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POSITIVELY EXUDING BONHOMIE

FIGHTING WORDS

Mommie Dearest
The pope beati ies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.
By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
OCT 20, 2003 • 4:04 PM
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Mother Teresa of Calcutta in December 1991.

Raveendran/AFP Getty Images

In 2003, Pope John Paul II approved the beati ication of Mother Teresa. At the time,
Christopher Hitchens called Mother Teresa “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud,”
arguing that “even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed.” On Sept. 4,
2016, Pope Francis will canonize Mother Teresa. Hitchens’ original essay is
republished below.

I think it was Macaulay who said that the Roman Catholic Church deserved great
credit for, and owed its longevity to, its ability to handle and contain fanaticism. This
rather oblique compliment belongs to a more serious age. What is so striking about
the “beati ication” of the woman who styled herself “Mother” Teresa is the abject
surrender, on the part of the church, to the forces of showbiz, superstition, and
populism.

It’s the sheer tawdriness that strikes the eye irst of all. It used to be that a person
could not even be nominated for “beati ication,” the irst step to “sainthood,” until ive
years after his or her death. This was to guard against local or popular enthusiasm in
the promotion of dubious characters. The pope nominated MT a year after her death
in 1997. It also used to be that an apparatus of inquiry was set in train, including the
scrutiny of an advocatus diaboli or “devil’s advocate,” to test any extraordinary claims.
The pope has abolished this of ice and has created more instant saints than all his
predecessors combined as far back as the 16th century.
As for the “miracle” that had to be attested, what can one say? Surely any
respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the obviousness of the fakery. A Bengali
woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of
MT, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor.
Her physician, Dr. Ranjan Musta i, says that she didn’t have a cancerous tumor in the
irst place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of
prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican’s investigators? No. (As it
happens, I myself was interviewed by them but only in the most perfunctory way. The
procedure still does demand a show of consultation with doubters, and a show of
consultation was what, in this case, it got.)

According to an uncontradicted report in the Italian paper L’Eco di Bergamo, the

Vatican’s secretary of state sent a letter to senior cardinals in June, asking on behalf
of the pope whether they favored making MT a saint right away. The pope’s clear
intention has been to speed the process up in order to perform the ceremony in his
own lifetime. The response was in the negative, according to Father Brian
Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who has acted as postulator or advocate for the
“canonization.” But the damage, to such integrity as the process possesses, has
already been done.

During the deliberations over the Second Vatican Council, under the stewardship of
Pope John XXIII, MT was to the fore in opposing all suggestions of reform. What was
needed, she maintained, was more work and more faith, not doctrinal revision. Her
position was ultra-reactionary and fundamentalist even in orthodox Catholic
terms. Believers are indeed enjoined to abhor and eschew abortion, but they are not
required to af irm that abortion is “the greatest destroyer of peace,” as MT
fantastically asserted to a dumbfounded audience when receiving the Nobel Peace
Prize.* Believers are likewise enjoined to abhor and eschew divorce, but they are not
required to insist that a ban on divorce and remarriage be a part of the state
constitution, as MT demanded in a referendum in Ireland (which her side narrowly
lost) in 1996. Later in that same year, she told Ladies Home Journal that she was
pleased by the divorce of her friend Princess Diana, because the marriage had so
obviously been an unhappy one …

This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to
the rich while preaching hell ire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of
the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that su ering was a gift from God. She
spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment
of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory
reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated
money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return)
and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and
all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when
she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick
herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own
claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the
name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?

The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own
unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for “the poorest of
the poor.” People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a
vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered
to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back
abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the
“Missionaries of Charity,” but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell’s
admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty
until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and
uninquiring propaganda.
 Correction, Oct. 21, 2003: This piece originally claimed that in her Nobel Peace Prize
lecture, Mother Teresa called abortion and contraception the greatest threats to
world peace. In that speech Mother Teresa did call abortion “the greatest destroyer of
peace.” But she did not much discuss contraception, except to praise “natural” family
planning.

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