Yahoo News Asks: 'Was Mother Teresa Actually Sort of a Jerk?'

March 7th, 2013 1:59 PM

Former Time.com writer Keith Wagstaff has just joined a different magazine, The Week, but he’s still sounding like the old employer. He has a new piece posted on Yahoo! News titled “Was Mother Teresa actually sort of a jerk?”

Catholic-bashing is a much more acceptable journalistic pastime than snarky revisionist histories of hallowed liberals like Thurgood Marshall (honored as a saint by the Episcopalians.) Wagstaff began, "A new study claims the beloved nun might not have been as helpful to the poor as she could have been."

Wagstaff ignored that this would like be going to the birthers for testimony on Obama's moral rectitude. The Canadian professors behind this attack are big fans of the late Christopher Hitchens -- an "erudite atheist," adds Wagstaff. 

In their article, Serge Larivée and Carole Senechal also cite “a number of problems not taken into account by the Vatican in Mother Teresa's beatification process,” such as "her rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and” – wait for it – “her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce."


Pause for air: the libertine left has never been overly dogmatic on these topics?!  Wagstaff summarized:

It's highly likely that one day, the Catholic Church will officially recognize Mother Teresa as a saint, a position she's held in the popular imagination for years. A new study in the religious studies journal Religieuses, however, says that the late Mother Teresa's reputation is mostly hype — a result of a church declining in popularity trying to boost its image.

Mother Teresa's biggest supposed sin? According to the Times of India, it was "her dubious way of caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it."

How did researchers reach this controversial conclusion? The team of Canadian researchers studied nearly 300 documents, and discovered reports of poor hygiene standards and a shortage of medicine, supplies, and care in Mother Teresa's 517 "homes for the dying" — although not for lack of cash. According to the report, her organization, the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, received hundreds of millions of dollars in donations. 

Larrivee and Senechal are such overly dogmatic atheists that they've also tried to study why children stop believing in Santa Claus, but don't stop believing in God.