Christopher Hitchens - The Missionary Position

Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shrivelled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute? On the other hand, who would be so incurious as to leave unexamined the influence and motives of a woman who once boasted of operating more than five hundred convents in upwards of 105 countries — ‘without counting India’? Lone self-sacrificing zealot, or chair of a missionary multinational? The scale alters with the perspective, and the perspective alters with the scale.

Once the decision is taken to do without awe and reverence, if only for a moment, the Mother Teresa phenomenon assumes the proportions of the ordinary and even the political. It is part of the combat of ideas and the clash of interpretations, and can make no serious claims to having invisible means of support. The first step, as so often, is the crucial one. It still seems astonishing to me that nobody had ever before decided to look at the saint of Calcutta as if, possibly, the supernatural had nothing to do with it.

I was very much discouraged — as I asked the most obvious questions and initiated what were, at the outset, the most perfunctory investigations — by almost everybody to whom I spoke. So I must mention several people who gave me heart, and who answered the implied question — Is nothing sacred? — with a stoical ‘No’. Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation, and Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, both allowed me to write early polemics against Mother Teresa even though they had every reason to expect a hostile reader response (which, interestingly, failed to materialize). In making the Channel Four documentary Hell’s Angel, which aired in Britain in the autumn of 1994 and which did lead to venomous and irrational attacks, I owe everything to Vania Del Borgo and Tariq Ali of Bandung Productions, whose idea it was, and to Waldemar Janusczak of Channel Four, who ‘took the heat’, as the saying goes. A secular Muslim, a secular Jew and a secular Polish Catholic made excellent company in fending off the likes of Ms Victoria Gillick, a pestilential morals campaigner who stated publicly that our programme was a Jewish/Muslim conspiracy against the One True Faith. Colin Robinson and Mike Davis of Verso were unwavering in their belief that a few words are worth many pictures. Ben Metcalf was and is a splendid copy editor.

This is a small episode in an unending argument between those who know they are right and therefore claim the mandate of heaven, and those who suspect that the human race has nothing but the poor candle of reason by which to light its way. So I acknowledge as well the help and counsel and support of three heroes in this battle: Gore Vidal, Salman Rushdie and Israel Shahak. It was once well said, of the criticism of religion, that the critic should pluck the flowers from the chain, not in order that people should wear the chain without consolation but so that they might break the chain and cull the living flower. As fundamental monotheism and shallow cultism testify to one view of the human future, and as the millennium casts its shadow before us, it has been a privilege to soldier with such distinguished witnesses. If the baffled and fearful prehistory of our species ever comes to an end, and if we ever get off of our knees and cull those blooms, there will be no need for smoking altars and forbidding temples with which to honour the freethinking humanists, who scorned to use the fear of death to coerce and flatter the poor.

On my table as I write is an old copy of L’Assaut (‘The Attack’). It is, or more properly it was, a propaganda organ for the personal despotism of Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti. As the helplessly fat and jowly and stupid son of a very gaunt and ruthless and intelligent father Jean-François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier), the portly Dauphin was known to all, and to his evident embarrassment, as ‘Baby Doc’. In an attempt to salvage some dignity trd to establish an identity separate from that of the parental, L’Asaut carried the subtitle ‘Organe de Jean-Claudisme’.

But this avoidance of the more accurate ‘Duvalierism’ served only to underline the banana-republic, cult-of-dynasty impression that it sought to dispel. Below the headline appears a laughable bird, which resembles a very plump and nearly flightless pigeon but is clearly intended as a dove, judging by the stylized sprig of olive clamped in its beak. Beneath the dismal avian is a large slogan in Latin — In Hoc Signo Vinces (‘In this sign shall ye conquer’) — which appears to negate the pacific and herbivorous intentions of the logo. Early Christian symbols, such as the cross or the fish, sometimes bore this superscription. I have seen it annexed on pamphlets bearing other runes and fetishes, such as the swastika. For a certainty, nobody could conquer anything under a banner bearing the device reproduced here.

On the inside, next to a long and adoring account of the wedding anniversary of Haiti’s bulbous First Citizen and his celebrated bride, Michèle Duvalier, is a large photograph. It shows Michèle, poised and cool and elegant in her capacity as leader of Haiti’s white and Creole elite. Her bangled arms are being held in a loving clasp by another woman, who is offering up a gaze filled with respect and deference. Next to the picture is a quotation from this other woman, who clearly feels that her sycophantic gestures are not enough and that words must be offered as well: ‘ Madame la Presidente, c’est une personne qui sent, qui sait, qui veut prouver son amour non seulement par des mots, mais aussi par des actions concrètes et tangibles.’ [1] ‘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.] The neighbouring Society page takes up the cry, with the headline: ‘ Mme la Présidente, le pays resonne de votre œuvre. ’ [2] ‘Madame President, the country vibrates with your life work.’

The eye rests on the picture. The woman proposing these lavish compliments is the woman known to millions as Mother Teresa of Calcutta. A number of questions obtrude themselves at once. First, is the picture by any chance a setup? Have the deft editors of L’Assaut made an exploited visitor out of an unsuspecting stranger, placed words in her mouth, put her in a vulnerable position? The answer appears to be in the negative, because the date of this issue is January 1981, and there exists film footage of Mother Teresa visiting Haiti that year. The footage, which was shown on the CBS documentary programme Sixty Minutes, has Mother Teresa smiling into the camera and saying, of Michèle Duvalier, that while she had met kings and presidents aplenty in her time, she had ‘never seen the poor people being so familiar with their head of state as they were with her. It was a beautiful lesson for me.’ In return for these and other favours, Mother Teresa was awarded the Haitian Légion d’honneur . And her simple testimony, in warm encomium of the ruling couple, was shown on state-run television every night for at least a week. No protest against this footage is known to have been registered by Mother Teresa (who has ways of making her views widely available) between the time of the award and the time when the Haitian people became so ‘familiar’ with Jean-Claude and Michèle that the couple had barely enough time to stuff their luggage with the National Treasury before fleeing for ever to the French Riviera.