Mother Teresa was a saint.

Before I began, I read the comments on this debate before posting my argument, and something caught my attention. Someone brought up that my case would be easy once I started quoting Christopher Hitchens, who is indeed my main source on this debate. My opponent responded by saying that I must prove she did these things. That is absolutely not true, and is nothing short of impossible. If he is unwilling to accept a first-hand source from the first (and one of the only) person who bothered to investigate the life of this woman, what source is he willing to accept? Unless he can prove that Christopher Hitchens made up everything he said about Mother Teresa, I will consider my sources valid and acceptable. Assuming we're clear on that, I'd like to thank my opponent for accepting this debate. He is right: I will have a very difficult time trying to convince people that Mother Teresa was not a saint. She has been held up as the epitome of goodness and virtue for years, and I think I'll get a lot of responses like, "Well of course she wasn't perfect, but that doesn't mean she was a bad person!" On the contrary, it goes much further than her not being perfect; to put it simply, she was a bad person. However, I don't think that was entirely her fault. The Catholic church used her for its own agenda, and she was in many ways victimized. But that does not change what she did. And so I will begin. Mother Teresa was a women who is credited with being a friend of the poor. But it would be much more accurate to say, as Christopher Hitchens did, that she was really a friend of poverty. Her actual words were that poverty was a "gift from god," which should, in itself, tell you what sort of deranged and fanatical person she was. This is a woman who was so fundamental, so extreme, so caught up in blind faith, that she considered poverty to be a blessing on the grounds that she could do her Christian duty by helping these people. And keep in mind what kind of poverty we're talking about: starving children, disease-ridden mothers, AIDS-infected fathers dying in the streets. A gift from god? What a kind thing to say. She was simply not concerned with helping stop poverty. She did nothing to encourage the poor to improve their lives, even if they had the ability or means. She spent almost her entire fortune on establishing convents on her own named all around the world. Imagine the number of hospitals, or donations to medicine or science in Calcutta that could have been funded by this. But no, her sole concern was "saving their souls." A friend of the poor, indeed. She was also a hypocrite in several respect. Accepting generous donations, for example, from Ronald Reagan, a man who funded the slaughter of nuns, priests, and parishioners in catholic towns in South America, hardly seems in line with her teachings. It seems she was willing to go against principle when money was involved. As for her "good works," would it suffice to say that most residents of Indiana had no idea who she was until she became an icon in the west? (Indeed, she spent far more time crusading around the world, meeting powerful leaders and accepting donations than she did in her own city.) If not, let's examine them a little further. The first thing to understand is that the vast majority of what she established were "Houses of the Dying." These ramshackle establishments served no other purpose than to try to convert the souls of the destitute before they passed on. A nice gesture? Sure. But surely more could be done for these individuals with the untold amount of donation money this woman received. In fact, beyond simply not treating any of these individuals, the commonplace sharing of infected needles and IVs undoubtedly lead to even more misery through the spreading of diseases. The nuns also refused to allow their "patients" to be treated, even if such treatments required nothing more than some antibiotics, on the grounds that if they did for one, they'd have to do it for all. This seems unlikely. Getting a dying fifteen-year-old antibiotics would not mean having to try to get an operation for an individual with terminal cancer, for instance. Perhaps they'd have had more money and resources to help people like this if she hadn't squandered so much of her money on "fighting" Family Planning organizations and birth control providers (something that impoverished nations desperately need). You can see her how she is almost directly adding to the problem. Fighting abortion is one thing - although I firmly disagree. But to fight the use of contraceptives? Surely she could be doing much, much more helpful things with her time and resources. Especially given that allowing women to have access to contraceptives and abortions has been shown to greatly reduce poverty in almost every nation that it has been tried it. Women having unwanted pregnancies leads to more poverty, death, and suffering than almost anything else, and this "saint" point-blank refused these measures (even calling them the "greatest destroyers of peace"). However, there are two main instances of fraud on her part that cannot be overlooked. In the 1980s, Mother Teresa accepted well over a million dollars from a Catholic anti-pornography crusader named Charles Keating. The problem, of course, was that it wasn't his money to give. She took a very generous donation from one of the biggest scandals in recent history. Perhaps this could be overlooked if she didn't do the exact same thing in Haiti a short time later. Here, again, she received an extremely substantial donation from the Duvaliers. This money was stolen directly from the Haitian poor. She then praised the Duvaliers and said that she had never seen any leaders so connected with and helpful to the poor. When the family was overthrown in a coup, Mother Teresa was asked to return the money to help the impoverished in Haiti. She never responded. In both cases, she accepted money stolen from the poor and the hard-working. In both cases, she was asked to return it. In both cases, she ignored these requests. What sort of person does such a thing? It is very clear that Mother Teresa was no saint. Her fundamental fanaticism stopped her from doing the good, life-saving work she could have done with her resources. Her fraudulent tendencies disproved untold thousands of families of money, after it was stolen from them. She does not deserve the respect and reverence she gets. She should be praised for the small amount of good she did, but she should be shamed and criticized for all of the awful and disgusting things she did too. This woman hardly qualifies as a "saint." Sources: http://www.youtube.com... http://www.youtube.com... http://www.youtube.com... http://www.slate.com...