Was Mother Teresa BAD or a SAINT? (Answering Atheist Critics)

In this video, we're going to be talking about Mother Teresa and the lies, the grievous slander, and the erroneous claims made against her. As most people in this world know, Mother Teresa has spent her life serving the sick, the poor, the dying, the destitute, and those who have nobody to love them, no one to help them, and yet she spent the greater part of her life serving them day and night, night and day, when no one else would. And yet, despite the fact that everybody she came in contact with, she changed their life, despite the fact that she was a world changer, and that everyone from around the world loved this woman, and despite the fact that she was voted woman of the century, person of the century, not of the year, of the century, yet she has some critics. All atheists, led by Christopher Hitchens, who we all know is a super, angry, hostile, vehemently aggressive atheist who really hates Mother Teresa, disdains her, calls her a fake and a fraud, and he is the one leading the charges to criminalize her rather than canonize her. But anyone who has seen his documentary, Hell's Angel, or heard his other arguments and the other arguments of the atheists who think like him, they can't help but see, and they don't even try to hide it. They can't help but see their bias, their dripping sarcasm and disdain for her. Not only do these people don't like her, they hate religion. I mean, Christopher Hitchens is known for being a religion hater. He's known for thinking that Mother Teresa was an atheist. That's what he thought. He thought Mother Teresa was an atheist. She's a fake, a fraud, a phony. So in this video, we are going to be debunking their erroneous claims and slander against her. Now, most people know that Mother Teresa is a saint, and this isn't even an argument, but there are people and an increasing number of people who are being influenced by Christopher Hitchens and his atheist buddies who really haven't done the research and perhaps don't care to do real research on this. So in this video, we're going to be vindicating her good name. Hello, everyone. My name is Brian Mercier, president of Catholic Truth. If you haven't been here before, thank you for joining us. Please check out our show description notes below. You can follow us on social media, you can support our ministry, and you can check out our new website, catholictruth.org, if you would like a Catholic speaker, merchandise, or anything else. So Christopher Hitchens and a few atheists, three from Canada, have been leading the charge of attack against Mother Teresa. They're the ones bringing up a lot of these arguments and a lot of these critiques against her and her supposed lifestyle. So we're going to be addressing these now. We should say at the outset that besides Christopher Hitchens claiming to visit an orphanage, not one of these atheists who are attacking her, not one of these atheists who are making these claims, who seem to have this secret knowledge of how she works, not one of them went to visit her homes for the poor or the dying or the lepers. In other words, they really haven't gone to do the research. They haven't gone to see what it's about. They've sent other people to do research, and they've just done it from afar. So is that real research if you're not going to look into it yourself? Is that not dubious? Are we going to believe this if you're not willing to go do the credible work and you're going to go send some other people and maybe just take their word for it? For me, if I was going to study something, I would check out both sides. With that being said, there are atheists and there are people who do not like the Catholic Church and do not necessarily agree morally with Mother Teresa, but they have gone to see her work. They have gone to see that she's not a hell's angel, but that she is a holy angel from heaven helping the poor, the destitute, and the dying and doing what few, if any, people would ever do. One of these people was Malcolm Muggeridge, and he was a British man who visited Mother Teresa. He was an agnostic, didn't even necessarily believe in God, but he was an open-minded, unbiased source and a journalist who went to see what she did, and he came out praising her work and praising her efforts. Naturally, Christopher Hitchens calls him a fraud, but doesn't give any evidence as to why. He just thinks he's a fraud because he disagrees with what Mr. Hitchens said, because unlike Mr. Hitchens, he actually went to see her work, and he was the one who kind of made her popular and allowed the world to see her and all the great work that she's doing, when in reality, if he did not do that, we might not have known all the work that she's done today. One of the people who was working with Hitchens, Arup Chatterjee, actually changed his mind and said that Hitchens had gone too far in his documentary. He critiqued him on a number of letters and a number of things that he said. He said it was a biased and slanderous, sensational approach to Mother Teresa, which, if anybody watches it, absolutely. I mean, you can tell by looking at Christopher Hitchens, you