When Mother Teresa, a Catholic nun who worked with the poor in the Indian city of Calcutta, be declared a saint on Sunday, critics continue defending that faith triumphed over reason and science.
The religious, Nobel Peace Prize, died in 1997 at 87 years old. In 1950, he founded the Congregation of the Missionaries of Charity, which currently has over 3,000 nuns worldwide.
raised hospices, soup kitchens, schools, shelters for lepers and homes for abandoned children and was called the Saint of the Gutters for his work in the poorest neighborhoods of the city.
But also had a good number of detractors.
The English writer Christopher Hitchens described it as a “religious fundamentalist, political activist, preachy the old and accomplice of the secular powers of this world “.
in his much discussed pamphlet on the life of Mother Teresa of 1995,” the position of the missionary “( the missionary position in English), Hitchens criticized the “cult of suffering” nun , who claims that painted his adopted hometown as “a hell hole” and was associated with dictators.
Hitchens also presented The Hell’s Angel ( Hell’s Angel ), a documentary tone skeptical about the religious.
Much later, in 2003, the London-based medical Aroup Chatterjee published a harsh criticism of the nun after making about 100 interviews with people related to his congregation.
He attacked what he called a lack of hygiene awful -Reuse hypodermic needles, for example- and chaotic facilities maintenance centers , among other things.
Hemley Gonzalez, who currently lives in Miami and worked as a volunteer for two months in 2008 in one of the homes for the poor of Mother Teresa in Calcutta, said he was “shocked to discover the horrible and careless way in which the organization operates and contradiction between that and how the general public perceives their work “.
Milagros questioned
“With a strong opposition against the planned maternity, against the modernization of equipment and against many other initiatives that seek solutions, Mother Teresa it was not a friend of the poor, but rather a promoter of poverty report “on the congregation to” unsuspecting donors “,” Gonzalez, who manages a Facebook page critical of the nun who seeks told me. ”
In recent years, Indian nationalists as Sanal Edamaruku questioned the miracles that led to the nun to sainthood .
To become a saint in the eyes of the Vatican is necessary to link a miracle prayers and petitions dedicated to the person concerned after death.
Such cases must be “verified” before being accepted as miracles. Often it comes to cures or recoveries from illnesses that seem to have no logical medical explanation.
Five years after the death of the nun, Pope John Paul II accepted a first miracle: the healing of Bengali woman Monica Besra of an abdominal tumor and concluded that it was the result of supernatural intervention.
This cleared the way for beatification in 2003.
Pope Francis recognized a second miracle in 2015: healing of a Brazilian man with brain tumors in 2008.
Between faith and testing
Edemaruku discredits the first case and wondered how a woman could be cured by a photo of nun placed on his stomach, when there was evidence to suggest he was being treated with medication.
“Most people no longer question the nun because his image is of someone who worked for the poor,” he says.
“If you question to Mother Teresa identifies you as opposed to the poor. I have nothing against her, but spread miracles is unscientific.”
And a clearly upset, Chatterjee He told me that “ called miracles are too flippant and puerile even to be refuted “.
The latest dispute came from a group of academics and social workers who asked Foreign Minister Indian, Sushma Swaraj, to reconsider his decision to visit the Vatican to attend the canonization ceremony.
“It is astonishing that the foreign minister of a country whose constitution encourages its citizens to have a scientific temperament approve a canonization based on ‘miracles’” noted the petition.
However, as the sociologist Shiv Visvanathan says, testing and faith are different things .
“There are still many open questions. Many of us have a knowledge of the history and philosophy of science. Christianity has a long history of battles against science. And the rationalists may also end up sometimes overstepping certain things to ask for proof at all times, “he says.
Clearly, the verdict on the Saint of the Gutters is not yet final .
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