Mother Teresa, Hell's Angel Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit Wed, 03 Sep 1997 14:14:47 edt sent by "Dale Wharton" <1@dale.CAM.ORG> THE MISSIONARY POSITION : Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice by Christopher Hitchens, 1949-. London: Verso, 1995; 98 pp plus 16 pp photos. ISBN 1 85984 929 6. LOC call # BX4406.5 Z8H55 --reviewed 1997 08 30 by Dale Wharton, Montreal <52@dale.cam.org> SOMEONE somewhere (we trust, we wish to believe) is doing some good for the Third World. The squalor of those dark pitiful millions gets us down. The rich world has a poor conscience, we need helpers to relieve it. When anyone seems to fill the need we clasp them, not peering too closely into their motives or methods. "The great white hope meets the great black hole, the mission to the heathen blends with the comforting myth of Florence Nightingale" (p 49). Their repute--what we think of the people we know--builds upon their acts, what they say and do. Mass media reverse the order: deeds and words tend to be rated by reputations. Thus image and perception become crucial "...and those who possess them have the ability to determine their own myth, to be taken at their own evaluation" (p 6). SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL FOR GOD, a book by Malcolm Muggeridge, came out in 1971. It told of work by an extraordinary Christian nun, Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Muggeridge (who would later convert to Catholicism) had already narrated a BBC film with the same title. It is "...from this [1969 film that] we can date the arrival of Mother Teresa's `image' on the international retina" (p 22). A star and a cult were born. Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born in Skopje Albania on August 27, 1910. At 18 she entered an Irish order, the Sisters of Loreto. She stopped briefly in Zagreb, then Dublin, then settled in India. She taught geography for 19 years at St Mary's High School in Calcutta. In 1948 Agnes (called Sister Teresa) went down from the classroom to the streets, there to render wholehearted succor to the abject needy. By 1950 she made real her intent to found an order, to compose a rule and a discipline of her own, to be like St Francis and St Benedict. Mother Teresa's order is Missionaries of Charity. Now a multinational concern, it comprises 500-plus convents in 106 countries: 4000 nuns and 40 000 lay workers. Christopher Hitchens researched, met with Mother, visited part of her plant, talked and corresponded with workers. He judges that the chief aim of the Missionaries, as of all her work, is fundamentalist proselyting: winning religious converts. A former sister tells of quiet baptism in the Home for the Dying. If a vagrant agreed to a ticket to heaven, a nun would murmur the rite of baptism as she cooled the moribund forehead with wet cloth. Thus beggars who entered Hindu or Muslim would depart this world Christian. Author Hitchens is a periodical journalist who appears in The Nation (weekly) and Vanity Fair (monthly). He studied at Oxford. In 1994 he worked on "Hell's Angel," a TV documentary about Mother for England's Channel Four. This is the twelfth book he has written, coauthored, or edited. A dozen musings on religion dot the book. Their sources range from Aristide ("The Bible commands us to love our enemies. I love the Pope very much.") to Xenophanes ("Ethiopians imagine their gods as black and snub-nosed; Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired..."). Missionaries of Charity live as their clients do, plain and simply. Cash contributions rolling in are taken to signify heaven's favor. Their constitution forbids begging for more than they need, so money may be treated as if it did not exist. An insider reveals that $50 million lay in one Bronx checking account. The order demands total obedience at every level to the edicts, no matter how extreme, of one woman. Defectors confirm the order's cultish nature. One disillusioned nun thinks its canon is less ascetic than austere, rigid, harsh, and confused. She relates ways that dogma comes before needs of the poor. A visitor to the Home for Dying found that it looked like pictures of Belsen: shaved heads and stretcher beds. The Home can afford pain- relief drugs, but there are few beyond aspirin. Hitchens charges that Mother heads a cult based on death, torment, and subjection. He cites an interview in which she tells the camera what she said to a terminal cancer patient: "`You are suffering like Christ on the cross, so Jesus must be kissing you'" (p 41). In its issue of 17 September 1994, the editor of The Lancet reports, "Along with the neglect of diagnosis, the lack of good analgesia marks Mother Teresa's approach as clearly separate from the hospice movement. I know which I prefer" (p 37). English is official language across Mother's global domain. Emissary of a Vatican adroit at geopolitics, her theory of poverty exhorts to submit and be grateful. (In 1984, as Union Carbide's neglect caused the agony and death of thousands, she urged India to forgive, forgive. "Mother Teresa's flying visit to Bhopal read like a hasty exercise in damage control, the expedient containment of righteous secular indignation"--p 88.) She wins tribute as saintly ally of earthly power. Queen Elizabeth and Pope John Paul II honored her. UN Food and Agriculture Organization issued a medal with her picture on it. Prime Minister Thatcher and President Reagan received her. She took the Nobel Peace Prize. J-C Duvalier awarded her Haiti's Legion d'honneur. Charles H Keating Jr, the savings-and-loan baron, used to lend Mother his private jet. He gave her Missionaries more than $1 million (of other people's money). While California was proving how Keating robbed 17 000 citizens of $252 million, Mother wrote to his judge, Lance Ito. She sought clemency for her friend. In 1992 Keating was sentenced to 10 years (he actually served four--rare for a rich man). This book contains both her letter and the reply Deputy District Attorney Paul W Turley sent Mother. He reminds her that the indulgences market closed with the Reformation. He puts to her the same suggestions she made to Judge Ito: Look into your heart. Ask what Jesus would do (with the fruits of a crime). Turley held no doubts: He would return the loot that came from Keating. The attorney offered to put Mother in direct touch with Keating's victims, the rightful owners of property now in her possession. By June 1995 his offer was still unacknowledged. ## Bibliographic database fields (input to addbib program): a= Christopher (Eric) Hitchens, 1949- c= London d= 1995 g= ISBN 1 85984 929 6 i= Verso (imprint of New Left Books) p= xv, 98 p plus 16 p photos, 23 cm t= The missionary position : Mother Teresa in theory and practice ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org =================================================================