A friend of poverty and suffering
Mother Teresa wasn’t a friend to the poor, she was a friend of poverty. There is a difference.
That’s also my view of her.
An academic in political philosophy and ethics has an opposed view:
Most Christians think that God can allow us to suffer if the suffering is redemptive. I think that too. And that looks like all she is saying, [is] that God can heal our hearts through some kinds of suffering and that we can accept it as such.
Then a few minutes later:
Most atheist attacks on her character focus on her view of the morally purgative effects of suffering (again, see the thread), and I think that while she may have publicly exaggerated at times (though many of the quotes adduced to that effect don’t demonstrate this, as you can see from the discussion earlier in the thread), she has a view that is defensible within Christianity about how we can choose to let suffering fundamentally improve our characters and to draw nearer to God.
Christian belief by no means guarantees good and right moral belief, but I think she just had a different, but reasonable view about suffering and God than you do. And people who disagree reasonably about moral matters can both have good character.
After that, unfortunately, he stopped engaging.
Is this idea about suffering “reasonable”? I’m not convinced it is, at least not in the sense I understand “reasonable.” It may be reasonable within a Christian system of thought, i.e. if you accept certain assumptions…but maybe it’s not reasonable to accept those assumptions.
Or maybe it is. Either way, I don’t see much merit in this claim that “we can choose to let suffering fundamentally improve our characters” – because I don’t believe that suffering does fundamentally improve our characters. I think it’s a rather sick and ugly way of looking at things to think it does. (This was the sort of thing Nietzsche hated about Christianity.)
What does it mean to say that “God can heal our hearts through some kinds of suffering”? I wonder if it means it breaks us, and thus makes us less “arrogant” and thus more submissive to “God.” But that doesn’t improve our characters, does it, it just makes us more obedient to the boss-God who isn’t there. It’s all rather circular. Pain perhaps makes us more receptive to “God”…but what’s good about that? Swap Hitler or Stalin for God and it becomes obvious that it’s not, so the claim is senseless unless we assume not only that “God” exists but also that it’s good. It’s fatuous to assume either of those, let alone both.
Or maybe he means the Victorian idea that suffering makes people “patient” – like Beth in Little Women. But what’s good about that? How does it improve the character? It’s just self-regarding – I am strong, I can take it, I can suffer in silence. Who cares? That doesn’t make the world a better place. We don’t need martyrs and Beths and silent sufferers and obeyers – we need people who do things. Sick people need good medical care, not nuns leering at them while they suffer.
There are of course religious people who do things, including providing good medical care. It’s just that “Mother” Teresa wasn’t one of them.
she has a view that is defensible within Christianity about how we can choose to let suffering fundamentally improve our characters and to draw nearer to God.
Except, she never choose suffering for herself, what with the hopping on a plane and receiving the best care US hospitals had to offer. Also, she raised hundreds of millions of dollars for the church, set up places promising help for the destitute and the sick, and then actively inflicted pain and suffering on these people, against their will.
Whatever her views, the fact remains that she was a disturbed woman who hurt many of the most vulnerable members of society.
Agreeing with Ema, choice is a key point.
Those who would help the poor should consider the medical profession’s rule of “first, do no harm” and (coming back to choice) informed consent.
Experimenting with bringing *other people* closer to god(s) through *their* suffering is no more defensible than the Tuskegee experiments.
I’m not even sure this was her view. The commenter who wrote this is a Protestant, and it sounds to me like Protestant, not Catholic, theology. Anyway the people Mother Teresa was most famous for “caring for” were dying; they were in no shape to demonstrate improved character.
I think she believed suffering is redemptive in itself, as long as we passively receive it as a chance to share in Christ’s suffering (or something). It’s not about making us better people. I could be wrong.
I know. A fight about the shadow of an ass. Anyway, the point is: she raised incredible amounts of money, and she could have used it to offer quality medical care (and quality child care to the orphans in her children’s homes.) She didn’t bother to, because comforting the afflicted materially wasn’t her concern.
Evidently she only cared about helpless people’s spiritual well-being. But she made a name for herself as someone who made a material difference, and she had the clout and the resources to have actually done so. She could have really helped people; there’s absolutely no reason she couldn’t have done that while praying over them or telling them about Jesus or whatevs. She chose not to. And she never corrected the public’s misapprehensions about her work, either.
“This was the sort of thing Nietzsche hated about Christianity.”
Yay! You’ve actually read him, rather than other people paraphrasing him.
Whatever she believed, whatever her Church believes…
You cannot “do virtue¨ to somebody else. She could have chosen to sleep in the gutter, gone without food, shelter or shoes, given her every possession to somebody poorer, that might have been virtuous, if you believe in the right things, but causing other people to suffer because it makes you feel happy inside – that is sheer wickedness, and I’m only sorry she didn’t get her comeuppance for it before she died.
Funny you say that. In a comment thread in our local news website on this topic, someone was quoting Nietzsche as justification FOR her actions. I can’t claim to be informed at all, but I did wonder if they had understood what they had read.
Haaaaaaa no I don’t think Nietzsche would have been keen on Ma Terry or her actions.