The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice 
by 

Christopher Hitchens

 

Money Does Smell (Usually Badly)

Puncturing the self-inflated balloons of hypocritical cant is always entertaining. And Mother Teresa is right up there with Donald Trump when it comes to the latest fashion in imperial new clothes. Charity is its own reward or it is bunk. And anyone who sets charity up as a business becomes a huckster and seller of snake oil whatever they started out as. This is a law of nature and Hitchens confirms it magnificently in this wonderfully written case study.

It is empirically verifiable that authentic spiritual enthusiasm, or any idealism at all, has a limited half-life and degrades rapidly into obsession with ‘the numbers’ immediately upon the loss of an important customer or a major benefactor. At that moment the ‘mission’ no matter what it has been heretofore becomes bigger than oneself, an objectified, independent entity, that must be protected. This is the point when the idealist becomes the victim of his own hubris. And also the point when others are enrolled in the cause. As every entrepreneur knows, organisations are a bitch. They sap your strength and immerse everyone involved in political conflict.

Jesus discovered this cruel reality - the immediate distortion of himself and his message - as soon as he had assembled his motley Apostles and sent them on the road. Whatever they told the folk round about, it wasn’t very well received. And the Apostles themselves were clearly confused about the points to be made and their authority to make them. Eventually that confusion would be resolved by calling for devotion to the Church as the message. The result, we understand now, is a fixation on corporate reputation with practical consequences that range from the promotion of religious warfare to the protection of paedophilia.

Not that Mother Teresa started with motivations as pure as those of Jesus. From the start of her crusade to use the poor of the world to her best advantage she was “a religious fundamentalist, a political operative, a primitive sermonizer and an accomplice of worldly, secular powers.” She had a shibboleth for every occasion and press conference, usually using the word ‘love.’ She consciously used her stature and dress to create an effect of supplicatory humility. She was also a malicious control freak who imposed what she regarded as a therapeutic level of suffering on her charges as well as her staff.

Mother Teresa is in contention with Billy Graham as the world’s most successful televangelist. Certainly their claims to special personal revelation are on a par with each other. Their abilities to harvest the loose change of the rich and famous are comparable. Their affinities for right-wing government thugs are hard to distinguish. But at least Billy Graham kept accounts and was audited on occasion. No one knows how much Mother Teresa collected in her global ministry, how it was spent, and where it is now. Only one thing is certain: little of it went to any sort of palliative care for her inmates, who, according to numerous eyewitness testimony, were treated as living sacrifices to the God of pain.

“The conjurer is only the instrument of the audience,”says Hitchens. Although, the cheerleaders for MT’s audience differ from those of Trump’s (Hillary Clinton and Oprah are big on Mother Teresa), the bulk of the paying audience is about the same demographic in both cases - under-educated, evangelical idealists who would love to get their revenge on those in charge, in the next life if not in this one. But only after donating what they can’t afford to their respective campaigns for canonisation. Certainly Hitchens’s comment applies equally to both MT and DJT: “It is time to recognize that the world’s leading exponent of this false consolation is herself a demagogue, an obscurantist and a servant of earthly powers.”