for people, not because she couldn't afford anything better. The Sisters of Charity had so much money in the Vatican Bank, they would have caused it to default if they'd tried to withdraw all of it at the same time. And of course, MT obtained her own health care in California.

While she didn't order the deaths of innocent people directly, MT's philosophy indirectly led to the death and oppression of countless victims. And when her journals were released after her death, we learned that she had lost her faith years earlier, and only continued out of inertia, and what I can only characterize as spite.

Hitchens didn't just hole up in an office, by the way - he was out there in the world observing it first-hand. And Dr. Chatterjee was a native of Calcutta, who became suspicious of MT when he was unable to find many of the clinics she claimed to operate there, despite the fact that he was very familiar with the city. Chatterjee also resented how MT was responsible for the popular image of Calcutta as a pestilential hellhole, when in fact it is no better or worse than many other cities in the developing world.

@LeopoldBloom I see. It has occurred to me that she seems to have slipped from public memory, perhaps because she wasn't what she wanted us all to think she was.

I wonder what her motives were, but if she was as bad as that, didn't the Church investigate?

@ArishMell As far as I can tell, her motives were based on an enjoyment of making other people suffer.

The church never investigated her - why should they? She was great advertising. None of this was widely known while she was alive. She was admired not just by conservatives, but by Hollywood liberals. And after her death, the church fast-tracked her canonization.

Keep in mind that this was the same church that covered up child sex abuse for decades. They would have covered up MT's activities too.

@LeopoldBloom Oh yes, the Vatican has an awful history.

Only yesterday we heard on the News that a mass-grave has been found in Canada, containing the victims of a Catholic-run boarding-school that closed only fairly recently but had originally been part of a government scheme to assimilate indigenous people into "Canadian" society (i.e. that of the descendants of European settlers).

In Eire, and I think Ulster, the Church was responsible for the dreadful Magdelan Laundries, basically slave-labour homes for poor womem especially if pregnant out of wedlock. The nuns who ran these had no idea how to look after babies and children born there, even if any of them cared, and the victims who died were buried without any grave-marker.

It was also implicit in the Swiss anti-Romany progrom of the 1940s-60, wgich worked by kidnapping the children and farming them out for adoption under new names, via Church-run orphanages, to approved Swiss families. Their parents and grandparents were allowed to live on, either emigrating or eventually dying naturally.

The Catholic Church, some Protestant church organisations and the children's home Dr. Barnadoes (a secular charity) at around the same time in the UK operated a government-created scheme to remove children from poverty and especially if illegitimate (held in those days itself to be as bad as the parents), and ship them off to a suppposed wonderful new life in Australia or Canada. No-one thought to ensure the emigres were looked after properly, and many were very badly treated by the orphanages then the foster-parents. The latter just used them as cheap farm labour. Some of the nuns involved would tell the children the terrible lie that their parents had died.

So I think however bad and self-serving Mother Theresa was she was still only a product and mouthpiece for a very inhumane, very backward but very wealthy institution with an utter lack of any understanding and compassion for women and children.

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Regarding how you see her reputation in America, as I'm not American and don't live there I don't fully understand your observation about "conservatives and Hollywood liberals". However I think the admiration she enjoyed was from all sides generally; at least in those countries who thought she was really was doing good.