The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice by Christopher Hitchens

I rarely inhale books, but today was one of those days. I whipped through this book, disillusioned — who’d have thought I could be more disillusioned than I had been? — yet not really surprised.

Hitchens Missionary Position cover Doubtless, some interpreted this text as an attack on Mother Teresa, but if you read it carefully, it’s much more an attack on the media — conservative and liberal alike — that, during the woman’s life, glossed over major issues in her work and beliefs, issues that the majority of human beings would probably take issue with if presented directly, and beatified Mother Teresa in the press, making her name synonymous with goodness and light.

Hitchens simply pulls apart the hagiography of the mediasphere, asking, in essence, whether we’re really all that comfortable with how Mother Teresa operated. Whether it’s doctors or patients who witnessed in horror (or experienced) the sickness and pain that was allowed unnecessarily to fester among the patients in Teresa’s order’s care, or his own observation of the sly role-playing involved when Teresa shifted gears between simple mystic and politicking powerhouse.

The rhetoric of her beliefs about poverty (essentially, that it is good for the world and we shouldn’t bother to try eliminate it), contrasted with her fundraising activities and her own behaviour (letting the poor in her hospices die without even basic humane application of proper, inexpensive anaesthetic, and making nuns in her order live in conditions that made them ill as well, while Teresa herself checked into some of the best hospitals in the world for her own health problems). Even her explicit assaults on the secularity of government wherever she went — campaigning to make divorce illegal in Ireland, abortion illegal everywhere, and birth control unavailable to humanity have been glossed over. (In a moment of glorious common sense, Hitchens notes how ridiculous it is that anyone living in a place as crowded and socioeconomically stratified as Calcutta would come to the conclusion that people should be denied birth control.)

But Hitchens is scrupulous in noting that Teresa’s duplicity is matched by the willing complicity of the media, who spin things in her favour, blot out the obvious questions that should arise when Teresa was photographed palling around with the most vile politicians and dictators, with a dangerous New Age cult leader, and when she tacitly refused to return charitable contributions to her organization of over a million dollars after it was revealed to her in a letter than it was stolen money. (Hitchens has the documents right there in his book!)

Not that the picture is completely one of mutual duplicity: people are quite willing dupes when it comes to beatification. Humans have a burning desire to know that someone is doing something, because most of us are not doing anything except enjoying our lives as best we can. It’s just that in the rush to present someone “doing something,” the media obviously obfuscated what Teresa was actually doing. And when you see what it was she was doing, it becomes rather obvious why this could not become common knowledge.

As I said, nothing in the book is terribly surprising, but it does reawaken in one a kind of unforgettable cynicism when it comes to saints and visionaries. With all the falsehoods and half-truths and exaggerations floating in the around around a woman only a few years in the grave, it surprises me how people can believe much more incredible (that is to say, in-credible) claims dating back a couple of thousand years. Surely Hitchens knows this, though he wisely does not go there. That would probably have been too much for most of his audience. But like Galileo’s statement of the simple truth, Hitchens’, when you really get what he’s talking about, raises much more profound questions which ought to be grappled with more in Western civilization: why the human eagerness for spirits, visions, saints, and deities? Why the persistent safeguarding of patently unbelievable claims? What is it about is that makes us need such things?

All in all, a book worth reading.

8 thoughts on “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice by Christopher Hitchens

  1. While Christopher Hitchens’s argument made a believer out of me too, I did get a laugh when some wag in a New Yorker profile of Hitchens pointed out that if you were starving in the streets of Calcutta, Hitchens is the last person who would stop and give you a bowl of soup.

  2. Breaking up the posts makes them a lot more readable – have you thought of staggering your posts? I think you could have a daily blog if you banked more of what you wrote.

    If you want love, you have to give it – I don’t get a lot of commenters on my blog, but my readership did increase when I started leaving more comments on other peoples blogs.

  3. I could bank posts, but since this is more of a record of my life in general, mostly for me and not mostly for my “audience,” I prefer to post stuff when I write it. Call me old-fashioned. :) Or maybe that’s new-fangled?

    True. But I barely have time to keep up with people I know around here! It’s a busy life, mine…

  4. Mother Theresa is just one example of missionaries who obfuscate their religious beliefs through charity.

    I have been a great fan of Hitchens. Unlike cowardly Indian intellectuals Hitchen completly destroys the image of this lady,

    1. Amit,

      Yeah, she’s just one example, but an important one: in the West when I was growing up her name was a shorthand for self-sacrificing saintliness, which is why Hitchens’ exposé was so very important. It was the lone voice in the wilderness crying out, “There’s nothing saintly about this woman!”

      (And I should add, it’s not just some Indian intellectuals who have failed to attack Theresa and other religious monsters: the trend is common all over, including in Hitchens’ homeland and his adopted country–the US.)

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