Having been busy, I hadn't come across the information that the atheists are kicking around the corpse of Mother Teresa again until I went looking for Alexander Cockburn's obit of Christopher Hitchens yesterday. I'll post the piece I looked it up for later.
From what I can gather this innings in the game centers around one Serge Larivée, a figure in the Sceptiques du Québec, a local parish of the pseudo-skepticism industry, itself a branch of the atheism industry. He and Genevieve Chenard, one of his co-authors both work in the Department of Psychoeducation* at Université de Montréal, the third author, Carole Sénéchal, works in the Department of Education at The University of Ottowa. I haven't been able to find out anything else about them. The paper which contains their charges against Mother Teresa is behind a pay wall so I haven't been able to read it. Apparently neither have the people who wrote most of the stuff I've read online, much of it posted before the article was published, that looks like it's the typical product of the online atheist grapevine.
Also from what I've been able to read, most of that from the usual atheist sources, it looks like an update of Christopher Hitchen's hatchet job explicitly with the goal of supporting what he said. With his hit job on M.T. Hitchens became a figure of atheist adoration. Figures of atheist adoration enjoy a similar status to the most popular of saints. Having called attention to some of the very unsavory, not to mention corrupt, aspects of Hitchen's career in my blog brawls with atheists, they will hear nothing said against him. Consider that one of the reported bases of the Larivée case against Mother Teresa are some of the unsavory political figures she took donations from and allegedly consorted with. In light of that, their reliance on Hitchens is entirely hypocritical. There was his conversion from Trotskyism (a pretty violent and anti-democratic ideology) to his fawning, adoring Thatcherism and onward to his further descent into American style neo-conservatism during the Bush II regime and his massive media presence as a major promoter of the illegal invasion of Iraq, Hitchens has more of that kind of political filth on him than Mother Teresa does by a factor of hundreds of thousands of times. Pointing that out will get these same atheist nun-bashers in a lather of indignation that anyone should look critically at their idol's record, most of it completely documented in his own, published, writing. Anticipating my next post, you can read about a bit of the underside of Hitch in Cockburn's obit.
One of the odd things about the continued use of Mother Teresa is that last time around the atheist team was hooting that M. T. was, covertly, one of them. Then it was the publication of her diary in which she revealed that she had profound doubts about the reality of God, going on for decades, that she felt no presence of God in her life. Many of the same blog atheists were crowing, then, that Mother Teresa was an atheist, a hypocrite and any number of other things. And including using her as their new found atheist tool to slam the Church. Hitchens, the media's go-to man for everything anti-M.T., joined in the crowing:
So, which is the more striking: that the faithful should bravely confront the fact that one of their heroines all but lost her own faith, or that the Church should have gone on deploying, as an icon of favorable publicity, a confused old lady who it knew had for all practical purposes ceased to believe?
Unsaid in this was that if she was guilty of all of those things Hitchens, Larivée et al are accusing her of, neglect of the dying beggars she'd taken in from the street, medical and clerical incompetence and implied corruption, then, according to them, it was an atheist pretending to be a religious person who committed those wrongs. I wouldn't say that, myself, but I'd like to know how the same atheists would confront that point.
While she was hardly someone I'd consult on matters of reproductive rights, modern medicine or administration, one thing is clear, that in the decades before she was made famous, she was trying to do what later made her famous, pick up dying beggars from the street and do something for them. Pretty much on her own for a good part of it, going on doing that, without world wide acclaim, for years on end.
She was a very unsophisticated person who was doing what none of her sophisticated, affluent, atheist critics seem to be doing, trying to serve some of the most destitute people on Earth. I would like to know how many atheists have continually done what she did in the years before she became the center of a rather vulgar and overblown cult of personality.
That personality cult might be usefully compared to a somewhat similar one, that of James Randi, who is a sleaze, a documented serial liar, a fraudster and a criminal. I'd like to know where the millions of dollars that go to his "educational foundation" go. There must be millions, he's the one who says he's got the money to cover his phony "challenge" at the ready.
I'm not a fan of the Mother Teresa cult. As someone who the Church still considers to be a Catholic, I'm entirely against the saint-making machine the Vatican installed under John Paul II, something that went crazy during his pontificate, though somewhat slowed during that of Benedict XVI. It was frequently a scandal, part of JPII's own publicity machine. The guy loved to dress up and make a spectacle of himself for the TV cameras. I don't think the Vatican should be in the saint making business, at all. At the very least, a generation or more should pass between the death of someone and this kind of thing. It often takes longer than that to gain some kind of perspective on the life of a person held up as a saint or, on the other hand, smeared as a deeply flawed human being. If you're going to call someone venerable you owe it to those you want to venerate them to make sure they are.
This is not going to be the last atheist use of Mother Teresa, they've raised up an anti-MT franchise business, it's something they'll be doing for decades. There will always be minor figures in semi-pro atheism who will be looking for publicity. I will just about guarantee you that Larivée will be a headliner featured in future atheist conclaves. I don't have any problem with an honest criticism of Mother Teresa, anyone held up as a hero, never mind a saint, should be looked at fully. I don't even mind atheists doing that if they're honest. But this criticism doesn't seem to be that one, the promotion of it by the atheist PR machine certainly isn't. It's their usual ideological smearing.
* I'd never heard of "psychoeducation" before this morning and was unaware that such a thing was being taught at universities. I might look into its "scientific" foundations but the little I've read makes me very skeptical that it's an advance on other sects of that pseudo-science.
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