The Missionary Position

Title: The Missionary Position – Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

Author: Christopher Hitchens

Publisher: Atlantic Books, 2012 (First published 1995)

ISBN: 9780857898388

Pages: 105

Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu (1910-1997), better known as Mother Teresa, was born in Albania and adopted India as her home. In a stay extending 68 years in India, she founded a religious order called the Missionaries of Charity and accepted the Indian saree as its habit. In a life devoted to the destitute, she did meritorious service to the cause of the poor in Kolkata. Indians recognised her as the personification of compassion and selfless service. The mother was awarded numerous distinctions from various countries, including India's top most civilian honour, Bharat Ratna and the Peace Nobel. It is astonishing to learn that people could find something in her career that deserved criticism. When I spotted this book, I was rather peeved at this supposedly shameless attempt to throw mud on the mother's unblemished track record. The title of the book simply seemed to be atrocious. But, when Christopher Hitchens is behind it, it is better to take notice. He does not tarnish Mother Teresa’s reputation in this book, but is only looking askance at some of her ways that smack of religious fanaticism and misplaced notions of kindness. All fans of Mother Teresa must read this, which would bolster her image on their minds in a new light, as a genuine criticism of what else more could she have done to help the poor.

This short book, at roughly hundred pages, is a rational enquiry, a calm lifting of the veil that drapes around its sacred subject. Hitchens examines the mother's public pronouncements, finances, projects and associates and reassess her reputation by her actions and words, rather than her actions and words by her reputation. The author himself had interviewed the Mother once in his journalistic career and came away disillusioned at some of the practices in her home for the dying in Kolkata. The Mother had magnanimously forgiven him for the outrage. This is picked up by Hitchens for another barb by saying that he had not sought her forgiveness. For the ordinary readers, this seems like a poor repartee, coming especially from such a brilliant writer as Hitchens.

Mother Teresa was canonized in 2016 as the Saint Teresa of Calcutta and she, along with Saint Francis Xavier were named co-patrons of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Kolkata. The author asserts that Pope John Paul II, who initiated the proceedings to elevate the mother to sainthood, was unusually fond of the canonization process. Between 1588 and 1988, Vatican canonized 679 saints. In the reign of the Polish Pope alone (till 1995), there have been 271 canonisations and 631 beatifications which Hitchens satirizes as the anteroom to sainthood. A bubble of myth which the author deflates is the supposed poverty of the Missionaries of Charity. It has 4000 nuns and 40000 lay workers in its rolls. It has for decades been the recipient of the extraordinary largesse of governments, large foundations, corporates and private citizens. The affectation of poverty has obscured this relative plenty. What is essential for the Mother Teresa cult is the impression that Kolkata is a hell hole and the emphasis on the poorest of the poor and the lowest of the low. This justly irritates many Bengalis. Kolkata is indeed poor, crowded and dirty but it is anything but abject. The people work and they struggle,but as a general rule, they do not beg. It is the city of Tagore and Bose and of a great flowering of culture and nationalism.

Hitchens’ most stinging criticism against Mother Teresa is her reluctance to provide systematic medical care even to dying patients. Some basic medicines were administered, without any diagnostic tests or palliative drugs. She preferred providence to planning. This was in spite of the capacity of her order to provide material comforts owing to the immense quantities of money and material donated to her coffers from around the world. The author quotes a case in which she tried to console a person in the terminal stages of cancer and writhing in pain and agony to becalm as Jesus was caressing him at that very instant, at which he begged the mother to beseech Jesus not to caress him anymore. This is contrasted with the Mother's own preferences when sick. Hitchens accuses that she had herself checked into some of the finest and costliest clinics and hospitals in the West during her bouts with heart trouble and old age. Moreover, within the order, total obedience to the dictates of a single woman is in force at every level. Questioning of authority is not an option in the Missionaries of Charity. He quotes several genuine ex-members including Susan Shields. She had served in the Mother's order for a decade and speaks about the irregularities in her famous book, Teresa’s House of Illusions. She describes about the baptism held secretly on Mother Teresa’s institutions:“In the homes of the dying, Mother taught the sisters how to secretly baptize those who were dying. Sisters were to ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a ticket to heaven. An affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. The sister was then to pretend she was just cooling the person's forehead with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptising him, saying quietly the necessary words. Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa’s sisters were baptizing Hindus and Muslims”(p.51).

An area in which the Mother could justifiably be criticised is where she makes religion as the sole basis for her pronouncements which have the power to adversely affect the lives of believers. She opposed abortion and sometimes even birth control. In India, which is also the world's second most populous country, the crucial importance of birth control need hardly be emphasized. Her fight against abortion was unconditional. When mass rapes occurred in the cause of the aggressive war in Bangladesh, Mother Teresa made strenuous appeals to the victims not to abort the seed of the invader and the violator(p.55). Her blind adherence to dogma enabled the fundamental faction within the Vatican to use her in two ways - first as an advertisement for the good works of the church to non-Catholics and the second as a potential instrument of moral persuasion within the ranks of the existing faithful.

The book is easy to read and can be finished pretty quickly. The rational critique of the Mother rightly fills a void in the literature associated with her good deeds. Hitchens has been irreverent to his illustrious protagonist, but keeps a gentleman's tone in the text, except on one occasion when he raves at the ‘thieving, fanatical Albanian dwarf’. It makes the readers sad to encounter such language coming from so enlightened an author.

The book is strongly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star