The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice Read online

  ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

  BOOKS

  Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger

  Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies

  Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles

  Why Orwell Matters

  No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton

  Letters to a Young Contrarian

  The Trial of Henry Kissinger

  Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

  Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”: A Biography

  God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

  The Portable Atheist

  Hitch-22: A Memoir

  Arguably: Essays

  PAMPHLETS

  Karl Marx and the Paris Commune

  The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish

  The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

  A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq

  ESSAYS

  Prepared for the Worst: Essays and Minority Reports

  For the Sake of Argument

  Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere

  Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays

  COLLABORATIONS

  James Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner)

  Blaming the Victims (edited with Edward Said)

  When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (photographs by Ed Kash)

  International Territory: The United Nations (photographs by Adam Bartos)

  Vanity Fair’s Hollywood (with Graydon Carter and David Friend)

  Copyright © 2012 by Christopher Hitchens

  Foreword to this edition © 2012 by Thomas Mallon

  Signal is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House Canada Limited

  Published simultaneously in the United States of America by Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  One Toronto Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5C 2V6

  www.mcclelland.com

  eISBN: 978-0-7710-3919-5

  v3.1

  For Edwin and Gertrude Blue:

  saintly but secular.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  A Miracle

  Good Works and Heroic Virtues Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Ubiquity Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Afterword

  Foreword

  During the middle of the last decade, in his great period of political apostasy, Christopher Hitchens often entertained, along with his older left-leaning pals, a sprinkling of younger conservative journalists and operatives, all of them not only thrilled to be in his company—who ever wasn’t?—but also grateful and deeply reassured to have such a blue-chip intellectual on their side of the Iraq War, that historical moment’s great divide.

  I would smile quietly while these young men cheered him on and hear-hear’d. Just wait, I’d think, knowing the moment would arrive when the ideological fiddler would have to be paid, when the host would change the topic and the earnest and happy young men would be reduced to looking at their shoes and muttering Oh, well, yes, I suppose. I like to think of this as the Mother Teresa Moment, named for Hitch’s most incendiary cultural dissent but applicable to any subject that might startle the Christian soldiers of the Bush administration into remembering that, apart from Saddam Hussein, Hitch remained entirely his unreconstructed secular and socialist self.

  Hitchens’s disdain for the “thieving, fanatical Albanian dwarf”—i.e., Mother Teresa—became so famous that new readers of The Missionary Position may be surprised to discover that the phrase appears nowhere in this slender volume. If the book’s main title produces a guffaw, its subhead (“Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice”) more closely tracks its spirit. Far from being some cackle of defilement, or even just a bit of bad-boy blasphemy, The Missionary Position is, in fact, a modest, rational inquiry, a calm lifting of the veil that drapes its sacred subject. “Once the decision is taken to do without awe and reverence, if only for a moment,” writes Hitchens, “the Mother Teresa phenomenon assumes the proportions of the ordinary and even the political.” The author wishes to examine his subject’s public pronouncements, her finances, projects and associates, and to judge “Mother Teresa’s reputation by her actions and words rather than her actions and words by her reputation.”

  Does anyone have a problem with that?

  What’s under the veil turns out to be pretty unsightly: Mother Teresa’s missions—backed by a yachtful of grifters from Haitian first lady Michèle Duvalier to 1980s S&L fleecer Charles Keating—are revealed to be less concerned with eliminating the poverty of the poor (and even their attendant physical pain) than with extending those things as their means toward salvation in the afterlife: “The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection.” Hitchens’s most devastating source is “Mother” herself: She “has never pretended that her work is anything but a fundamentalist religious campaign,” through which the poorest of the poor, the least of these, must grin and bear it until they’re transmuted from being the last to the first.

  Hitch being Hitch, he cannot, here and there, resist pouring it on for the reader’s edified delight. Commenting upon the decision of advice columnist Ann Landers to share one of Mother’s prescriptions for improving the world (“smile more”), he writes: “It is … doubtful whether a fortune-cookie maxim of such cretinous condescension would have been chosen even by Ann Landers unless it bore the imprimatur of Mother Teresa, one of the few untouchables in the mental universe of the mediocre and the credulous.”

  But The Missionary Position remains less a polemic than an investigation rooted in personal passion. In the manner of such intrepid, also-departed colleagues as Oriana Fallaci and Ryszard Kapuściński, Hitchens traveled the world toward eruptions of what fundamentally agitated him, and that was tyranny. “This is,” he writes in the book’s original foreword, “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.” Preferring “anti-theist” to “atheist,” Hitchens liked to draw comparisons between Christianity and North Korea, both mental kingdoms offering their inhabitants the chance to commit “thought crime” and to deliver “everlasting praise” of the leader.

