2023/04/30

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice - Wikipedia

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice - Wikipedia

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

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The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
Missionary Position book Mother Teresa.jpg
AuthorChristopher Hitchens
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
SubjectMother Teresa
PublisherVerso
Publication date
1995
Pages128 pages
ISBN1-85984-054-X
OCLC33358318
271/.97 B 20
LC ClassBX4406.5.Z8 H55 1995

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice is a book by the British-American journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens published in 1995. It is a critique of the work and philosophy of Mother Teresa, the founder of an international Roman Catholic religious congregation, and it challenges the mainstream media's assessment of her charitable efforts. The book's thesis, as summarized by one critic, was that "Mother Teresa is less interested in helping the poor than in using them as an indefatigable source of wretchedness on which to fuel the expansion of her fundamentalist Roman Catholic beliefs."[1]

Only 128 pages in length,[1] it was re-issued in paperback and ebook form with a foreword by Thomas Mallon in 2012.[2]

Background[edit]

Hitchens addressed the subject of Mother Teresa on several occasions before publishing The Missionary Position. In 1992 he devoted one of his regular columns in The Nation to her.[3] In 1993 he discussed her during an interview on C-SPAN's Booknotes, noting public reaction: "If you touch the idea of sainthood, especially in this country, people feel you've taken something from them personally. I'm fascinated because we like to look down on other religious beliefs as being tribal and superstitious but never dare criticize our own."[4] In 1994 he contributed to a 25-minute essay broadcast on British television.[5] A New York Times critic thought the show should provoke other journalists to visit Calcutta and conduct their own investigations.[6] He recounted his work on the television production in Vanity Fair in early 1995.[7] In the foreword to The Missionary Position, he described these activities as "early polemics", part of "a battle",[8] and estimated that The Missionary Position represented an expansion of the television script "by about a third".[9]

The back cover of the first edition carried several of the customary blurbs praising the book as well as one that quoted the New York Press: "If there is a hell, Hitchens is going there for this book."[10]

Later events[edit]

Christopher Hitchens in 2005

In 2001, Hitchens testified in opposition before the body of the Washington Archdiocese that was considering the cause of Mother Teresa's sainthood. He described his role as that of the traditional devil's advocate, charged with scrutinising the candidate's sanctity.[11] Mother Teresa was beatified in October 2003.[12] Hitchens marked the occasion by questioning the speed of the modern beatification process and describing "the obviousness of the fakery" of the miracle attributed to her. He argued that she "was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty" and "a friend to the worst of the rich". He wrote that the press was to blame for its "soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda" on her behalf.[13] She was canonized as Saint Teresa of Kolkata in September 2016.[14]

Synopsis[edit]

The introduction is devoted to Mother Teresa's acceptance of an award from the government of Haiti, which Hitchens uses to discuss her relationship to the Duvalier regime. From her praise of the country's corrupt first family, he writes, "Other questions arise … all of them touching on matters of saintliness, modesty, humility and devotion to the poor."[15] He adds other examples of Mother Teresa's relationships with powerful people with what he considers dubious reputations. He quickly reviews Mother Teresa's saintly reputation in books devoted to her and describes the process of beatification and canonization under Pope John Paul II. Finally, he disclaims any quarrel with Mother Teresa herself and says he is more concerned with the public view of her: "What follows here is an argument not with a deceiver but with the deceived."[16]

The first section, "A Miracle", discusses the popular view of Mother Teresa and focuses on the 1969 BBC documentary Something Wonderful for God which brought her to the attention of the general public and served as the basis for the book of the same title by Malcolm Muggeridge. Hitchens says that Calcutta's reputation as a place of abject poverty, "a hellhole", is not deserved, but nevertheless provides a sympathetic context for Mother Teresa's work there.[17] He quotes from conversations between Muggeridge and Mother Teresa, providing his own commentary. He quotes Muggeridge's description of "the technically unaccountable light" the BBC team filmed in the interior of the Home of the Dying as "the first authentic photographic miracle".[18] Hitchens contrasts this with the cameraman's statement that what Muggeridge thought was a miracle was the result of them using the latest Kodak low light film.[19]

