User:Ridiculus mus/sandbox/Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa - Some allegations

Three criticisms are trailed prominently in the last para. of the lede:-

(1) misusing charitable money

(2) failing to provide medical care or painkillers, and

(3) maintaining positive relations with dictators

I take exception to all of them, but I confine my long presentation here to (1), which raises (or is likely to be read as raising) an implicit claim of fraud – an allegation that Hitchens did not scruple to make outright (without the slightest attempt to justify it) in an altogether tawdry 2003 piece cited lower down in the wiki-article. Allegation (2) can be shortly dealt with. There is no dispute that MoC provide rudimentary medical care. Unless it can be asserted that MoC are obliged to provide care at a higher standard than they do, the allegation of "failure" must be expunged. The most that can be asserted is that MoC do not, as a matter of course, provide medical or drug-based palliative care to those in their charge, but that they do, in each country where they operate, conform to applicable health regulations which (needless to say) are not uniform world-wide. Allegation (3), in so far as it means anything, is paltry; I would just note that the body of the wiki-article names only one dictator in this regard.

Allegation (1) – misuse of charitable donations (money is neither "charitable" nor "uncharitable").

In the lede

"Admired and respected by many, she has also been accused of . . misusing charitable money . ."

At the end of this sentence, two in-line sources are offered:-

(a) a news release relating to a 2013 research paper by three Canadian educationalists (Larivée, Sénéchal, and Chénard) "Les côtés ténébreux de Mère Teresa", Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, September 2013 vol. 42 no. 3, pp. 319-345; and

b) another Canadian piece, this time by Ted Byfield (in the now defunct Alberta Report, issue 24, 1997). Since the research paper was itself a comprehensive review of published materials on Mother Teresa, we can assume it took into account Byfield's piece – as, indeed, a subsequent publication (discussed below) tends to confirm.

The research paper itself is behind an academic paywall where one can at least read the abstract. The in-line reference, however, refers not to the paper but to a detailed news release, dated 1 March 2013, put online by the relevant department of the Université de Montréal. In the news release, this was reported under the tendentious cross-heading "Facts debunk the myth of Mother Teresa":-

In their article, Serge Larivée and his colleagues also cite a number of problems not take[n] into account by the Vatican in Mother Teresa's beatification process, such as '(i) her rather dubious way of caring for the sick, (ii) her questionable political contacts, (iii) her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and (iv) her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce'." [numbering added]

Leaving aside the rather ludicrous objection (iv) that the Vatican didn't take into account against Mother Teresa the fact that she adhered to the Church's teachings on morals, we can see (although each is expressed in a significantly different way from how it appears in the wiki-lede) the outline of the three wiki-allegations numbered above: (1)=(iii), (2)=(i), and (3)=(ii).

In the same news release, under the equally tendentious cross-heading "Questionable politics and shadowy accounting", we find this:-

Mother Teresa was generous with her prayers but rather miserly with her foundation's millions when it came to humanity's suffering. During numerous floods in India or following the explosion of a pesticide plant in Bhopal, she offered numerous prayers and medallions of the Virgin Mary but no direct or monetary aid. On the other hand, she had no qualms about accepting the Legion of Honour and a grant from the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. Millions of dollars were transferred to the MCO's various bank accounts, but most of the accounts were kept secret, Larivée says. 'Given the parsimonious management of Mother Theresa's works, one may ask where the millions of dollars for the poorest of the poor have gone?'.

So the objection here would seem not to be "misuse" of charitable donations at all, but an objection as to Mother Teresa's choice of charitable objects, coupled with an allegation that she personally failed publicly to account for the donations she received.

The former objection (that Mother Teresa did not spend the donations the way the complainants would have spent them) is absurdly self-referential and goes nowhere near substantiating a claim of "misuse" of charitable funds. As for the latter objection, unless it can be established (a) that Mother Teresa was in effective direct control of the finances of MoC and (b) that MoC are under an obligation to make their accounts public, it, too, is mis-conceived at best and can only stem from malice, ignorance, or folly. An additional objection is that nothing in the body of the paragraph justifies the rather different allegation made in the cross-heading of "shadowy accounting". Given the quote from one of the authors of the research paper, we can exclude the charitable hypothesis that the news release might have misrepresented the thrust of the conclusions reached by them in it.

In the body of the article

So much for the wiki-lede and the two sources offered there in support of the allegations. Turning to the body of the wiki-article, the only place where these allegations are developed and substantiated qua allegations (I am not entering into the question of the validity of what is alleged but only the nature of the allegations) is in the section Criticism.

So far as regards allegation (1), we find this:-

The German magazine Stern published a critical article on the first anniversary of Mother Teresa's death. This concerned allegations regarding financial matters and the spending of donations.

