Christopher Hitchens - The Missionary Position

Agnes Bojaxhiu knows perfectly well that she is conscripted by people like Ralph Reed, that she is a fund-raising icon for clerical nationalists in the Balkans, that she has furnished PR-type cover for all manner of cultists and shady businessmen (who are often the same thing), that her face is on vast highway billboards urging the state to take on the responsibility of safeguarding the womb. By no word or gesture has she ever repudiated any of these connections or alliances. Nor has she ever deigned to respond to questions about her friendship with despots. She merely desires to be taken at her own valuation and to be addressed universally as ‘Mother Teresa’. Her success is not, therefore, a triumph of humility and simplicity. It is another chapter in a millennial story which stretches back to the superstitious childhood of our species, and which depends on the exploitation of the simple and the humble by the cunning and the single-minded.

As Edward Gibbon observed about the modes of worship prevalent in the Roman world, they were ‘considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false and by the magistrate as equally useful’. Mother Teresa descends from each element in this grisly triptych. She has herself purposely blurred the supposed distinction between the sacred and the profane, to say nothing of the line that separates the sublime from the ridiculous. It is past time that she was subjected to the rational critique that she has evaded so arrogantly and for so long.

‘Madame President is someone who feels, who knows, who wishes to demonstrate her love not only with words but also with concrete and tangible actions.’ [Emphasis added.]

‘Madame President, the country vibrates with your life work.’

It seems to me a disgrace that such an original piece of courageous work should have failed to find a publisher when the Pope can receive an advance of around $5 million for a book he did not write.

In the course of preparing for the 1994 United Nations World Population Conference in Cairo, the Vatican went so far as to make a temporary alliance with those forces of Shi’a Islam, chiefly represented by the mullahs of Iran, which denounced population control as an imperialist conspiracy. The apple of dogma had, at least in this case, fallen some distance from the tree of proselytization and the crusades.

If I may add a personal anecdote here: Mother Teresa was in the autumn of 1994 asked by the Calcutta newspapers to comment on Hell’s Angel , the critical documentary which I and others had made on her work. She had not seen the documentary but her response was to say that she ‘forgave’ us for making it. This was odd, since we had not sought forgiveness from her or from anyone else. Odder still if you have any inclination to ask by what right she assumes the power to forgive. There are even some conscientious Christians who would say that forgiveness, like the astringent of revenge, is reserved to a higher power.