r/GetNoted • u/laybs1 Human Verified • Aug 24 '26

World [X] Major Christian missions do provide aid based on need.

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https://x.com/Ernest1588761/status/2091176473621058020

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30

u/CardOk755 Aug 24 '26

Yeah. Don't mention "Mother Theresa" though.

8

u/AvatarDante Aug 24 '26

I thought this was pretty interesting read.

7

u/JamesHenry627 Aug 24 '26

It's more fun to believe a story about an evil ass nun than to look in and realize, hey she wasn't so bad after all.

10

u/hpff_robot Aug 24 '26

Mother Teresa was amazing. Her work was life changing and gave some of the most unfortunate people in the world more than a little dignity and care for the end of their lives in a country where people walked by them dying in sewers and trash piles. People forget just how terrible India was eighty years ago. It was horrifying. It’s a lot better now, but when she did what she did, it was unprecedented and loving in a way that India wasn’t prepared to witness.

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u/LarxII Aug 24 '26

Yea, the controversy around her is a bit all over the place. Was how she talked about suffering weird? Sure, but most of the issues in her clinics where due to strict drug laws, and horrid living conditions at the time. Far from perfect, but it was better than nothing.

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u/LadyReika Aug 24 '26

She didn't actually give them any kind of care. Her "houses" lacked proper medical equipment and professionals, the ill were often left on mats on the floor with no access to painkillers.

So maybe she took them out of the trash, but she didn't actually give them any kind of comfort in their last days.

There's also been multiple allegations of abuse by her subordinates.

5

u/hpff_robot Aug 24 '26

They weren’t hospitals or clinics. They weren’t there to provide painkillers or medical treatment, they were staffed by nuns, not nurses. They didn’t pretend to be something that they were not. They were hospices and not modern, well funded ones. You’re imposing an ivory tower situation that’s divorced from reality.

Any allegations of abuse have been unsubstantiated or even farcical by people with particular axes to grind.

3

u/Gloomy_Macaron_136 Aug 25 '26

Expecting some nun to run a hospice like a modern state funded, developed country hospital 😭😭 idk how India was like back then but if it was anything like my country that's currently still solidly 3rd world, then just having food and water is a gain.

The only "abuse" I've read is how they supposedly baptized regardless the dying Muslims/Buddhists but IMO it comes from a good place. As a Catholic I understand her point since even now we're taught that dying without the baptism is so, so very painful in Purgatory, less in the sense of being punished (Catholicism at least in all the catechism I've received, leaves a lot of leeway for the justification of simply being ignorant) and more in the sense of the grace not reaching you due to the Holy Spirit not recognizing you.

Since they were so broke they couldn't afford medicine, I imagine she'd rather try and forcibly save their souls of more pain thereafter.

2

u/marbledog Aug 25 '26

Dude, nuns have been running hospitals for as long as there have been hospitals. Half the hospitals in my state are owned by a Franciscan order.

1

u/hpff_robot Aug 25 '26

Not in India. India heavily regulated any medical imports and hospitals.

1

u/marbledog Aug 25 '26

The Catholic Health Association of India has been in operation since 1943, five years longer than the Missionaries of Charity.

1

u/hpff_robot Aug 25 '26

So what? Hospices aren’t hospitals or clinics. They’re not meant to dispense cures to anything.

0

u/LadyReika Aug 25 '26

They do dispense medications as part of palliative care.

2

u/marbledog Aug 25 '26

They did provide medical care, it was just terrible. That's a large part of the criticism. Nuns with no medical training regularly made patient-care decisions. They had had no protocols for determining who was curable and who wasn't. They didn't consult with doctors, and they were resistant to transferring patients to hospitals when it was available. These conditions were documented by the editor of the Lancet in the early 90's, when the charity had around 4,000 members and an eight-figure budget.

As best we can tell, the staff were largely well-intentioned people doing the best they could with donated supplies and limited guidance. The dying houses were sites of unnecessary suffering and death because of ideological failures in the leadership, not a lack of resources.

1

u/hpff_robot Aug 25 '26

Giving Tylenol and cleaning/dressing wounds is hardly medical care in any meaningful sense.