can just feel his animosity toward her. It's completely and totally biased, but he actually disassociated himself from the film and from Hitchens himself. Christopher Hitchens doesn't interview a single person ever, neither do the other atheists in Canada, who were given treatment by Mother Teresa. He never got their opinions. He never asked what they thought of Mother Teresa. He never asked what they thought of her help. He didn't get any of the firsthand opinions of the people who were being helped, and one who's making a documentary would wonder why he didn't ask the people there who were getting the help and what they thought of her. But as we said, thankfully, there were really good atheists who have gone there and who have interviewed and talked to the people who have actually volunteered there, and they give firsthand accounts of being with Mother Teresa and what it was really like, despite the fact that they don't agree. Listen to what a few of them say. One of these ladies is Celeste Owen, and she was an ex-Catholic who does not agree with the Catholic Church, but she went to visit herself, and this is what she says, quote, "...most of the people the sisters care for are physically and mentally handicapped or are very sick and very old. They live in places where it's hard enough to survive when you are young and healthy, and I have seen the sisters do everything they can to make these people's lives better, and I have seen their hearts ripped apart when a little girl died one morning. Her fundamental belief is that everyone, absolutely everyone in the world deserves love and care. She cherished every single life on this planet more than anyone else ever did, and that's why she created the missionaries of charity to help and welcome the poorest of the poor, those whose life had been judged unworthy to live and who had been rejected by everyone and everything." Unquote. Wow, this is somebody who doesn't necessarily believe in Mother Teresa's ideals or morality, doesn't used to be part of the Catholic Church, but wow, what praise for someone who actually saw her work, unlike Kitchens. This is really remarkable, and many people have these quotes. Listen to another one. Prabir Ghosh is another man who actually is a radical communist atheist. He definitely does not agree with Mother Teresa, and yet he praised her up and down for her work because he went there to visit her, he saw what she did, and he praised her despite disagreeing with her. Quote, missionaries of charity certainly brought relief for many people, not in medical terms, but with love and affection. Mother Teresa's sisters attempted to cure the ails of the ill and the dying with the balm of love, since many had only rudimentary training in the art of medicine. He then goes on to compare her to Gandhi. In fact, Indira Gandhi was one of her great admirers, so this is saying something. She has all these great admirers, big admirers from around the world, even people who disagreed with her saw the reality, the beauty, the authenticity of her work. I had a priest go there about 20 years ago, and him and I had a discussion, and he was saying that when he went to Calcutta, he just saw people sick and dying everywhere, laying, dying in the middle of the streets, and it was such a common thing that people would just walk over the dead or walk around those who were dying because they were just used to it. It was something that was part of life. These people were not cared for. These people were not loved. They were literally just treated as unhuman in a sense. They were just left to die, and Mother Teresa spent her life loving the unlovable, helping the unhelpable, and helping those that nobody else would help. Even news reporters used to get bored when she would spend an hour holding a cup in front of dripping faucet so she could get enough water for someone, or it could be summed up by one news reporter who came up to her, and she was digging maggots with her hands out of somebody's arm. These are the type of people that she had to work with and the things she had to do. She was literally digging maggots out of people's arms with her own fingers, and the reporter was so disgusted, and he turned to her and said, Lady, you could not pay me a million dollars to do that. She looked at him right in the eyes, and she said, You could never pay me a million dollars to do this either. She did it for something much greater, the love of Jesus Christ, the dignity of each and every human person who she loved with an intense compassion and love, more than most people have ever done in their lifetime. Everyone who has met Mother Teresa has just been changed by her. They've just been astounded by her. Even the hardest criminals, and even people on the other side, have just been changed by her radiant love, her purity and holiness, and so we wonder why a few embittered atheists who hate religion to begin with and don't hide their bias, we wonder why we should listen to them. Why should we listen to people who have an axe to grind, who didn't go there and interview anyone themselves, who didn't do any real actual research? It's interesting, but so we are not remiss. Let's