Please, call me Petr. Mr Swedock was my grandfather, an estimable man, now departed.

I feel compelled to point out that situation with respect to Mother Teresa and others, in my estimations, derives from a willful mix of wild speculation and received dogma. The Catholic Church has, in my estimation, spent two thousand plus years making wholesale mistakes regarding what Jesus said, did and thought... I think that's the problem. Mother Teresa acted based upon that which she learned from those two thousand years and she gets... frankly... shit upon by people like Christopher Hitchens who let their moral ardor far outstrip their moral intelligence. They do so based on a nativist sexism and in elision to the real villians of the piece, that is to say, the Curia.... which I think is underlined by your point: Mother Teresa would have suffered and died alongside the poor and filthy rather than in a posh hospital, but that choice was taken from her.

I do not think I said that Jesus wanted anyone to deliberately live in filth, poverty and suffering. As I understand the historical and the Catholic Jesus, filth, poverty and suffering should be no bar to seeing someone as valuable and as a child of God. Jesus reportedly healed people of their suffering and received scorn and ultimate death for doing so (healing on the sabbath, healing and absolving sinners, etc...) from those who, ultimately believed in the unworthiness--and unworthiness precisely because of suffering--of those he healed... That the Catholic Church has turned this into an embrace of suffering, filth and poverty--perhaps even a fetish, of sort-- is, I think, an inversion of what Jesus said and did. I think Mother Teresa may have drank the kool-aid on that... leading her to make some decidedly awful choices, but I point outthat the awfulness of the choices results from the corruptions of Jesus' teachings and belong, as much if not more, to the curriculum (the Curia) than to the result of that curriculum (Mother Teresa)