[Reader-list] Christopher Hitchens: Mommie Dearest

[geert lovink]

Mommie Dearest

The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a
fraud.

By Christopher Hitchens

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 "beatification" 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 first of all. It used to
be that a person could not even be nominated for "beatification," the
first step to "sainthood," until five 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 office 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
Mustafi, says that she didn't have a cancerous tumor in the first 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 affirm 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 hellfire and continence to the
poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She
said that suffering 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. 

One of the curses of India, as of other poor countries, is the quack
medicine man, who fleeces the sufferer by promises of miraculous
healing. Sunday was a great day for these parasites, who saw their
crummy methods endorsed by his holiness and given a more or less free
ride in the international press. Forgotten were the elementary rules of
logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that
what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without
evidence. More than that, we witnessed the elevation and consecration of
extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human
personality. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of
MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was
a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially
protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign
of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.

Correction, Oct. 21, 2003: This piece originally claimed that in her
Nobel Peace Prize lecture
<http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1979/teresa-lecture.html> , 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.( Return to corrected sentence.)

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and author of the
book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
<http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=2VXL
2BZ3NV&isbn=185984054X&itm=1> .

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2090083/