look at some of their claims, some of the claims in the videos, or some claims that atheists from Canada or others have written against Mother Teresa. Henry Gonzalez is a rabid atheist who fiercely attacks Mother Teresa, and what is his biggest claim? Like so many of these atheists who critique her, his biggest claim is that she did not fight poverty with the modern means that we have available to us today. In other words, contraception and abortion. He detested the In fact, he accused her of being outdated, superstitious, and part of a cult. Now that's just showing your bigotry and your bias, rather than sticking with the facts and assessing the quality of her care and the people she's helping. In fact, he thought that he could do the same work that she did, and he set up a rival charity organization to help poor people in India. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, it didn't last too long, and in fact, he ended up changing the mission and the scope of this organization very quickly. Almost immediately, he started to defend prostitutes and lesbians, bisexuals, homosexuals, and so on. So clearly, this was his belief, his moral belief, in which he disagreed with her belief, but this was why he didn't like her, and he ended up doing nothing to help the poor, but only to help prostitutes and people like that. Unlike his organization, which does nothing really for poor people today, she is still helping millions of poor people in the most destitute situations and in the poorest countries around the world. Her and her sisters of charity, the missionaries, the nuns, they're all helping, working tirelessly around the world to help these people, and they live like the people that they help. I mean, they take out the carpets and air conditioners in buildings. They don't have the modern means, but we'll talk about that later. In other words, they don't just talk the talk, they also walk the walk. One of the biggest critiques from Christopher Hitchens in his documentary, and from the atheists, is that Mother Teresa, instead of just, you know, kind of walking the walk, as we just said, instead of only serving the poor, a lot of times she traveled, and she was hardly in India. In fact, she traveled around as kind of an extremist sidekick of the Pope, kind of like the Pope wanted somebody who could make Catholicism look good, so he just used Mother Teresa. And he starts concocting all of these conspiracy theories of what Mother Teresa really was, rather than helping the poor, even though she started the missionaries of charity and spends waking moments around the world helping people, and her nuns are all helping people. Oh, none of that's any good. She's a fake, because she hung out with notorious and evil people. She even accepted money from notorious and evil people, and for Christopher Hitchens, that's something that's unforgivable. She should not be hanging out with famous people, apparently. She should be helping the poor 24-7. She shouldn't be having radio interviews, or even being up there with Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan, and having them speak her praises. No, she shouldn't be consorting with the high and lofty. She shouldn't be accepting money from those who are rich. That's hypocritical. I mean, these are the claims that they're making. But seriously, anyone who runs a non-profit, we all need money. Non-profits, and especially the work that she does, it doesn't run by itself. You need the money. If you don't have the money, you can't do the work. And so, for him to critique her that she was accepting money from lofty, and high, and noble, and rich, and famous, and even some interesting people, it's not a very good argument. Isn't it a good thing that people are so inspired by the work, and the love of Mother Teresa, and what she's doing that no one else is doing, that they want to get involved themselves? That they want to help her in that work? I mean, isn't it inspiring when you see an organization that you like, and you just want to help them forward their mission? That's all these people are doing, and Christopher Hitchens has a problem with that. No bias there. One of the people he had a problem with her accepting money from was Robert Maxwell, who was a British publisher, and he embezzled money, millions of dollars, from his own employees' funds. Now, of course, that's despicable, and that's terrible, and he ended up getting prosecuted for it. But what Mr. Hitchens doesn't tell you, or doesn't know himself, because he doesn't do proper research, is that Mr. Maxwell donated large amounts of money to the missionaries of charity and to Mother Teresa before he became a criminal, before he did these bad things. Back when he was a good guy, he donated to her, but somewhere along the line, he ended up stealing millions of dollars from the pensions. But Mother Teresa did it beforehand, so there's not a problem here. Likewise, he has a problem with Charles Keating, who gave a quarter of a million dollars to her organization, and she gave him a crucifix in return. He did not like this. Hitchens talks about his scandal with the United States' savings and loans, and he ended up