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You Too Can be a Saint (reprise)
Saturday, March 9th, 2013 02:09 pmThis article about Mother Theresa's misdeeds prompted me to dig up and reprint my own blog entry on the subject from way back when John Paul II was pope and blog entries were handcrafted and FTPed. Looks like I was prescient.
Pope John Paul II currently holds the record for canonisation, having created about 300 saints, and is apparently about to process another dozen this month. Cynic though I may be, I still found the sheer scale of saint-making staggering. I didn't even know that there were that many saints in existence, let alone that they were the work of one pontiff.
Of course, with this saintly inflation there must inevitably be some devaluation of the divine currency. Saints are not what they used to be. In the good old days, they sat on the right hand of God and had odd parts of their bodies distributed among churches throughout Christendom (miraculously preserved, of course). Kissing some martyr's detatched toe could cure anything from paralysis to infertility (though not, ironically, leprosy). Nowadays, a saint is merely, according to the Vatican, someone whose life and/or death may be taken as an example by the rest of us, and only two attested miracles are required, healing the sick being the most popular choice.
Leading the candidates for canonisation is Mother Theresa, who does not even have to wait the customary five years after death before her case is considered by the spiritual Olympics Committee. In the miracle stakes she is at a distinct advantage because of the nature of her work running hospices. Hang around dying people long enough and you're bound to encounter a few who suddenly fail to die for no obvious reason. Of course if you're a real doctor in a proper hospital, you just shrug your shoulders and say “Spontaneous remission,” but if your main function is to pray, it must be tempting for onlookers to see the hand of the Almighty at work.
People may start to boo and hiss at this point, but I have to say that I am not impressed by Mother Theresa. In fact, I don't even like her very much. Since not liking Mother Theresa is at least a venal sin, and maybe even a mortal one, I should explain myself.
It is true that Mother Theresa went and lived in fairly uncomfortable surroundings to comfort the poor, sick and dying, but she was a nun, for God's sake. That's what nuns are supposed to do, and thousands of them get on with their nunly business without all the fanfares. It is not as though they are giving up a life of luxury and sensual pleasures to do so, and I imagine any girl wanting to join Holy Orders on the condition that she didn't have to deal with the poor and sick wouldn't get very far. More to the point, it is not necessary to have a divine mission to help people. Doctors Without Frontiers recently won a well-deserved Nobel prize, but I imagine there are plenty of atheists in their ranks. Moreover, they do not wrap up their good deeds in an aura of self-sacrificing piety; a friend of mine who worked alongside some of them summed up their attitude as “Get in, get out, get drunk.”
Perhaps part of the appeal was the fact that Theresa ministered to non-Christians, but in this age a little religious tolerance should not be so surprising. After all, doctors treat bodies without considering their race or religion, so why shouldn't the same apply to doctoring souls? The Dalai Lama once blessed some talismans for a friend of mine who was not only not a Buddhist, but a follower of the notorious Aleister Crowley, who in his lifetime was called “the wickedest man in the world.” You can't get more interdenominational than that.
Apart from prayers, hand-holding and a few dubious miracles, did Mother Theresa do any good? Well, she might have made quite a few people happy, which is to be applauded, but again this is hardly a criterion for sainthood, otherwise we would also have St. Elvis of the Pelvis. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that Mother Theresa did more harm than good (pause to duck flying cyber-tomatoes and rotten eggs). India's most pressing problem is poverty, and one of the most important factors in this poverty is over-population. To go into a country like this and preach the sanctity of poverty and the evil of birth control is counter-productive, to say the least. To be sure, our saint-elect was acting with the best of intentions, but good intentions are said to pave a certain road ...
If I believed in the idea that the pope could sanctify people in the same way that the Roman senate used to deify them, my candidate would be the Dalai Lama. I don't go all goopy over the Dalai Lama like a lot of Westerners do, but he seems like a decent chap, not only personally, but also politically and religiously. If it weren't for the inconvenience of troops of pilgrims passing through the living room, he's the kind of person you'd quite like to share a flat with. I'm not sure how he does in the miracle business, but someone who's spent that long meditating ought to be able to pull off a few good ones. Making him a Catholic saint would be a major advance in inter-faith co-operation, and it would also be a wonderful way to annoy Jiang Zemin on his European tour. One thing the Dalai Lama said that I particularly liked went something like “People often think that behaving ethically is something to do with spirituality. In fact, behaving ethically is just part of being human.” Amen to that.
