14 Highly Uncomfortable Facts About Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa is a literal Saint who raised hundreds of millions of dollars for, well, not for charity, exactly. Only about 7 percent of the money she raised ever went to the crusty death motels she ran for the terminally ill.
The rest of it went to struggling religious upstart, The Vatican. They won’t tell anyone what they did with it, but it’s probably going to good causes.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Here are a few more times the Mother Theresa/Donald Trump comparison proved surprisingly apt…
She Had God-Awful Views on AIDS
According to a nurse who was present, Mother Teresa made clear during an award acceptance speech that “she did not want to label (AIDS) a scourge of God, but that it did seem like a just retribution for improper sexual conduct.”
She Went Berserker Mode on Baptisms
This lady went on baptism sprees the way some serial killers go on murder sprees, claiming the souls of dying people for her team. She’d ask a benign question, like “would you like to go to the God who sent the Sisters,” and if they said yes? BOOM. Baptized.
Her Big Miracle Is Laughably Flimsy
To become a Saint, the Vatican has to find two things you did that qualify as miracles. Teresa’s first miracle was posthumously curing a woman’s cancer, by shooting a beam of light at it from a portrait on the wall. The woman’s doctors have clarified that she didn’t even have cancer in the first place, and her husband has said, “My wife was cured by the doctors and not by any miracle.”
She Kind of Objectified the People She Aimed to Help
One Mother Teresa biographer coined the phrase “compassion homework,” referring to her tendency to treat sick people as little projects that let her practice and display empathy.
She Accepted a $10,000 ‘Integrity Award’ from a Cult
After claiming that his “spiritual consciousness” beat even that of her main man Jesus, she accepted the award from notorious cult leader John-Roger Hinkins.
She Also Held onto Cash from a Proven Conman
She got over $1 million from convicted fraudster (and anti-porn activist) Charles Keating. When shit hit the fan and he was brought up on racketeering charges, she not only didn’t return that money to the investors he’d ruined, she asked the court to grant him clemency.
Her First Honorary Cathedral Displaced a Muslim High School
Kosovo’s Cathedral of Blessed Mother Teresa was the first cathedral built in her honor. The city of Pristina bulldozed a historic Muslim high school to clear room for it.
She Said Contraception Was the Work of the Devil
She sent a self-tape into a celebration of the Catholic church’s ban on contraception, saying, “In contraception, something is done to oneself to destroy the power to conceive a child.”
At Best, She Was Bad at Operating a Charitable Organization
Her Order of the Missionaries of Charity raked in hundreds of millions in donations in her lifetime, but volunteers often complained they didn’t have enough supplies and medicine to carry out their duties. Where’d the money go?
At Worst, She Was Great at Running a Money- and Image-Laundering Operation for the Vatican
Only 7 percent of donations were used for actual charity; the Vatican is sitting on the rest of it. No matter how nicely anyone asks, they won’t say what they’re doing with it.
She Ran ‘Clinics,’ Which Have Lower Standards for Hygiene Than ‘Hospitals’
A critic described them as “haphazard and cranky institutions” that would get sued into oblivion if they were run by the state.
She Wouldn’t Even Use Her Own Clinics
The famously old lady got her own medical stuff taken care of at high quality hospitals in the West.
She Had a Falling Out with Jesus
In her later decades, she suffered a crisis of faith. She once wrote a letter to a reverend friend saying that, while Jesus might work for him, “as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.”
She Was BFF with a Brutal Haitian Regime
“Baby Doc” Duvalier was a dictator with a lavish lifestyle and a penchant for torturing dissenters and generally promoting poverty and devastation among his countrymen. Mother Teresa couldn’t get enough of this regime. She graciously accepted an award from them, and appeared in propaganda material with Baby Doc’s wife, heaping her with praise: “I have never seen the poor people being so familiar with their heads of state as they were with her.”