being convicted and going to prison. But again, what Mr. Hitchens doesn't tell you, or what he fails to know himself, because he didn't do proper research, is that Mr. Keating gave this money, and Mother Teresa accepted this money, before he went on to commit scandal and crime. So, when he was good, and when he was walking straight, she accepted it from him, not after. Mr. Hitchens makes it seem like she accepted it after, after he went to jail, but of course, this was not the case. Almost every claim he makes is the same, unsubstantiated, unfounded, and not well-researched. Even if they had donated after, let's say they did some bad things, and they committed some crimes, and she accepted their money, why shouldn't she? She's using the money for good. She's using the money to help people. Should she just turn it away? And that countless innocent people suffer, which Christopher Hitchens and the atheists in Canada accuse her of doing anyways, of not doing enough, of not giving them enough medical attention, of their quality, of her quality of care wasn't good enough, and yet they want her to refuse millions of dollars, so that she can't help more people? That wouldn't even make sense, even if it was true. The Canadian atheists make an argument that her bank accounts are kept secret. Whoa, that's deep. I didn't consider that before. Let me ask you a question. Is your bank account secret? Seriously, most people's bank accounts are secret. How is this even an argument? Why are they attacking the leaves on a tree? They're just ripping leaves off and think that they're arguments. Most everyone's bank accounts are secret, so the fact that hers are secret, it doesn't matter. We're going to talk about this in a second, but we're going to see that she does a lot of good with the money she has, and they critique her for having millions of dollars. In fact, they sent someone undercover to spy and discover that she had $7 million in the bank. Apparently, she has a lot of money, so she's pocketing it, so she can live how? In luxury? Or in the rags she was wearing, living like the poor and helping the poor? Or was she using the money to help the poor? Yes, that. She was using the money to help the poor. Again, why is this an argument? All the money she receives, she gives back either to the that go to the poor directly. Most of it goes to the poor almost immediately. In fact, building leper colonies and housing and schools and asylums and houses for the poor, deaf, dying, destitute, orphanages, all of that takes an enormous amount of money, and she doesn't fundraise. She accepts just the gratitude of what people give, and she gives it all back to the poor. That's saintly. She opened her first home, her children's home, in 1955. Of course, this takes a lot of money. This doesn't even account for everything that she pays for personally, all the uniforms, the books, and everything. Everything is literally paid for by the sisters and nuns. They have to raise this money from scratch. Then, of course, more homes were started, so they need more money. Everything that they do, they do for the poor and the babies. If you look at the criteria of the children that they take in, most of these children are infants who are not able to survive premature births, so they're going to die right away. People didn't want them, and many of them were found in drains or in train tracks or in dumpsters, garbage cans. Mother Teresa would fish these kids out, or her nuns would find them, or other people would find them and bring them to the nuns. These were unwanted babies who have no one to love them, and Mother Teresa was going to love them every second of their little life. Other people that might help were babies that survived abortion attempts, and the people didn't want them, and so they were cast out, and they would help them. Other people would give away babies or leave them on doorsteps who were deformed, or babies they helped who had mothers who were addicted to drugs, and they had abnormalities or sicknesses because of it. Some of the babies just were abandoned, severely handicapped mentally, physically, and so on. And all of these atheist critics have the audacity to condemn or critique Mother Teresa, who is helping the poorest of the poor that nobody else wants to help. Nobody else is doing anything about it. Hospitals won't take most of the people that she's working with, or any of the people. And, in fact, they've tried, and hospitals refuse to take them. So who's going to help them? Mother Teresa will help them. And, in fact, she's quoted in saying, if you don't want your baby, give it to me. We will take care of it. And people have asked Mother Teresa, why? Why do you take care of these little children when sometimes they only have hours to live? Mother Teresa says this. She says, quote, I don't understand this. For me, even if a child dies within minutes, that child must not be allowed to die alone or uncared for, unquote. That is her whole philosophy, to love every single person, every minute of their lives, and try to ease their pain in dying until the end. That is what she wanted for them. This sums up her mission in a nutshell, and