Of Crabby Saints and Mother Teresa

Hundreds of thousands of people are streaming into Rome for this weekend's celebration of the beatification of Mother Teresa. Beatification is the gateway to sainthood in the complicated system the Catholics invented to identify and elevate folks to sainthood.

I might get struck dead by the Big Editor in the Sky for putting this opinion here, but I've never been a big fan of Mother Teresa. She was too crabby for my taste. I also think she loved humankind but didn't like individuals much.

Diana Dawson, a wonderful journalist who worked here at The Spokesman-Review in the '80s and '90s, planned to travel to Calcutta once with some good local church people. She had to get Mother Teresa's permission and so she called her on the phone. Mother Teresa basically chewed Diana out. Very crabby.

The British writer Christopher Hitchins exposed Mother Teresa's dark side in the book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.

His criticisms include the fact that MT received millions in donations and yet spent little of it upgrading the clinics for the poor. Hitchens also believes MT was co-opted by the religious right and also given a free ride by the mainstream media who failed to report some of her less than saintly attributes.

To be fair, most saints had complex personalities and dark sides, so Mother Teresa is not alone. The best book of saints I've read is All Saints : Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time by Robert Ellsberg who includes saints from all faith traditions, and not just the official Catholic kind. He writes brief bios of the women and men throughout history whose lives provide blueprints on how to change communities and the world.