Today, Mother Teresa of Calcutta will be declared a saint by the Catholic Church. The Albanian nun, who died in 1997, founded the Missionaries of Charity, a religious congregation of five thousand sisters (and affiliated brothers) devoted to caring for the sick and dying poor. She was known in Calcutta as the “Saint of the Gutters” because she and her sisters would scour the roadsides in and around Calcutta for destitute people who were ill or dying, bring them to a home, and provide food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and when necessary hospice care for them.

She often promised that if she couldn’t heal them she would at least make sure they didn’t die alone. She and her sisters make solemn vows of chastity, poverty, obedience, and “wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor.”

The Missionaries of Charity today work in 133 countries and run hospices and clinics to treat AIDS, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other afflictions of the destitute poor. Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980, and she was beatified in 2003. She will be canonized in St. Peter’s Square.

Writing at Why Evolution Is True, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is not OK with this.

We all know by now what a fraud Agnes Bojaxhiu was. She courted dictators and took money from them, she used her homes to convert the sick and dying rather than help them, she was slippery in managing her funds. If you have doubts, read Christopher Hitchens’s The Missionary Position, an attack on Mother Teresa that has never been refuted, or (if you read French) the critical paper “Les côtés ténébreux de Mère Teresa” (“The dark side of Mother Teresa”), which is free online.

Readers may recall that Coyne, on a visit to Kentucky, posted a picture of himself hugging the grave of John Scopes, the defendant in the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 who admitted (and then admitted lying about or forgetting about) teaching human evolution from a eugenicist and racist biology textbook. Coyne adores the guy, and honors his memory.

Coyne is copacetic with Scopes, but not so much with Mother Teresa. Coyne is obsessed, as was Christopher Hitchens, with Mother Teresa’s “dark side.” Hitchens, between sips of Scotch, found time to cut the diminutive nun down to size with the cleverly titled The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Hitchens, who spent years on his back for atheism and Trotsky, strips the bark off the Missionaries of Charity’s founder, accusing her of accepting donations for the poor from rich and even unsavory people, of embracing suffering, of not distributing contraceptives, and of holding political views unlike those of Hitchens.

The Catholic Church, ever forgiving, used Hitchens’s testimony as its Devil’s Advocate in the canonization process, thereby signaling the dearth of credible challenges to her sanctity.

Like Hitchens, Jerry Coyne has disdain not only for the nuns who devote their lives to charity, but, as you might expect, for the Catholic Church itself:

And, of course, the whole procedure for determining sainthood is just as bogus, with a “devil’s advocate” (Hitchens was one in this case!) who argues against the case for sainthood but is ignored, and specious “proof” that the saint in statu nascendi brought about two miracles. In Faith Versus Fact and on this site, I wrote about those miracles. I don’t know much about the second, but the first one wasn’t a miracle at all.

Coyne, who believes that everything came from nothing for no reason, life popped out of mud and evolved because survivors survived, and that purposes in nature and free will are an illusion, is skeptical of crazy ideas like miracles.

Yet Coyne has resigned himself to the inevitable:

But her sainthood was always a fait accompli, for the legend of Agnes Bojaxhiu is impervious to fact, just as Catholicism itself is impervious to fact. And so, on Sunday, another person joins the pantheon of the two-thousand-odd existing saints who, by being canonized by the Vatican, now have special access to God, and special powers if you pray for them…We may pride ourselves on being “the rational animal,” but that’s the final thing that’s bogus. How rational is Catholicism, and how rational is this phony, cooked-up way of declaring that some person gets a special telephone line to God?

I’m not sure about the “telephone line to God” — that’s not quite the Beatific Vision, which is what Catholics believe each person in Heaven gets without paying a cent to Verizon. In Catholic theology we are each called to sanctity. Mother Teresa simply answered the call with particular alacrity, despite the venom and lewd slander from the likes of Coyne and Hitchens. Perhaps her sanctity is the reason for the hate and slander — her life is an acted parable of love for God and man, and of respect for human dignity.

Like their founder, the sisters of the Missionaries of Charity endure hardship and calumny patiently. They set aside their own comfort and safety and they work in the gutters alongside the forgotten poor. So please, if you’re inclined, say a prayer for Mother Teresa and for the thousands of living saints who are carrying out her work in hospices and orphanages and clinics and gutters. In a suffering and fallen world, it’s nice from time to time to be reminded of grace.

Photo credit: Manfredo Ferrari (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.