that's the difference between her and the atheists who are critiquing her. She also started her famous Homes for the Dying. Again, ill people that she found in the streets, people who are on their way out, people who don't have long to live, people who couldn't get the medical care, people that hospitals would not help. I mean, Christopher Hitchens was saying in his video, he was trying to interview a former volunteer of Mother Teresa's, who is saying that this man was 15 years old, and she wanted him to go to the hospital. And they were telling her, oh, the hospital said they wouldn't take him. Well, why don't you just try and demand it? The hospital doesn't take most of these people. There are so many people that couldn't fit, or they just aren't wanted. And these are the people that Mother Teresa works with. Now, each of these Homes for the Dying and each of these Homes for Children are monumentally expensive. They don't come for free. So the fact that people are donating money and she's accepting them, of course, she's going to because she needs all the money she can to help these poor and dying destitute souls. Bill Donahue, in his book, Unmasking Mother Teresa's Critics, he talks about this. He quotes her biographer saying that from the 1940s to the 1950s, all of those who were admitted succumbed to illness. In the 1960s to the 1970s, the mortality rate was roughly half. So, you know, right after they started, you know, the first years after they started, they lost about half the people they were trying to help. In the last 10 years, only a fifth of the patients, he said, dies. That's good. I mean, it's bad that they die, of course, but it tells you a few things. Here's what it tells you. Number one, it undoes the myth that the sisters only loved people and didn't try to help them. Number two, it shows that Mother Teresa truly cared for people and wanted to help people, even in their dying moments, even the people who had no one else to love them. Three, while her sisters and her weren't like medical experts, they certainly helped a lot of people. Even in the first years, when they lost half the people, that means they still saved half the people, people who would have died otherwise, and people who would have been unloved, and the people who did die would have been unloved and died unloved and died lonely in this already lonely world. So, they do help people, and that's been proven. Four, they grew better and better and more efficient, giving better quality care each and every year, so that they went from half people dying to only a fifth of the dying. And again, these were the poorest of the poor, really destitute people who were already going that direction, and she helped countless. How many has Christopher Hitchens helped again? How many have these atheist critics in Canada helped again? My point exactly. She also started leper asylums to help lepers, which is an insane amount of money. So, the people who critique her that she accepted money and that she had millions of dollars in the bank account, it's going to help these people. And in fact, the Pope donated a limousine to Mother Teresa. She immediately auctioned it, sold it, and made a leper asylum or put it toward a leper asylum. Same thing like five years later, he gave her a check for a large amount of money, and she immediately cashed it and put it toward a leper asylum. So, she was immediately giving it back to the mothers and the sisters who help and to all of these poor people. So, for the atheists to say that her bank account is secret and they don't know what she did with every last penny, they don't need to know. The world knows. The proof is in the pudding. Her nuns are around the world helping the poorest of the poor and changing lives around the world. The proof is in the pudding. Their critiques aren't convincing. Even the old mayor of New York was so blown away, mystified by Mother Teresa, that even he sang her praises when he saw the work that she did. Listen to what he says. Quote, she said that when AIDS patients were near death, she would sit at their bedside. Often, they would take her hands and she would place her fingers on their face, wanting her to feel their lesions and to close their eyelids for the last time. Would you do that? Would you feel people's lumps and legions? Most people would be grossed out by it. But Mother Teresa loved these people and gave them the dignity that they were children of God and the dignity that God loves every soul and she treated them like that. She showed the love of God to a lost world. She showed the love of God to a dark world, forgotten soul. She has shown them the love of God. Christopher Hitchens is known for calling Mother Teresa a fake, a fraud, a phony, a demagogue, who socialized and hung out with frauds, crooks, and exploiters. He accused her of being an extremist, basically an appendage of the Pope, and many other things, a political operative of worldly and secular powers. And this is saying something. If you look up Christopher Hitchens and the people he supported and the disgusting regimes that he supported, it's calling the kettle black because none of these things about her, as