The second section, "Good Works and Heroic Deeds", has three chapters:

  • Asserting that Mother Teresa serves her own religious beliefs and reputation, Hitchens questions the popular belief that Mother Teresa is nevertheless addressing the physical needs of the poor. He quotes several who have visited her institutions or worked in them to establish that the medical care provided does not compare with that provided in a hospice, lacked diagnostic services, and eschewed even basic pain medications. He says that rather than asceticism, her institutions are characterized by "austerity, rigidity, harshness and confusion" because "when the requirements of dogma clash with the needs of the poor, it is the latter which give way."[20] He quotes a former member of her order who describes baptisms of the dying performed without their consent.
  • Hitchens reviews the Catholic Church's moral teaching on abortion, sympathizing in general but objecting first to its "absolutist edict"[21] that makes no distinction between a fertilized egg and later stages of development, and second to its proscription on birth control. Noting conservative Catholics who have dissented from this last teaching, he identifies Mother Teresa as "the most consistently reactionary figure." Hitchens quotes her speech when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979: "Today, abortion is the worst evil, and the greatest enemy of peace."[22] Hitchens goes on to argue that women become empowered when given the right to contraceptives. He writes that giving women control over their fertility and empowering them is the only known cure to poverty.
  • Hitchens describes the prize money awarded Mother Teresa, "the extraordinary largesse of governments, large foundations, corporations and private citizens",[23] to call into question whether her avowed poverty is not the affectation of poverty. He describes her ties to financier Charles Keating, who gave her $1.25 million before being convicted for his role in the savings and loan scandal (1986–1995). He includes a facsimile of a letter she wrote testifying to Keating's good character, followed by a letter from the prosecutor's office to Mother Teresa detailing Keating's crimes, the thousands of people he "fleeced without flinching" of $252 million. The prosecutor asked her to do "what Jesus would do if he were in possession of money that had been stolen, … if he were being exploited by a thief to ease his conscience". Hitchens ends by noting that the letter has not had a response.[24]

The third section, "Ubiquity", has two chapters:

  • Hitchens describes Mother Teresa's Albanian background and political events in the Balkans to establish the importance of her 1990 visit to the nationalist Mother Albania monument in Tirana, an assertion of Catholic expansionist sentiment in the unstable former Yugoslavia.[25]
  • Hitchens notes the consistency with which Mother Teresa has backed powerful interests aligned against the powerless: Union Carbide following the 1984 Bhopal disaster, the government of Margaret Thatcher, the administration of Ronald Reagan. She visited Nicaragua to side with the CIA-backed Contras against the Sandinistas.[26]

Reception[edit]

In the London Review of Books, Amit Chaudhuri praised the book: "Hitchens's investigations have been a solitary and courageous endeavour. The book is extremely well-written, with a sanity and sympathy that tempers its irony." He commented that the portrait "is in danger of assuming the one-dimensionality of the Mother Teresa of her admirers", and that he finished the book without much more of an idea of the character and motivations of Mother Teresa.[27] In The New York Times Bruno Maddox wrote: "Like all good pamphlets... it is very short, zealously over-written and rails wild". He called its arguments "rather convincing", made "with consummate style."[1] The Sunday Times said: "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."[28]

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, in a critical review that appeared in 1996 wrote: "If this sounds like nonsense, well, it is."[29] Though he admired Hitchens generally as a writer and "provocateur", Donohue has said that Hitchens was "totally overrated as a scholar ... sloppy in his research".[30] Donohue released a book to coincide with Saint Teresa's canonization, entitled "Unmasking Mother Teresa's Critics". In an interview, Donohue said, "Unlike Hitchens, who wrote a 98-page book with no footnotes, no endnotes, no bibliography, no attribution at all, just 98 pages of unsupported opinion, I have a short book too. But I actually have more footnotes than I have pages in the book. That's because I want people to check my sources."[31]

