If it makes you feel better, there are some rather grumpy people who think mother Theresa was more of a sadist than a saint. Maybe she needed a shock or two.
Her approach may have been laudable in the 19th century. It was absolutely unacceptable in the late 20th century.
The only reason people accepted it was because it was happening in a poor country. If she had used the same approach in a North American or European country she would almost certainly have been put behind bars.
Edit: If you read the Wikipedia article about the response to criticisms of her, the major defense of her is that she never intended to create a place with clinical facilities, but instead a place where people could die peacefully.
If her institution was accurately promoted as such, I doubt it would receive the millions in funding it did, and even if it did, then the people who sent the funding should be shamed for not sending it to actual hospitals in the areas which actually saved lives. Further, that’s not what the people who went there thought. They didn’t go there thinking they were being given a “kinder” death. They went there thinking they would be treated well.
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/12/world/mother-teresa-carri...
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Mother Teresa stressed two points. First, the gas tragedy was not the worst catastrophe she had seen. ''I have seen worse suffering,'' she said.
Referring to the intensity of the disaster, she said, ''It is more terrible to see a person with maggots eating his face slowly dying over weeks and months.'' Then, returning to a favorite theme, Mother Teresa made her second point. She stressed the need for forgiveness to government officials, reporters and doctors. ''There must be bitter feelings inside,'' she said. ''This could have been an accident, it is like a fire could break out anywhere.''
''That is why,'' she said, ''It is important to forgive.''
''Forgiveness offers us a clean heart and people will be a hundred times better after it,'' she said.
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She was an awful person.
When the Charleston historic black church was shot by a racist mass shooter, the family of one of the victims had a chance to speak to the killer. She took the time to say she forgives him and prays for him. This powerful moment is more than theatrics-- it's clears then of the emotional labor of continuing being angry. Forgiveness is required in order to heal. Holding on to anger feels logical but life is more than logic.
Telling someone that it could be worse isn't a horrible affront to their suffering. Hearing it put into context of the suffering she regularly sees-- ie things like people slowly dying while their flesh rots with maggots-- mother Teresa is offering people who feel their world has ended an alternative vision. There is a reason she was so lauded, and it's very colorblind to ignore all the people she affected to say she could have done better.
Bhopal happened because some bureaucrats wanted to save a few bucks on engineering and maintenance and there were obvious increased risks from that action but they didn't care because it wouldn't hurt them and they were richer. Now thousands of people are dead. Did the people responsible even end up in prison? There's no emotion in sacrificing others for your personal gain. That should not be forgiven. You knew this could happen. Risks like that should not be profitable.
I think her take on life and suffering was similar to others that have extreme hardship. Like this quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about his time in the Gulag
It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good.
In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel.
In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor.
In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments.
It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. . . .
That is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me:
“Bless you, prison!”
I . . . have served enough time there.
I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!”
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956, Volume 2, pp. 615-617.