According to Hitchens, the result of MT's views was basically torture in the hospices. Needles were re-used (even after their tips had blunted) because an increase in pain for patients might help to save their souls, or so the theory went. Painkillers were not used, because that would lessen the pain, and therefore lessen the chances of a person going to Heaven.
If I'm in a hospital, and I'm in serious pain, I'm goint to want painkillers. How would you feel if someone deliberately denied you or a family member painkillers while you/they were suffering, because of some religious conviction?Mother Teresa has been favoured with huge sums of money during the past 30 years, but patients' illnesses have been wrongly diagnosed by unqualified sisters and volunteers unable to distinguish between the curable and incurable . Mother Teresa prefers providence to planning, and the very strictest economy is always enforced - much to the detriment of the patient's interests. It is interesting to note that, despite the enormous sums involved ($50 million remains in a cheque account in the Bronx), needles are used over and over again, and are rinsed under the cold water tap. The nuns' answer to "why are you not boiling water and sterilizing your needles?" was simple: "There's no point. There's no time." Perhaps the patients take too long to die, and hastening death saves money. Cynical as that may be, Mother Teresa's global income is more than enough to equip several first class clinics like some of the finest in the West that she herself has checked into. To a person in the last agonies of cancer, and suffering unbearable pain, she said with a smile: "You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you." A sign on the wall of the morgue of Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying reads "I am going to Heaven today".
Mary Loudon, a volunteer in Calcutta, was shocked by what she saw there. "It looked a bit like the photos of Belsen", she said. "All patients had shaved heads, there were old stretcher beds, no chairs, and not much medical care or painkillers". In another home, despite the existence of huge sums of money: "The sisters are rarely allowed to spend money on the poor they are trying to help. Instead they are forced to plead poverty, thus manipulating generous, credulous people into giving more goods, services and cash." So great wealth has no good effect on the lives of patients and volunteers. In a damp house heating remains off throughout winter and several sisters consequently got TB. This was stated by a woman who left the Missionaries of Charity for the same reason she joined it, "a love of her fellow humans".
Mother Teresa has a San Francisco hostel named The Gift of Love; it is for homeless men with HIV. They are not allowed to watch TV or smoke or drink or invite friends, not even when they are dying, and so, of course, they are exceptionally depressed. One man said how afraid he was of dying without morphine. It is hard to find anyone with a good word for The Gift of Love.
Is he just innocently telling sick people not to despair, or is upholding pain and suffering as good things?
If suffering is so beautiful, will Catholic hospitals prescribe the full amount of painkillers to patients, or will they withhold a little, just to make the place more holy? I thought the Catholic Church did away with its celebration of human suffering when it put the Inquisition to an end. Or did Mel Gibson bring all this ugly stuff back?
What I can believe is that Mother Therese, forced by circumstances in India to use substandard medical equipment, would tell her patients that their experience of suffering drew them closer to Christ, to console them in their suffering and strengthen them in their faith. Have a vicious, hateful anti-Christian misunderstand rumors and spin in the worst possible light, and voila! Let's not forget that there were plenty of nationalist Hindus who would love to malign Catholic missionaries; although every Indian without exception that I've ever met in this country was remarkably peaceable, I have known people whose family members were slaughtered by nationalistic Hindu mobs in India.
It's also worth noting that even Hitchens calls such stories rumors. One would wonder why you would exerpt the rantings of a hate-crazed, left-wing atheist and post them to a religion forum, accepting them as if they were fact with greater certainty than the author himself.
He is speaking to 'how' we suffer albeit physical or emotional. Whether we offer up those trying moments with humility drawing ourselves closer to God. It by no means doesn't imply you don't receive normal medical help when needed. And the Catholic hospitals do not withhold medications.
Mel Gibson's the Passion Of The Christ portrayed the beauty in suffereing with Christ nailed to the cross and dying for us. That is love.
I'm just concerned about the implications that a pro-pain philosophy might have.
Old thread, but I just thought I'd let you know Christopher Hitchens is an anti-Christian scumbag by all accounts. You may want to find better references.
Old thread, but I just thought I'd let you know Christopher Hitchens is an anti-Christian scumbag by all accounts. You may want to find better references.