[Wright is right!]

"The Pope once gave her a car. She raffled it off, using the money for a leper colony."

At the risk of ignonomy, I'm going to posit that it might have been entirely possible that the vehicle MIGHT have been a tool that could have helped her cause far more than the dollars from the raffle. Although I would never impugn Blessed Mother Teresa's motives, there ARE times when the truly selfless nonetheless do things to SEEM truly selfless. The truly selfless don't make a show of being selfless. They just are. I'll never be a Blessed Mother Teresa, but if I were in her position, I'd have found a really good use for that car.

Michael

[Tax-chick]

I don't think there's one right answer to this. Mother Teresa sometimes did things on principle that seem contrary to common sense. Perhaps she was thinking that the need for gas, insurance, maintenance, storage, etc., for the car would make it a burden, or that driving instead of walking or using public transportation would distance the sisters from the poor. There are lots of possibilities.

She refused a large annual donation from the Knights of Columbus, because she said the expectation of a large sum regularly could lead them away from total reliance on God to meet their needs. She asked instead for the Knights to do even more volunteer work for the poor.

St. Francis of Assisi used similar reasoning regarding material gifts. It doesn't mean it would have been wrong to use the car, or to accept the Knights' money, but that the charism of their order required a different way.

[giotto]

I have to admit I am underwhelmed by Mother Teresa's supposed saintliness. There are so many contradictions...She scolded her sisters for canning their overabundant supply of tomatoes because of her rule that they should collect nothing, and yet the millions of dollars in donations sat collecting in bank accounts, unused for the purposes for which they were given. She professed to care about the poor, but her hospitals used abysmally bad hygiene and medical practices. She preached against divorce and yet she approved of Diana's divorce.

I think the canonization process for Teresa should be just as rigorous as for all other saints. But apparently the Pope has suspended most of the required procedures in her case, including the use of a Devil's Advocate.