The New York Review of Books provided a series of contrasting assessments of both Mother Teresa's and Hitchens's views over several months, beginning with a review of The Missionary Position by Murray Kempton who found Hitchens persuasive that Mother Teresa's "love for the poor is curiously detached from every expectation or even desire for the betterment of their mortal lot". His essay matched the tone of Hitchens's prose: "The swindler Charles Keating gave her $1.25 million—most dubiously his own to give—and she rewarded him with the 'personalized crucifix' he doubtless found of sovereign use as an ornamental camouflage for his pirate flag." He condemned her for baptizing those "incapable of informed consent" and for "her service at Madame Duvalier's altar". Kempton saw Hitchens's work as a contrast with his avowed atheism and more representative of a Christian whose protests "resonate with the severities of orthodoxy".[32] In reply, James Martin, S.J., culture editor of the magazine America, acknowledged that Mother Teresa "accepted donations from dictators and other unsavory characters [and] tolerates substandard medical conditions in her hospices." Without mentioning Hitchens, he called Kempton's review "hysterical" and made two points, that she took advantage of high quality medical care for herself most likely at the urging of other members of her order and that the care her order provides is "comfort and solace" for the dying, not "primary health care" as other orders do. Martin closed his remarks by stating that there "would seem to be two choices" regarding those poor people in the developing world who die neglected: "First, to cluck one’s tongue that such a group of people should even exist. Second, to act: to provide comfort and solace to these individuals as they face death. Mr. Kempton chooses the former. Mother Teresa, for all of her faults, chooses the latter."[33]

Literary critic and sinologist Simon Leys wrote that "the attacks which are being directed at Mother Teresa all boil down to one single crime: she endeavors to be a Christian, in the most literal sense of the word". He compared her accepting "the hospitality of crooks, millionaires, and criminals" to Christ's relations with unsavory individuals, said that on his deathbed he would prefer the comfort Mother Teresa's order provides to the services of "a modern social worker". He defended secretly baptizing the dying as "a generous mark of sincere concern and affection". He concluded by comparing journalists' treatment of Mother Teresa to Christ being spat upon.[33]

In reply to Leys, Hitchens noted that in April 1996 Mother Teresa welcomed Princess Diana's divorce after advising the Irish to oppose the right of civil divorce and remarriage in a November 1995 national referendum. He thought this buttressed his case that Mother Teresa preached different gospels to the rich and the poor. He disputed whether Christ ever praised someone like the Duvaliers or accepted funds "stolen from small and humble savers" by the likes of Charles Keating. He identified Leys with religious leaders who "claim that all criticism is abusive, blasphemous, and defamatory by definition".[34] Leys replied in turn, writing that Hitchens' book "contain[ed] a remarkable number of howlers on elementary aspects of Christianity"[35] and accusing Hitchens of "a complete ignorance of the position of the Catholic Church on the issues of marriage, divorce, and remarriage" and a "strong and vehement distaste for Mother Teresa."[36]

