The term “modern day saint” is hard to get away with. It’s been overused and exaggerated to the point of everyday household ubiquity. Did someone pay for your meal?

Oh, they’re a saint, must be. Did someone hold the door open for you? What a saint! But sainthood is still taken seriously, and its titles are difficult to disperse because of the connotation.

In life or after their death, a Saint is someone recognized as a person of incredible value and importance to the Christian community worldwide. One of those faithful modern Saints was Mother Teresa.

Mother Teresa is the name everyone associates with the goodness of Catholocism through her charity work and is the very image of what a nun is supposed to be. But was she?

We tend to get swept up in the positives of public figures, so it becomes easy to get distracted from the real negatives they create by way of living.

Being a saint means that she was considered a perfect Christian, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she was ideal. Beneath every perfect person at their job is the imperfect human their contemporaries forget about.





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10 /10 Young Mother

Teresa was a name she took on much later in life as her “Christian” name. Her birth name was Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu. She was born in what is now known as the capital of North Macedonia to a Kosovar Albanian family.

They were deeply religious, had her baptized, and ever since she was a young girl, she dreamed of being a missionary to foreign lands, which is what she eventually became.



9 /10 Shall Not Covet







One of the first things she did when she was officially commemorated was by taking her religious vows at the age of 27, choosing a new name for herself, by naming herself after a saint of old or after a religious figure from the Bible would cement her place with her faith and her fellow missionaries.

However, the name she wanted, Therese de Lisieux’s name, was already taken by another nun at her mission in India. So she went with the Spanish Teresa to get around it, proving that she had an evil way to her.



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8 /10 Lay With Enemies

Many controversial and dangerous figures rose to power during Mother Teresa’s long life from 1910 to 1987. And she was downright friendly with a few.

Enver Hoxha, an Albanian Communist political leader, was infamous for forcing religious practices to close or compromise themselves, such as making Jews eat pork, issuing passions to those practicing religious fasts, and jailing anyone who didn’t comply.

He even closed down the religious school and churches Mother Teresa went to, and after his death, she visited his grave and was received by his widow. Perhaps it was in the name of forgiveness.

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7 /10 The Catholic Bank

Mother Teresa was, at one point, the richest woman in the Catholic Church by way of some nefarious loopholes.

Many criminals of the mid-1900s made considerable donations to Mother Teresa’s charity cause in her name, which she accepted and would deposit into the Vatican’s private banking institute.

Much of the money going in was dirty, gained from crime, for which the criminals were often arrested or charged later on. It happened so many times that it seemed odd she didn’t know.

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6 /10 The Other Cheek

Mother Teresa more than once gave praising words and support to fascists and even excused their actions.

She supported Licio Gelli, a member of nefarious organizations, and admitted neo-fascist and heads of a masonic order connected to high-profile corruption and murders in Italy.

She also supported Indira Gandhi’s suspension of civil liberties during The Emergency in India, stating that people were happier, had more jobs, and had no more strikes.

5 /10 Mother, Not Doctor

Many others knew Mother Teresa as the “Angel of Calcutta” and “Hell’s Angel” after investigations revealed just what kind of medical care her facilities were administering.

The level of medical safety was sub-par, at best.

She ran a very positive image of a kindly Christian helping the poor, but in reality, little of her collected wealth from charitable donations went toward helping the poor and sick, as she declared.

She was more of a faith healer, a spiritualist who said that pain was necessary to share the passion of Christ.

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4 /10 Spiritual Sabotage

Mother Teresa was a Catholic Nun working in and around the Bengal region of India, specifically out of Calcutta, where her largest mission was. It was her job to provide charity and assistance in the name of the Catholic Church.

She went one step further, a bit too far, by giving deathbed confessionals and baptisms for those not of the faith, Hindus, and Muslims that were taken in with nowhere else to go, thus violating their religious beliefs by forcing her own onto them.

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3 /10 Religious Imperialism

Mother Teresa was criticized even for treating the poor of Calcutta like a British conqueror would. She cared not for their rights or their religions, only hers.

She would stealthily instruct the sisters who worked for her to baptize those in her missions en mass, performing the ceremony in earnest while pretending to be a bath or a wet cloth to the forehead to deal with a fever – which they wouldn’t treat, but invite in as necessary suffering in God’s plan.

Many of her charities took in money but put out no actual charitable work.

2 /10 Dark Night Of The Soul

After she died in 1997, a request in her will was ignored to destroy all writings and correspondences.

These revealed that she had been struggling for many decades with a feeling of discontent and disconnection from God.

Her actions may have been motivated by a misguided crisis of faith where her belief in God that she had in her youth didn’t follow her to her older years.

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1 /10 Mother, May I

Despite her shortcomings – and frankly some of her Crimes – she remains a saint to Catholicism as a charitable woman who engaged with that society was quick to leave behind.

Even today, she is the target of investigations and cult-like fanaticism, but no one can deny that she did what no one else bothered to do.

She may have messed up, but the poor she took in would have died in much worse conditions without her. And that’s good enough to be canonized.

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