Why Mother Teresa is overrated

Mother Teresa, one of the most admired and respected women in the world. Yeah, I’m sick of that reputation. And I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks the way I do.

For starters, she apparently supports those who are against civil liberties. In 1975, Indira Gandhi, perhaps just as overrated, had suspended civil liberties in India, and after that happened, Mother Teresa apparently actually believed “people were happier, there were more jobs, there are no more strikes”. This is no saint, nor someone worthy of respect, but someone who’s friends with a politician keen on social control. She’s also apparently friends, or at least associates herself, with dictators, like the Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, even openly praising the Duvalier family, and the communist Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha.

She is also unworthy of her image as the saviour of the poor, as she actually valued their suffering. She thinks it is “very beautiful that the poor accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ”, and that “the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people”. In her Homes for the Dying, it was said that one could hear the screams of people having maggots tweezered from their open wounds, and she doesn’t even give them any pain relief, on principle. Her philosophy is that “it is the most beautiful gift for a person that he can participate in the sufferings of Christ”.

She also apparently carried a zealous and dogmatic view of Catholicism which, apparently, no one has looked into or given attention to.

And yet this woman, this woman who loves the suffering of the poor and cohorts with tyrants, is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and recognized as an admirable figure. Why, when she showed a complete disregard for the poor and the dying?