Sir, – Eamonn McCann's piece on Mother Teresa was really dreadful ("Mother Teresa not such a good role model", Opinion & Analysis, December 24th). No amount of festive goodwill can leave it unanswered.
First, the “fraud” regarding Teresa’s acceptance of Charles Keating’s donation is now a story as frayed as an old sack. Your readers are asked to accept Eamonn McCann’s version of events based on a phone call he made to a federal attorney 20 years ago. I venture that a far more persuasive route would be to provide a document supporting the serious allegation that Teresa “knowingly received stolen property”. Given that no federal indictment ever followed in the United States, I guess available evidence to that effect is weak, oblique or non-existent.
However, even if we assume Mother Teresa once accepted funds whose source was dodgy, we need not accept Eamonn McCann’s conclusion that Teresa was not a “suitable role model”. I did my doctoral research on Vincent de Paul and his followers, and many people might be surprised to learn aspects of this saint’s life. De Paul was ordained at an illegal age, and later accepted money from people who were hardly unimpeachable characters – such as Cardinal Richelieu and King Louis XIII. Yet few would dispute that he spent his life in the service of France’s poor.
In this way, Eamonn McCann fundamentally misunderstands the nature of canonisation; it is not recognition that the candidate is a perfect human being, only that he or she displayed some exemplary Christian virtues.
Finally, the point made about Mother Teresa’s views on the Princess of Wales is, quite frankly, inapposite. Diana Spencer was not Roman Catholic, nor was she ever married to a Roman Catholic. Eamonn McCann invokes “the rules of the church” to malign Mother Teresa, but he mischievously confuses the discipline of two entirely separate Christian confessions. How Teresa’s views on the dissolution of Diana’s Anglican marriage can be relevant to assessing Teresa’s Catholic virtue is as inexplicable as it goes unexplained. – Yours, etc,
Dr SEAN
ALEXANDER SMITH,
Calahonda,
Spain.
Sir, – How sad to read the thrashing of Mother Teresa by Eamonn McCann in the Christmas Eve edition of The Irish Times. He refers to a donation of a million dollars to Mother Teresa by Charles Keating, head of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. He calls this money "stolen from the poor" and which Mother Teresa did not return. He says the money "was filched from the pockets of poor pensioners and small savers by the notorious conman, Charles Keating, head of what turned out to be a front for fraud".
He does not say that this donation to Mother Teresa could have come from Keating’s own lawfully acquired assets. He implies that it came from monies deposited by Lincoln S&L savers or monies invested in other companies which he controlled. Thus he accuses Mother Teresa of receiving stolen money.
Eamonn McCann failed to mention that all the depositors in the Lincoln Saving and Loan Association, or any other defunct S&Ls, were reimbursed up to $40,000 by the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, an agency of the US government. Since $40,000 was a lot of money back in the 1970s, it is not likely that many depositors had more than that in their accounts. The “poor” were not hurt.
It is true that some people lost money they invested in the “junk bonds” of a company called American Continental Corporation. People who invest in “junk bonds” are neither poor nor unsophisticated. They are gamblers who are well aware of the huge risk they are taking when investing in cheap, low-rated financial instruments. They hope to make a quick profit from a small but relatively large percentage increase in their value. These are not the people whose monies were “filched” by Mother Teresa.
These claims are often brought up by, among others, atheists, and others deeply opposed to the Catholic Church. The simple question may be, why are they afraid of someone like Mother Teresa? Mother Teresa was an easy, safe target for Eamonn McCann. Mother Teresa has done more for the poor and down-trodden of this world than he will ever do. – Yours, etc,
JOHN J BRENNAN,
Bronx, New York.