A new study by Canadian academics says Mother Teresa was a product of hype who housed the poor and sick in shoddy conditions, despite her access to a fortune.

The Times of India, reporting on the controversial essay, wrote that the authors asserted Mother Teresa saw beauty in the downtrodden's suffering and was far more willing to pray for them than provide practical medical care. Meanwhile, researchers say, the Vatican engaged in a PR ploy as it threw aside concerns about her suspicious financial dealings and contacts to forgo the five-year waiting period to beatify her.

One of the researchers, Serge Larivee of the University of Montreal's department of psychoeducation, told the school's website, “Given the parsimonious management of Mother Teresa's works, one may ask where the millions of dollars for the poorest of the poor have gone?”

The research paper claims that the celebrated nun had 517 missions in 100 countries at the time of her death, but that the majority of patients were not cared for properly and many were left to die, according to the university website. In addition, the Vatican is said to have ignored a doctor's assertions when it concluded that a Mother Teresa miracle healed a woman who had tuberculosis and an ovarian cyst.

Researchers Carole Senechal of the University of Ottawa and Larivee and Genevieve Chenard from the University of Montreal came to their conclusions by examining 96 percent of the originally researched, published works about Teresa, according to the U of M website. Their findings are to be published in French-language journal Studies in Religion/Sciences.

Read the rest here.


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Well, gee whiz, what took them so long? Christopher Hitchens was debunking the supposed saint of Calcutta back in 1995 with his book, The Missionary Position. Why should it take 18 years for the rest of the world to wake up to the fact that Ma. Teresa was a fraud who seemed to worship suffering, particularly that of her charges, rather than take any meaningful action to ameliorate that suffering?

I doubt this will have any impact on the efforts of the RC church to fast-track the process of promoting Ma. Teresa to sainthood, but perhaps it will wake up some others to the propaganda surrounding her and her cult.