: Christopher Hitchens
: The Missionary Position Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
: Atlantic Books
: 9780857898401
: 1
: CHF 10.30
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: Christentum
: English
: 128
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Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, feted by politicians, the Church and the world's media, Mother Teresa of Calcutta appears to be on the fast track to sainthood. But what makes Mother Teresa so divine? In this frank and damning exposé of the Teresa cult, Hitchens details the nature and limits of one woman's mission to help the world's poor. He probes the source of the heroic status bestowed upon an Albanian nun whose only declared wish was to serve God. He asks whether Mother Teresa's good works answered any higher purpose than the need of the world's privileged to see someone, somewhere, doing something for the Third World. He unmasks pseudo-miracles, questions Mother Teresa's fitness to adjudicate on matters of sex and reproduction, and reports on a version of saintly ubiquity which affords genial relations with dictators, corrupt tycoons and convicted frauds. Is Mother Teresa merely an essential salve to the conscience of the rich West, or an expert PR machine for the Catholic Church? In its caustic iconoclasm and unsparing wit, The Missionary Position showcases the devastating effect of Hitchens' writing at its polemical best. A dirty job but someone had to do it. By the end of this elegantly written, brilliantly argued piece of polemic, it is not looking good for Mother Teresa. - Sunday Times

Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and Visiting Professor in liberal studies at the New School in New York. He was named one of the world's 'Top 100 Public Intellectuals' by Foreign Policy and Prospect. His books include Love, Poverty& War and Blood, Class& Empire. Thomas Paine's Rights of Man and God Is Not Great were published by Atlantic Books.

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 andhear-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 mutteringOh, 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 ofThe 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