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Christopher Hitchens

THE MISSIONARY POSITION

Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

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 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 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 misdemeanour.

Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

Foreword and Acknowledgments

Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shrivelled 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 upwards 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 Janusczak 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 programme 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.