In 1999, Charles Taylor of Salon called The Missionary Position "brilliant" and wrote that it "should have laid the myth of Mother Teresa’s saintliness to rest once and for all."[37]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Jump up to:a b c Maddox, Bruno (14 January 1996). "Books in Brief: Nonfiction". The New York Times. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
  2. ^ Bosman, Julie (5 March 2012). "Three Hitchens Books Returning to Print". The New York Times. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
  3. ^ "Mother Teresa: Ghoul of Calcutta", The Nation, April 1992, reprinted in For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (Verso, 1994)
  4. ^ Lamb, Brian (17 October 1993). "For the Sake of Argument". Booknotes. Archived from the original on 17 November 2010. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
  5. ^ "Hell's Angel", shown on 8 November 1994 on Channel Four in its arts series "Without Walls".
  6. ^ Goodman, Walter (8 February 1995). "A Skeptical Look at Mother Teresa". The New York Times. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
  7. ^ Christopher Hitchens, "Mother Teresa and Me", Vanity Fair, February 1995
  8. ^ The Missionary Position, "Foreword", page xii
  9. ^ Interview with Matt Cherry, Free Inquiry, Volume 16, Number 4. Fall 1996
  10. ^ Karvajal, Doreen (13 October 1997). "Book jacket blurbs are, by definition, shameless". The New York Times. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
  11. ^ Thomas Mallon, "Foreword" to the 2012 edition, xiii
  12. ^ Cowell, Alan (20 October 2003). "Before Throngs, Pope Leads Mother Teresa Closer to Sainthood". The New York Times. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
  13. ^ Hitchens, Christopher (20 October 2003). "Mommie Dearest". Slate. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
  14. ^ Winfield, Nicole (4 September 2016). "Mother Teresa honored as saint and model of mercy". The Washington Post. Associated Press. Archived from the original on 5 September 2016.
  15. ^ Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Verso, 1995), 5
  16. ^ Hitchens, Missionary Position, 15
  17. ^ Hitchens, Missionary Position, 22–24
  18. ^ Hitchens, Missionary Position, 25–26
  19. ^ Hitchens, Missionary Position, 26–27
  20. ^ Hitchens, Missionary Position, 46
  21. ^ Hitchens, Missionary Position, 53
  22. ^ Hitchens, Missionary Position, 56–57
  23. ^ Hitchens, Missionary Position, 61
  24. ^ Hitchens, Missionary Position, 64–71
  25. ^ Hitchens, Missionary Position, 81–83
  26. ^ Hitchens, Missionary Position, 86ff.
  27. ^ Chaudhuri, Amit. "Why Calcutta?". London Review of Books. Archived from the original on 26 September 2012. Retrieved 15 March 2012.
  28. ^ Robert Kee, "Gentle arrogance", The Sunday Times (UK), 10 November 1995
  29. ^ William Donohue (19 March 1996). "Hating Mother Theresa". Catholicleague.org. Retrieved 30 January 2013.
  30. ^ Bill. "DONOHUE ON HITCHENS". Catholic League. Retrieved 29 October 2019.
  31. ^ "Answering Mother Teresa's critics". angelusnews.com. Archived from the original on 3 September 2016.
  32. ^ Kempton, Murray (11 July 1996). "The Shadow Saint". New York Review of Books. Retrieved 13 August 2014.
  33. ^ Jump up to:a b "In Defense of Mother Teresa". New York Review of Books. 19 September 1996. Retrieved 13 August 2014.
  34. ^ Hitchens, Christopher (19 December 1996). "Mother Teresa". New York Review of Books. Retrieved 13 August 2014.
  35. ^ Leys, Simon (9 January 1997). "On Mother Teresa". ISSN 0028-7504. Retrieved 16 October 2019.
  36. ^ Leys, Simon (9 January 1997). "On Mother Teresa". New York Review of Books. Retrieved 13 August 2014.
  37. ^ Taylor, Charles (7 June 1999). "The (un)friendly witness of Christopher Hitchens". Salon.com. Retrieved 4 March 2017.



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Christopher Hitchens

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice Paperback – April 10, 2012
by Christopher Hitchens (Author), Thomas Mallon (Foreword)
4.5 out of 5 stars (4.5) 2,607 ratings

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"A religious fundamentalist, a political operative, a primitive sermonizer, and an accomplice of worldly secular powers. Her mission has always been of this kind. The irony is that she has never been able to induce anybody to believe her. It is past time that she was duly honored and taken at her word."

Among his many books, perhaps none have sparked more outrage than The Missionary Position, Christopher Hitchens's meticulous study of the life and deeds of Mother Teresa.

