Geneviève Chénard is a professor in the department of psychoeducation at the University of Montreal. She was a co-author of an academic study on Mother Teresa.

I'm not convinced we should be so quick to canonize Mother Teresa, and here's why.

Her Missionary of Charity was (and still is) one on the richest organizations in the world, and yet at the facility under her watch, used syringes were rinsed with cold water, tuberculosis patients were not put in quarantine and pain medicine was not prescribed. Mother Teresa believed that suffering made you closer to God.

Maybe her reputation influenced people to do good, but her real work doesn’t stand up to her reputation.

And during the years she ran the clinic in India on a budget of more than $29 million, major floods occurred, one of which left 200 dead and more than 300,000 homeless. What did Mother Teresa do with her money? She offered prayers.

Aroup Chatterjee, the author of a book critical of Mother Teresa, also found that more than $2.5 million was transferred to the Vatican in 1993 alone. The money she had at her disposal -- which was donated by people like Princess Diana of Wales, the Reagans, the Clintons and Yasser Arafat -- could have built a modern hospital of India.

What’s more, her loyalty to lawyer and financier Charles Keating, even after he was convicted of fraud, racketeering and conspiracy, destroying the savings of tens of thousands of customers, and her association with Baby Doc Duvalier, the Haitian dictator known for torturing his people, was just bizarre. Her decision to lay a crown of flowers on the tombstone of Communist leader and human rights abuser, Enver Hoxha in Albania in 1990, at best, showed her cluelessness.

Maybe her reputation influenced people to do good, but her real work doesn’t stand up to her reputation, and she certainly doesn’t deserve sainthood.



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