This isn’t Walden Pond

The Times on Dr Aroup Chatterjee on “Mother” Teresa.

Over hundreds of hours of research, much of it cataloged in a book he published in 2003, Dr. Chatterjee said he found a “cult of suffering” in homes run by Mother Teresa’s organization, the Missionaries of Charity, with children tied to beds and little to comfort dying patients but aspirin.

He and others said that Mother Teresa took her adherence to frugality and simplicity in her work to extremes, allowing practices like the reuse of hypodermic needles and tolerating primitive facilities that required patients to defecate in front of one another.

Again – like the nonsense about suffering as some kind of virtue-pump – a self-regarding performance of saintliness that disregards the needs of the people she pretended to care about. Frugality with the needles is not a virtue.

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