No in-line source reference is offered. As it stands, the allegation is wholly unparticularised and fails to identify even the area of alleged concern. To this extent, it is merely prejudicial. It is enlarged upon somewhat further down in the section where it finally seems - as with the Canadian research paper - to have no reference whatever to "misuse" of charitable donations except in the uninteresting sense that Mother Teresa did not spend the money in the ways that Hitchens et al. would have had her spend it:-

Hitchens and Stern have said Mother Teresa did not focus donated money on alleviating poverty or improving the conditions of her hospices, but on opening new convents and increasing missionary work

I note here that, so far as concerns their involvement with the sick and dying, MoC are not principally engaged in running "hospices" (although their first AIDS hospice was opened by Mother Teresa in New York in 1985), so the condition of their premises and the nature of the care offered in them should not be judged as if they were.

At this point an in-line source reference is made to a 2003 article by Hitchens (that's the one where he recklessly calls her "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud"), but none to Stern. In fact, the relevant Stern article does appear, but under "Further reading", where we find "Wüllenweber, Walter. 'Nehmen ist seliger denn geben. Mutter Teresa—wo sind ihre Millionen?' Stern (illustrated German weekly), 10 September 1998." The link to the English translation is broken.

What Hitchens says on allegation (1) in the source cited is precisely this much:-

Where did that money, and all the other donations, go?

Pausing here, the allegation as reported so far in wiki is not that the money was not spent on charitable purposes, but (a) that it was spent on charitable purposes other than the relief of poverty or medical care for the sick, and (b) that full audited accounts have never been published by MoC. As for (a), unless it can be established that the money was donated specifically for the relief of poverty (as opposed to having been given as a general accretion to the funds of MOC), the allegation is fundamentally mis-conceived, wholly off-target, and amounts to disinformation – the antithesis of wiki-principles. As to (b), if it is to be alleged that MoC are in breach of any statutory norms for publishing accounts (as distinct from lodging them with the appropriate body with oversight of charities in any given jurisdiction), then the fact should be asserted in terms.

The same irresponsible and befuddled complaints (a) and (b) have recently been repeated in a book published in 2013. In it, the author (one J.J. Dyken) commented (pp. 38f., in a chapter entitled "Why is Faith Dangerous?") that "the value of the millions of dollars spent on her missionary work [should not] be considered indisputable . . /. . Incredibly, the money was not always accounted for, and where it was, it was often used to open new convents instead of combating poverty . ." Incidentally, Byfield is cited on page 38 with reference to other criticisms of Mother Teresa. This suggests that his allegations with regard to any alleged "misuse of charitable donations" do not take the matter any further than any other cited source.

The closest I can get to what was reported in the Stern article is this, from a German blog commemorating the centenary of Mother Teresa's birth, 26 August, 2010:-

Aufgrund des großen Bekanntheitsgrades von Mutter Teresa, erhielt ihr Orden große Geld- und Sachspenden. Bei den Armen und Kranken kam davon aber nur sehr wenig an. Quellen in Großbritannien zeigen, dass z.B. 1991 den Einnahmen von umgerechnet etwa 2,6 Millionen Euro nur 180.000 Euro Ausgaben gegenüberstanden, d.h. nur etwa 7%. Das restliche Geld landete auf einem Konto bei der Vatikanbank in Rom, die für ihre wohltätige Unterstützung der italienischen Mafia bekannt ist. Jedenfalls ist nicht wirklich klar, was mit dem überwiegenden Teil der Spenden geschah. So veröffentlichte das Magazin Stern am 10.09.1998 eine vernichtende Kritik von Mutter Teresas Werk mit dem Titel: „Nehmen ist seliger denn geben, Mutter Teresa: Wo sind ihre Millionen?

It is the same lame objection which comes nowhere near substantiating allegations of "misuse of charitable donations". All that is objected against the MoC is that very little of certain donations was actually known to have been spent on the poor and sick. Wüllenweber, writing in 1998, had to go back to 1991 to find even one example to provide what is more cover than support for his case. The Stern novelty is the pitiful side-swipe at the Vatican Bank (where MoC has an account) which is said to be "known for its charitable support for the Italian Mafia".

Conclusions

Put shortly, then, the "criticisms" in the cited sources actually amount to this:-

Mother Teresa (for purposes of argument let us assume she was exclusively, directly and effectively in full and absolute control of the finances of MoC at all relevant times - a fact nowhere asserted)

(a) did not publish audited accounts detailing the destination of funds donated for charitable purposes, and

(b) did not spend all the money (or even the greater part of it) directly on the sick or directly on the relief of the poor, but on other charitable purposes.

For these criticisms to amount to valid complaints it must be shown that, as to (a) she was obliged to publish such accounts, and (b) was not entitled to use the donations for general charitable purposes or to treat them as an accretion to the general funds of MoC (itself, a valid charitable purpose). The mere fact that malice, ignorance, or folly have prompted some (even many) critics of Mother Teresa to propagate such "criticisms" is, I suppose, a fact that ought not to be suppressed, but it cannot be admitted in the wiki-article except on this precise basis - that her critics have not scrupled to level mis-conceived and reckless claims against her which they have singularly failed to substantiate. [Ridiculus mus (talk) 15:29, 25 January 2014 (UTC) moved from user page tab to sandbox] Ridiculus mus (talk) 10:14, 2 February 2014 (UTC)