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Review: The Missionary Position
It has been a cliché for sometime to ironically compare an egregious or heartless person with Mother Teresa (‘Look, we’re not exactly talking about Mother Teresa here!’). But Mother Teresa, it seems, was no Mother Teresa herself. ‘Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent,’ George Orwell once wrote. Christopher Hitchens has followed this line in The Missionary Position. According to many of the eyewitness accounts he quotes at length, she was not only an unashamed zealot (‘Jesus must be kissing you,’ she told a patient suffering the final agonies of cancer) but also a liar and a thief. She accepted money from famous frauds such as John-Roger and Charles Keating (and even after his crimes were exposed, she refused to return the stolen money he had donated to her charity, but instead urged the judge in his case to ‘do what Jesus would do’). She endorsed dictatorships, from the Duvalier family in Haiti to General Mairam’s in Eritrea, both of which had appalling human rights records. Still, as she always claimed, ‘I do not get involved in that sort of politics.’
Hitchens answers the obvious defence that, despite this history of Mother Teresa, she has still done so much good for the world’s poor and suffering. Not so. Accounts from Dr Robin Fox, editor of a leading medical journal, and several insiders who worked as volunteers for the Missionaries of Charity, have attested to the awful standards of the homes she ran. Little more than paracetamol was provided in the way of medicine. Needles were not properly sterilized. Sixty patients on stretcher beds were packed into one room. ‘Bear in mind,’ writes Hitchens, ‘that Mother Teresa’s global income is more than enough to outfit several first-class clinics in Bengal.’ This would be missing the point, however.
It soon becomes clear that Mother Teresa was a religious fanatic who, in order to spread the Catholic faith, endeavoured to propagate the image of her charity homes as destitute and needy, and thus encourage greater publicity and funding, most of which has now disappeared. And as for staying out of politics, she flew around the world – to Britain, to the USA, to Spain, to Ireland – in order to meet statesmen and encourage the limiting or banning of abortion. Indeed, in her Nobel Peace Prize speech she claimed that ‘abortion is the worst evil, and the greatest enemy of peace.’ Hitchens, fair-mindedly, is impressed by the ‘high priority the Church gives to potential life,’ but ridicules their stance on contraception: ‘It might be added that the call to go forth and multiply, and to take no thought for the morrow, sounds grotesque when uttered by an elderly virgin…’
This short and cheaply available polemic is more than a witty exposure of a celebrity cult figure. It is also a critique of Catholic Church policy, and allows insight into the way that international media creates a myth. This was written nine years before Hitchens’s famed attack on God, and probably remains as the least dated of his earlier polemics. It hardly matters that he wrote this for when Mother Teresa was the height of her fame, since she is still revered as untouchable in our day. The language of this book is brisk and plain: there are no wasted words. Each sentence is a pointed barb to the rich, who relied on her myth to satisfy their bad conscience about the Third World: ‘It is time to recognise that the world’s leading exponent of this false consolation is herself a demagogue, an obscurantist and a servant of earthly powers.’