Medicine and books

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

"Who would be so base," asks Christopher Hitchens, "as to pick on a wizened, shrivelled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her whole life to the needy and destitute?"

The answer is Hitchens himself, in this provocative study of the life of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. He presents a marvellous case, debunking the myth of Mother Teresa as simply as one might peel layers from an onion, producing some old and quite a lot of new evidence to suggest that Mother Teresa, the global icon of sainthood, needs fresh examination in a light unclouded by sentiment.

Mother Teresa's shining reputation, argues Hitchens, has been foist upon her by the millions who need to feel that someone, somewhere, is doing the things that they are not to help the poor. She feeds on it, has come to accept and expect it. Now it walks immediately before her, is as recognisable as the blue and white striped sari and veil of her order: no one, least of all Mother Teresa herself, can see past it.

Hitchens has set out to reverse the process of critical assessment, "judging Mother Teresa's reputation by her actions and words rather than the actions and words by her reputation."

His research is thorough and his findings compelling. Where does all her money go, for a start? For this Hitchens can find no satisfactory answer, although there is no doubt that Mother Teresa could, if she chose, set up the finest teaching hospital on the Indian subcontinent. She hasn't done so, and to those like myself or Robin Fox (who wrote in the Lancet about her Calcuttan home for the dying) who have visited her organisations and seen syringes run under cold water and reused, aspirin given to those with terminal cancer, and cold baths given to everyone, this is inexcusable.

As Hitchens says: "The decision not to [fund a proper hospital], and to run instead a haphazard and cranky institution which would expose itself to litigation and protest were it run by any branch of the medical profession, is a deliberate one. The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection." (And please note, adds Hitchens, that Mother Teresa herself has checked into some of the costliest clinics and hospitals in the West for her own treatment.)

Her apologists would have Mother Teresa down as some kind of innocent; as someone who doesn't know about business and politics, who is concerned only with God and God's will. Hmm. As Hitchens pointed out last year in the Channel 4 documentary Hell's Angel, Mother Teresa has kept some dodgy company over the years. She has received hospitality, awards, publicity, and money from numerous people with overt political motives or dubious business histories: Robert Maxwell; the Duvaliers; the Reagans; Margaret Thatcher; and Charles Keating, the great American swindler. When Keating was imprisoned for fraud and embezzlement, Mother Teresa wrote asking the trial judge to look kindly on him. She received a reply from one of the prosecutors, explaining that the $10000 she had received from Keating was stolen from innocent (and not especially wealthy) investors. Would she be good enough to return it? Apparently not. She didn't even reply to the letter.

Such blatant and deliberate ignorance, such faux naivete indicates enormous arrogance on Mother Teresa's part. This is shameful even in a woman who may be simply rather stupid. Claiming to be above, or beneath, politics, she speaks out against abortion in Britain and Ireland while remaining silent on the subject of the unlawful deaths, murders, and oppression in Bhopal, Haiti, and Albania, where she kisses the hands of ruling dictators and receives their money and their honours.

At what point, asks Hitchens, does Mother Teresa's association with frauds and despots cease to be coincidental? I would argue that it is not so much coincidence as pragmatism. At worst, Mother Teresa is without much conscience: at best, she is an opportunist, travelling happily on the wave of others' desire for association with someone universally recognised as good, and possibly even touched by the divine. Of course she has become addicted to it, fallen prey to her own myth; and her humility has been consumed in the process, gobbled up by primitive theology and vanity, leaving behind only the bare bones of what was once a good and noble idea.--MARY LOUDON, author, London

Mary Loudon