This past weekend witnessed a trifecta of momentous anniversaries. Katrina happened 5 years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream Speech" on the Washington Mall 47 years ago, and Mother Teresa was born a century ago.
Monday: Katrina; Tuesday: "I Have a Dream;" Today: Mother Teresa
After spending a great deal of time on and devoting a good deal of space to the two previous subjects in this series on recent anniversaries, 2005's devastating Hurricane Katrina and the world-changing 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I had looked forward to writing an innocuous, little piece on one of the two saints I have ever known.
Pope John Paul II was one, Mother Teresa was the other.
Not that I personally met with either the pope or the Catholic nun Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, later to be known as Mother Teresa, but I felt that a few words commemorating the anniversary of her birth in Shkoder, Albania on August 26th, 1910 were in order.
Agnes' middle name, Gonxha, meaning Rosebud, may be somewhat difficult to pronounce in English but this woman who committed herself at age 12 to a life of religious, missionary work for the Catholic Church led a life of service that wasn't difficult to evaluate.
I had an old Irish Uncle Mike whom my son labelled a saint and he might indeed have been one. With Agnes Gonxha Boxahiu, there was far less doubt and following her death in 1997 at age 87 she was beatified, made blessed, on her path to sainthood by Pope John Paul II.
There is no need here to detail Mother Teresa's life or contributions to humanity which were recognized even by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee which awarded her its Peace Prize in 1979.
What is almost as remarkable as her selfless, almost half-century devotion to the poorest of the poor, the sickest of the sick in India is the controversy even such a life could generate among people who have contended that Mother Teresa was a dishonest fraud and an evil, immoral individual.
It has to make one wonder whether the liberals of the world could and would find fault with Jesus Christ Himself, maybe for His audacious anger in chasing the Jewish moneylenders from the temple or for being so supercilious as to have Mary Magdalen wash His feet before His passion and crucifixion.
There's no concrete evidence to refute it, but it is reasonably certain that the diminutive Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu ever chased anyone from anywhere, unless and, as for washing feet and the rest of bodies, it's also pretty certain that it was she who did the washing.
Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity and spent most of her adult life tending to the needy in the Black Hole of Calcutta, now Kolkata, but came under criticism during her life and after her death primarily from a small clique of atheists, agnostics, and "progressives" who must have known better than the notoriously atheistic, agnostic, and "progressive" Nobel Prize Committee.
The charges against her and her order were dredged up by such people as Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and trotskyite Tarik Ali and groups such as the Council of Secular Humanism.
Hitchens, Ali, and others of their stripe have accused Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of everything from misusing contributions to being cultists to being virtual sadists far more concerned with helping the poor learn to live with and love their poverty and suffering than with alleviating their poverty and suffering.
The vast predominance of charges against Mother Teresa are totally unsubstantiated, others seem to have arisen due to a gross misunderstanding of her mission and disagreement with Catholic doctrine, and others based on a blatant, venomous anti-Catholic bias.
Yes, critics, Mother Teresa finds abortion abhorrent and yes, there are positive, spiritual benefits associated with suffering, as Pope John Paul II showed in the last weeks and days of his life.
And, no, one disgruntled nun who left the Missionaries because she couldn't tolerate adherence to strict obedience and then reviled them does not constitute grounds for a belief they are not holy, sincere, and dedicated.
That was the conclusion drawn by that Council on Secular Humanism: http://tiny.cc/yw2wv
None of Mother Teresa's sacrifices and years of good works matter to her critics.
Worth mentioning for its humor value is an article titled "Why Mother Teresa Was Evil" written by an evidently extremely disturbed woman, Sarah Fitz Claridge who may be dangerous to herself and to those around her.
Fitz Claridge charges the evil saint-to-be with using slave labor and says, "Mother Teresa was a deeply unpleasant, immoral human being and I can think of no ways in which she added anything to the world, except perhaps as an example of what not to do, how not to live:" http://tiny.cc/yw2wv
You just can't keep liberal dogs at bay when it comes to attacking anyone with a sense of religious fervor. There are few rocks so low under which those of a progressive stripe can't crawl and religion gives them the hives.
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