we can see, are true. His comments are biased. His comments are bigoted. His comments are dripping in sarcasm and disdain for Mother Teresa. And his comments don't hold any weight. Unlike Christopher Hitchens, who has made a nice, comfy living for himself, Mother Teresa ripped out all of the air conditioners and rugs. She sleeps on the floor. She owns three of those saris, three of those outfits, just three, that's all. And she sleeps on a very thin mattress on the floor. She washes all her own clothes by hand. There's no TV. There's no coffee maker. And there's literally nothing. She lives like the poor that she serves because she does not want to get past her mission. Some people, as she says, when they receive lots of money, they end up serving rich people. She lives poor to remind herself to always serve the poor, something that Christopher Hitchens himself doesn't seem to do himself. I don't remember ever seeing videos of him walking through and helping the neediest of the needy and the dying people on the streets of India, but maybe I missed it. So unlike Christopher Hitchens and unlike a few angry atheists who have axes to grind, Mother Teresa is beloved by all. It's not a secret and it's not a surprise that she won the Nobel Peace Prize. It's not a surprise that she has a litany of prizes and awards. She's won in all different countries that you can scroll and scroll and scroll down through Wikipedia. These are just a short, short list of all of her prizes from India, from the Philippines, the Nobel Peace Prize, the John F. Kennedy International Award. And you can see them over here on the side, but she's won countless awards and prizes because she's helped so many people. Now, if she wanted fame and popularity and political exposure and all of that, which Christopher Hitchens wrongly slanders her of, she went to a conference once and she was supposed to speak in front of thousands of people. But as she was going to the conference, between some buildings she saw that there was an alley and all of these poor people were back there and nobody was helping them. So she, true to her nature, stopped and helped the poor and she ended up spending her whole time there nurturing, comforting, and getting them the help they needed. She never ended up giving the speech at all. She ghosted them. I don't know if that's a good thing, but she ended up serving the poor and she was true to her word. She always put her money where her mouth was. And even despite Christopher Hitchens accusing her of being an atheist because she didn't believe in God, even though she did, even though she went through these dark nights of the soul and she found it hard to believe and she didn't feel like God was with her, she served him with more love, more passion, more faith, the faith that could move mountains, more than people who have lots of faith and experience God and experience his presence. And she changed the world more than most people who have ever walked on this earth. So it's no wonder that she was voted the most loved and admired person of the last century, that she's beloved around the world by all, literally in all countries. I mean, she's been dead for decades and she's still inspiring countless people around the world. She's still inspiring people to follow in her footsteps. Her nuns are still following her mission, continuing her mission, and propagating the help and the love and the respect and the dignity of those who are made by God, those who have been forgotten about in this world. So thank God for Mother Teresa. Thank God for her nuns. Thank God for the work that she's done. And thank God for his saints, because saints change the world. And she is a splendid example of that. Thank you so much for watching this video. I hope that you found it helpful. I hope that you found it informative. And I hope that you'll consider liking it and sharing it with others. And please, of course, if you have any questions or follow-up comments, please leave them in the comments section below. If you would like us to come speak at your parish, check out our new website link. It's catholictruth.org, not thecatholictruth.org anymore. It's just catholictruth.org. You can bring us to your church to speak. You can check out our website, our shop. You can check out our mugs. And if you would like to support our mission, of course, feel free to support the Sisters of Charity. I wholly support that, if you want to support Mother Teresa and her nuns. But if you love the work that we do, and you love the falsehoods that we call out, and you love the truth that we tell, and we've blessed you in your faith, and we've helped you to grow in your faith in some way, please, please, we need money as well, so we can continue growing in our work. We can continue doing this. We can continue hiring people. We can continue buying the things we need and making a difference, changing millions of lives in this world. And as always, thank you to our patrons who support us. You are the reason that we reach millions of souls for Christ, and souls daily are coming back to the Catholic Church here sometimes because of our ministry. So thank you, and God bless you.