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Mother Teresa to be declared a Saint September 4

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Trojita

Rapid Response Threadmaker
http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/15/europe/pope-mother-teresa-becomes-saint-september-4/index.html

Rome (CNN)Mother Teresa, a nun who dedicated her life to helping the poor in India, will be canonized as a saint September 4, Pope Francis announced Tuesday.

The date falls on the eve of the anniversary of her death, which occurred on September 5, 1997.

In December, Pope Francis announced that Mother Teresa would be declared a saint after recognizing a second miracle attributed to her: the healing of a Brazilian man with multiple brain tumors after loved ones prayed to her, the Italian Catholic bishops' association's official newspaper Avvenire reported. That miracle occurred after her death.

The nun was beatified in October 2003 by now deceased Pope John Paul II. He approved a first posthumous miracle.

A 30-year-old woman in Kolkata said she was cured of a stomach tumor after praying to Mother Teresa. A Vatican committee said it could find no scientific explanation for her healing and declared it a miracle.

Mother Teresa was born in 1910 in Albania and baptized Gonxha Agnes, the Vatican said in her biography.

Remembering Mother Teresa
9 photos: Remembering Mother Teresa
At age 18, she joined an Irish convent, where she received the name Sister Mary Teresa. Months later, she left for India, landing in Kolkata, the city then known as Calcutta, in January 1929. She taught at St. Mary's School for girls.

There, she took her Final Profession of Vows and became Mother Teresa. Nearly 20 years later, during a train ride in India, she felt a calling from Jesus to care for the poor, her Vatican biography said. She established Missionaries of Charity to serve the poorest of all.

In 1948, she donned her iconic white sari with blue trim for the first time and walked out of her convent to start her life caring for the poor. She washed the wounded, cared for the sick and dying, and some of her former students joined her over time. She spread her work throughout India.

Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

Pope John Paul II waived the requirement of waiting five years after a person's death to pursue the path to sainthood and opened Mother Teresa's Cause of Canonization less than two years after her death.
 

Trojita

Rapid Response Threadmaker
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/krithika-varagur/mother-teresa-was-no-saint_b_9470988.html

On September 4 of this year, Mother Teresa will become Saint Teresa. This is unsurprising; she was beatified in 2003, which is sort of a one-way road to canonization. But it's the last thing we need. She was no saint.

To canonize Mother Teresa would be to seal the lid on her problematic legacy, which includes forced conversion, questionable relations with dictators, gross mismanagement, and actually, pretty bad medical care. Worst of all, she was the quintessential white person expending her charity on the third world -- the entire reason for her public image, and the source of immeasurable scarring to the postcolonial psyche of India and its diaspora.

A 2013 study from the University of Ottawa dispelled the "myth of altruism and generosity" surrounding Mother Teresa, concluding that her hallowed image did not stand up to the facts, and was basically the result of a forceful media campaign from an ailing Catholic Church.

Although she had 517 missions in 100 countries at the time of her death, the study found that hardly anyone who came seeking medical care found it there. Doctors observed unhygienic, "even unfit," conditions, inadequate food, and no painkillers -- not for lack of funding, in which Mother Theresa's world-famous order was swimming, but what the study authors call her "particular conception of suffering and death."
 

adj_noun

Member
A 30-year-old woman in Kolkata said she was cured of a stomach tumor after praying to Mother Teresa. A Vatican committee said it could find no scientific explanation for her healing and declared it a miracle.

Well, I'm convinced.
 

fantomena

Member
Oh religion, you so funny.

A 30-year-old woman in Kolkata said she was cured of a stomach tumor after praying to Mother Teresa. A Vatican committee said it could find no scientific explanation for her healing and declared it a miracle.

Checkmate science.
 
This scientific explanation thing sounds like the least reliable thing ever. I mean, is it even retroactive? Or saint today is saint forever even if sometime in the future there is a "scientific" explanation (whatever that is) explaining some previously not understood phenomena?
 
That was after Mother Teresa was dead too. It wasn't like she put her hands over her and healed her.

Well, the way sainthood works in Catholicism is the saint has to do one miracle while they were alive and one while they were dead (the latter is to confirm that they're in heaven or whatever). So, pretty standard procedure.
 
Man that miracle barrier seems pretty low and they could only find two (or were there more they just didn't bother publicizing them)? I feel statistically there should be way more people who prayed to her and were cured without any known reason at some point in time.
 

BocoDragon

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
A Nietzschean example of the religious inversion of real values.

She didn't actually save people. She let them rot on the floor of her hospice.

But she "saved" them by teaching religious doctrines to them thereby "sending them to heaven".
 

Chariot

Member
She tortured poor people with sub par treatment, because she believed that suffering was the path to god. She was a career saint. Her declared mission wasn't to make people better to live on their own, she was a shepherd that tried to push as many the lambs into the barn as she could. It's a crime that she is remembered so positively in the minds of the public coincidence. Mother Teresa is the saint of the slowly decaying.
 
250px-Joseph_of_Aramathea.png


Can't wait for the Saint Trading Card. I still have my signed Joseph of Aramathea.
 

Breads

Banned
History's greatest monster.

Not literally. But few people can claim responsibility for so much harm and fraud.
 

Meicyn

Gold Member
Christopher Hitchens' documentary "Hell's Angel" covers everything you need to know about the woman. It's on Youtube too.
 

Aureon

Please do not let me serve on a jury. I am actually a crazy person.
Well, I'm convinced.

Gotta say, and i'm not in any way or shape claiming it's a miracle, that generally the vatican science department is generally very good.
They probably investigated, found no reason she'd survive, and classified the spontaneous remission, which is a very rare but known event, as miracle.

It's not that the healing broke physics: It was a possible, but extremely improbable event. And so, they're claiming it as theirs.

The catholic god doesn't break science - he guides it.

I'm an atheist with no sympathy for the catholic church, but facts are facts
 
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