  This small book is part of a big career devoted to pulverizing cant, deflating oppression, and maximizing human liberty. Not a day went by that Hitch didn’t enter the lists against some iniquity. Nearly all his causes were noble; a few we
re quixotic and probably not worth his time. I remember one piece he wrote a half-dozen years ago in defense of free speech for David Irving, the Holocaust-denying historian. Writing against the clock, with his usual urgency, he made a slip of the keyboard in an attempted reference to one of Irving’s editors, putting down “Thomas Mallon” for “Thomas Dunne.” Oh, joy, I thought, seeing my name mistakenly next to Irving’s in the pages of The Wall Street Journal. I sent Hitch an e-mail that began, more or less: “I know that to the sons of British naval officers all of us Micks must seem the same, but.…” He responded late that night with “Oh, fuck,” or words to that effect—no apology, just an injunction to turn up, the next day, at a demonstration he was organizing to support the Danish cartoonists who’d recently had the temerity to draw the prophet Mohammed. I thought about going, knew that I should, and finally never made it. If you want one more epitaph to add to all the ones that already have been suggested for this dual man-of-letters/man-of-action, let it be: He Showed Up. Throughout his life and times, whenever and wherever something important was on the line, he presented himself.

  The Missionary Position appeared in 1995, eight years before Mother Teresa’s beatification, an occurrence that Hitchens had seen rushing our way. He notes in his text how Pope John Paul II was readying so many candidates so quickly for this enhanced status (“the ante-room to sainthood”) that the process had begun to “[recall] the baptism by firehose with which Chinese generals Christianized their armies.”

  In the event, Hitchens played a necessary, if negative, role in Mother Teresa’s elevation, testifying before an official church body as to her unworthiness. He explained the task, undertaken in 2001, in the magazine Free Inquiry: “The present pope … has abolished the traditional office of ‘Devil’s Advocate,’ so I drew the job of representing the Evil One, as it were, pro bono. Fine by me—I don’t believe in Satan either.” The writer’s wife, Carol, can recall sending Hitch off to Father David O’Connor of the Washington, D.C., archdiocese to perform this strange and futile exercise in debunking, and then welcoming him home to lunch in their apartment on Columbia Road, as if he’d just come back from a radio interview.

  Another, even more significant, development—this one, too, coming years after The Missionary Position—was the publication of Mother Teresa’s letters. The spiritual doubts they were discovered to contain created a sensation worthy of the cover of Time. Let me present just one extract: “Jesus has a very special love for you,” Mother Teresa wrote to the Reverend Michael Van Der Peet in 1979, the year she received her Nobel Peace Prize. “As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.” No, let’s quote one more passage, just in case this was some momentary slip: “I am told God loves me—and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”

  You mean you’re not sure?

  Had these letters been available to him in the 1990s, I can hear Hitchens asking Mother Teresa just that question, face-to-face, as she showed him around the Calcutta orphanage. And it seems to me that the existence of such doubts makes her enterprise all the more breathtakingly presumptuous: She in fact was not one of “those who know they are right.” She felt no certainty that the poverty she was barely palliating would lead its sufferers toward an eternal reward. It is one thing to take Pascal’s wager and bet on the existence of God, no matter what one’s doubts may be. But to lead thousands of others to the gaming table, insisting that they double down with their one paltry handful of chips?

  After his cancer diagnosis, I often prayed, on my knees and through all my own doubts, for Hitch. Not for his soul; just for his earthly continuation. Nothing bothered me more during the long months of his illness (and suffering) than having to watch interviewers ask him if he might now not be ready to change his mind on matters cosmic. He met such inquiries with a sort of Christian forbearance, treated them as one more teachable moment in which he could explain his position. And throughout this grim period, by his conduct and example, he provided me with one specific religious certainty, the only one I’ve had in a very long time: If God does exist, He would have been deeply disappointed in any renunciation of nonbelief by Christopher Hitchens, that spectacular piece of His handicraft, the worthiest foe among all His brilliant, wayward sons of the morning.

  Thomas Mallon

  February 2012

  One may safely affirm that all popular theology has a kind of appetite for absurdity and contradiction.… While their gloomy apprehensions make them ascribe to Him measures of conduct which in human creatures would be blamed, they must still affect to praise and admire that conduct in the object of their devotional addresses. Thus it may safely be affirmed that popular religions are really, in the conception of their more vulgar votaries, a species of daemonism.

  David Hume, The Natural History of Religion

  Nothing to fear in God. Nothing to feel in death. Good can be attained. Evil can be endured.

  Diogenes of Oenoanda

  Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.

  Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

  Acknowledgments

  Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shriveled 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 upward 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 Januszczak 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 program 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 fund
amental 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 honor the freethinking humanists, who scorned to use the fear of death to coerce and flatter the poor.

  Ethiopians imagine their gods as black and snub-nosed; Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired. But if horses or lions had hands, or could draw and fashion works as men do, horses would draw the gods shaped like horses and lions like lions, making the gods resemble themselves.

  Xenophanes

  Introduction

  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 and to establish an identity separate from that of the parental, L’Assaut 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.