October, 1999
Pope John Paul II currently holds the record for canonisation, having created about 300 saints, and is apparently about to process another dozen this month. Cynic though I may be, I still found the sheer scale of saint-making staggering. I didn't even know that there were that many saints in existence, let alone that they were the work of one pontiff.
Of course, with this saintly inflation there must inevitably be some devaluation of the divine currency. Saints are not what they used to be. In the good old days, they sat on the right hand of God and had odd parts of their bodies distributed among churches throughout Christendom (miraculously preserved, of course). Kissing some martyr's detatched toe could cure anything from paralysis to infertility (though not, ironically, leprosy). Nowadays, a saint is merely, according to the Vatican, someone whose life and/or death may be taken as an example by the rest of us, and only two attested miracles are required, healing the sick being the most popular choice.
Leading the candidates for canonisation is Mother Theresa, who does not even have to wait the customary five years after death before her case is considered by the spiritual Olympics Committee. In the miracle stakes she is at a distinct advantage because of the nature of her work running hospices. Hang around dying people long enough and you're bound to encounter a few who suddenly fail to die for no obvious reason. Of course if you're a real doctor in a proper hospital, you just shrug your shoulders and say “Spontaneous remission,” but if your main function is to pray, it must be tempting for onlookers to see the hand of the Almighty at work.
People may start to boo and hiss at this point, but I have to say that I am not impressed by Mother Theresa. In fact, I don't even like her very much. Since not liking Mother Theresa is at least a venal sin, and maybe even a mortal one, I should explain myself.
It is true that Mother Theresa went and lived in fairly uncomfortable surroundings to comfort the poor, sick and dying, but she was a nun, for God's sake. That's what nuns are supposed to do, and thousands of them get on with their nunly business without all the fanfares. It is not as though they are giving up a life of luxury and sensual pleasures to do so, and I imagine any girl wanting to join Holy Orders on the condition that she didn't have to deal with the poor and sick wouldn't get very far. More to the point, it is not necessary to have a divine mission to help people. Doctors Without Frontiers recently won a well-deserved Nobel prize, but I imagine there are plenty of atheists in their ranks. Moreover, they do not wrap up their good deeds in an aura of self-sacrificing piety; a friend of mine who worked alongside some of them summed up their attitude as “Get in, get out, get drunk.”
Perhaps part of the appeal was the fact that Theresa ministered to non-Christians, but in this age a little religious tolerance should not be so surprising. After all, doctors treat bodies without considering their race or religion, so why shouldn't the same apply to doctoring souls? The Dalai Lama once blessed some talismans for a friend of mine who was not only not a Buddhist, but a follower of the notorious Aleister Crowley, who in his lifetime was called “the wickedest man in the world.” You can't get more interdenominational than that.
Apart from prayers, hand-holding and a few dubious miracles, did Mother Theresa do any good? Well, she might have made quite a few people happy, which is to be applauded, but again this is hardly a criterion for sainthood, otherwise we would also have St. Elvis of the Pelvis. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that Mother Theresa did more harm than good (pause to duck flying cyber-tomatoes and rotten eggs). India's most pressing problem is poverty, and one of the most important factors in this poverty is over-population. To go into a country like this and preach the sanctity of poverty and the evil of birth control is counter-productive, to say the least. To be sure, our saint-elect was acting with the best of intentions, but good intentions are said to pave a certain road ...
If I believed in the idea that the pope could sanctify people in the same way that the Roman senate used to deify them, my candidate would be the Dalai Lama. I don't go all goopy over the Dalai Lama like a lot of Westerners do, but he seems like a decent chap, not only personally, but also politically and religiously. If it weren't for the inconvenience of troops of pilgrims passing through the living room, he's the kind of person you'd quite like to share a flat with. I'm not sure how he does in the miracle business, but someone who's spent that long meditating ought to be able to pull off a few good ones. Making him a Catholic saint would be a major advance in inter-faith co-operation, and it would also be a wonderful way to annoy Jiang Zemin on his European tour. One thing the Dalai Lama said that I particularly liked went something like “People often think that behaving ethically is something to do with spirituality. In fact, behaving ethically is just part of being human.” Amen to that.
October, 1999