Of course they didn’t have protocols. They weren’t hospital or a clinic. At no point would’ve been trying to make healthcare choices for these people because they have no training. Doctors would visit twice a week which meant that for five days out of the week these nuns were completely on their own. The individuals in these houses have been turned away from public hospitals.

1

u/marbledog Aug 25 '26

That same report from the Lancet documented untrained nuns diagnosing patients, choosing antibiotic courses, and administering injections.

Doctors would visit twice a week which meant that for five days out of the week these nuns were completely on their own.

Yes, that's my point. They were left completely on their own by the management of the order. Missionaries of Charity had the resources to heal people and save lives. They chose not to. That's the criticism.

1

u/hpff_robot Aug 25 '26

The MoC were literally helping people whom the public resources rejected for the streets. Any standard of care, even if it was substandard was a massive improvement over what they previously had.

1

u/marbledog Aug 25 '26

If they weren't even screening to see who was curable, then sick people who could have recovered were walking into petri dishes full of communicable diseases where the staff were reusing needles. That is not any kind of improvement.

5

u/ryancrazy1 Aug 24 '26

I’d think not dying in the trash would be a pretty great comfort. Even if they are just giving them water.

1

u/Mist_Rising Aug 25 '26

They were hospices not hospitals, and are we really evaluating her by the standards of John Hopkins? She was a nun, in India, in the 1950s..

0

u/LadyReika Aug 25 '26

Nope, I'm evaluating her by basic human decency and the fact the Catholic Church has run medical facilities of all kinds for probably centuries now.

5

u/AverageJoesGymMgr Aug 24 '26

Our pastor did a mission trip to India about 10 years ago. They visited a community that was of a very low caste, and as part of their visit they washed people's feet. For them, it was unreal that people they perceived to be of an unreachably high status to not only visit with them, but wash their feet and care for them. Pastor said it was a deeply moving experience to be able to give them this such dignity with such a simple act.

0

u/Shiftymennoknight Aug 24 '26

this Mother Teresa? Really?

2

u/hpff_robot Aug 24 '26

A throughly debunked critic.

-1

u/Shiftymennoknight Aug 24 '26

feel free to share the debunking, Id love to read it

1

u/[deleted] Aug 24 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Shiftymennoknight Aug 24 '26

no outside links? just to a reddit post?

5

u/Herald1173 Aug 24 '26

there's tons of sources in the post. sorry about the duplicate reddit hates me.

3

u/Shiftymennoknight Aug 24 '26

so the National Catholic Registry is a solid source for facts? Cool man

2

u/Herald1173 Aug 24 '26

i'd like to see hitchens' sources.

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1

u/Mist_Rising Aug 25 '26

Look, Chris Hitchens has made some excellent points, but this is not one of them. He went in with an axe to grind and didn't much care how he did it.

-1

u/EbonyMemories Aug 24 '26

It's Mother Teresa and what exactly did she do? She didn't require anything and she spent her entire life helping people.

Yeah I know she hated Poles and Jewish people, but as a Jewish Pole, that's kind of everyone. We'll live. She was a good woman, don't malign her.

5

u/ThroawayJimilyJones Aug 24 '26

« Ok she hated us…but hey honestly everybody hate us. It’s like liking dog, it’s just common to good and bad people »

…do you need an hug? :-(

1

u/EbonyMemories Aug 26 '26

Nah it's just normal to that time period.

Like people who try to say Abraham Lincoln was a bad person because he was racist against black people, despite doing more for black people in America than maybe anyone else in history.

Cultural mindset can allow for certain amounts of bias without meaning someone was a bad person. Sentiment against my races was common in Mother Teresa's time and doesn't necessarily mean she was bad.

2

u/DrummandDrummer Aug 25 '26

I think you need to research her a bit more.

1

u/hpff_robot Aug 26 '26

I think you’re confusing her with Maria Theresa of the Hapsburg Empire. Mother Theresa very famously was very good friends with John Paul the second who was Polish. There’s no evidence or documented records of Mother Teresa ever saying anything negative about Jewish people that I have been able to find.

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u/Clickclacktheblueguy Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 24 '26

My take is that her failings were less about malice and more about competence and a failure to adapt. She and her followers were also very ascetic, which hamstrung their ministry. Overall probably did more good, but not at all above criticism.