A Nobel Peace Prize recipient beatified by the Catholic Church in 2003, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was celebrated by heads of state and adored by millions for her work on behalf of the poor. In his measured critique, Hitchens asks only that Mother Teresa's reputation be judged by her actions-not the other way around.

With characteristic élan and rhetorical dexterity, Hitchens eviscerates the fawning cult of Teresa, recasting the Albanian missionary as a spurious, despotic, and megalomaniacal operative of the wealthy who long opposed measures to end poverty, and fraternized, for financial gain, with tyrants and white-collar criminals throughout the world.
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Review
"Hilariously mean."―John Waters

"Convincing . . . Hitchens argues his case with consummate style."―New York Times Book Review

"Anyone with ambivalent feelings about the influence of Catholic dogma (especially concerning sex and procreation); about the media's manufacture of images; or about what one can, should, or shouldn't do for someone less fortunate, should read this book."―San Francisco Bay Guardian

"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 (London)

"If there is a hell, Hitchens is going there for this book."―New York Press
About the Author
Christopher Hitchens was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair,Slate, and the Atlantic, and the author of numerous books, including works on Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and George Orwell. He also wrote the international bestsellers god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitch-22: A Memoir, and Arguably. He died in December 2011.


Product details
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Twelve; New edition (April 10, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 128 pages
4.5 out of 5 stars (4.5) 2,607 ratings

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Christopher Hitchens


Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was the author of Letters to a Young Contrarian, and the bestseller No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family. A regular contributor to Vanity Fair, The Atlantic Monthly and Slate, Hitchens also wrote for The Weekly Standard, The National Review, and The Independent, and appeared on The Daily Show, Charlie Rose, The Chris Matthew's Show, Real Time with Bill Maher, and C-Span's Washington Journal. He was named one of the world's "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Britain's Prospect.






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Raghu Nathan
5.0 out of 5 stars The Great white Hope meets the Great black holeReviewed in the United States on April 4, 2013
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Christopher Hitchens' book is a blistering indictment of the cult of Mother Teresa. It investigates systematically the innards of Mother Teresa's charity in Calcutta and exposes it mostly as a sham with a great chasm lying between myth and reality. Hitchens is an anti-thiest (as he likes to call himself) and so has no sympathy for religion and belief in God. Still, this book is purely a rational exercise in simply evaluating Mother Teresa's reputation by her actions and words instead of the other way around. In doing so, he finds that the Mother is just one more 'holy' person of dubious distinction. For me as an Indian, it is a familiar tale, as India is so full of fraudulent Gurus and Swamis who amass money, selling the idea of Liberation and Heaven to gullible devotees and followers.

Contrary to the widely-publicised image of Mother Teresa as a compassionate nun saving countless number of poor Indians from dying, Hitchens demonstrates the following to be the truth:

1. That the Calcutta charity did not like to spend its vast wealth in providing care to save the sick and dying. It rather spent the money on establishing more convents across the world, all doing similar dubious work.
2. That it was a Catholic cult based on glorifying poverty, suffering, subjection and death. The cult was focused on prosyletization above saving lives. The dying poor were allowed to die, but die as Christians, because then only Jesus would save them. Towards this end, sick and dying Indians of other faiths would be brought to the charity and baptized, often without their knowledge, as they lay awaiting death.
3. That the conditions in the so-called 'hospital' of the Calcutta charity were often unhygienic and the staff poorly trained. They re-used needles over and over and washed them in cold, tap water instead of sterilizing them. Many inmates died not because they were incurable but because the charity wouldn't spend the money necessary to save them.
4. That Mother Teresa took multi-million dollar donations from shady and dubious characters like Charles Keating, Papa doc Duvalier and others and repaid the debt by interceding on their behalf. For example, she wrote to Judge Lance Ito in support of Charles Keating, who cheated ordinary hard-working Americans to the tune of $250 million.
5. That she was just a reactionary figure who advocated the rights of the unborn child even as she let adults and children under her care die for lack of desire to spend money to save them; that she glorified poverty and suffering and denounced materialism even as she sought and accepted millions of dollars as donations.

