Thank you, DMcG, for your thoughtful post. I must say that many people would regard my utter and vehement condemnation of Mother Teresa with horror: how could it possibly be so...? But I'm afraid she did champion poverty perfectly explicitly and she preached to the poor that they should rejoice in their lot and not fight against it. Have you ever looked up what she said to the people of Bhopal? As for all the good work she did for the poor, well she raised millions of dollars and used a large amount of it to set up hundreds of convents in which her proteges lived rather comfortably, and when she herself was ill she sought relief in expensive clinics in the US. Her own institutions for the poor and sick were places of shameful, criminal neglect, disease and needless deaths (well-documented, I'm afraid, weasel-words alert notwithstanding), and her staff were generally unqualified, badly treated and untrained in how to deal expertly, let alone sympathetically, with vulnerable people. She took money from Papa Doc, in return for which she publicly praised his regime. Don't even get me started on some of her egregiously illiberal and bigoted sayings, material alone for a thesis in themselves. She was the archetypal Christian fundamentalist par excellence. It pays to view the world with your eyes open and see things for what they really are rather than for what you'd fondly like them to be.

It's way past my bedtime and I'll be back at you, Joe, tomorrow, chores permitting. Bet you can't wait. Just remember that, officially, I'm still a Catholic!