There is a thread that links people like Mother Teresa and the other high-profile Gurus and Swamis in India. It is not a surprise that they all tend to be reactionary, have outmoded views and are mostly out of touch with the pulse of society. Most of the Gurus tend to be people who grew up in rural parts of India in the 1930s and 1940s, when the social mores were highly repressive compared to today. Women were terribly discriminated against and constrained, caste oppression was pervasive and illiteracy was rampant. These gurus would have often only had a few years of religious education which mostly reinforced such prejudices. They were often un-exposed to secular science based education. Much later, when they get anointed as Swamis by some vested interests in urban India, they bring all their baggage into their 'liberating' Ashrams. Often, men and women are severely segregated in these ashrams because that is what the gurus know society to be. They are often against women's education and empowerment. They often patronize the rich and powerful and practise caste discrimination. In a similar way, Mother Teresa grew up in a rural Albanian/Macedonian region in the 1930s and had only church-influenced education. She also never had any exposure to the enlightened European education. So, it is not a surprise that she is against contraception in an India that sought to reduce population growth. It is not a surprise that she thought that abortion is the biggest crime. It is not a surprise that she patronized frauds like Duvalier and Keating because they gave her big donations and professed themselves to be good Christians.
Christopher Hitchens has done a great service by tearing the mask of such people who think that they have a hotline to God.

The book is written in Hitchens' trade-mark style of hard-hitiing prose. One can see it even in the choice of the title. As an example, I would cite the following:
Commenting upon the decision of advice columnist Ann Landers to share one of Mother Teresa's prescriptions for improving the world ("smile more"), Hitchens writes," ...it is doubtful whether a fortune-cookie maxim of such cretinous condescension would have been chosen by even Ann Landers unless it bore the imprimateur of Mother Teresa, one of the few untouchables in the mental universe of the mediocre and the credulous".
This is vintage Christorpher Hitchens!

The book is not a polemic but a well-argued, rational critique. In fact, the foreword to the twelfth edition by Thomas Mellon sums up the book so well that one can hardly do better in a review. I loved it.

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Tim Challies
4.0 out of 5 stars Well-Argued & Narrowly FocusedReviewed in the United States on March 10, 2005
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"If there is a hell, Hitchens is going there for this book." So said the New York Press in respose to The Missionary Position, subtitled Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Written in 1995, during the height of Mother Teresa's popularity, this book was Hitchens' attempt to debunk the myth that was, and remains, Mother Teresa.

Written from the perspective of one who clearly is not a Christian, this book has been likened to a cruise missle. It is narrow in scope, yet devastatingly effective, for it strikes right to the heart of the matter. How are we to reconcile Mother Teresa, who cares for the sick and destitute, and Mother Teresa who holds hands and laughs with the wife of a brutal and notorious dictator? How are we to reconcile her desire to live out Christianity when she accepts million-dollar donations from the likes of Charles Keating?

The most significant chapter in this book is one which displays Mother Teresa's overwhelming hypocrisy. The author reproduces a letter that was sent from Mother Teresa to Judge Lance Ito, seeking clemency on his behalf. She suggests that while she knows nothing of his business dealings (in which he defrauded people of $250,000,000) what is more important is the service he has rendered to the poor. She asks that the judge to do what Jesus would do, which she evidently believes would be to let him free. Los Angeles deputy D.A., Paul Turley wrote a response to Mother Teresa, suggested that she should return the $1.25 million dollars given to her by Keating, promising he would return it to the rightful owner. He received no response.

Many others have written about Mother Teresa and have chastised her for this type of hypocrisy. Many have validated the claims that her care for the poor was more in providing a comfortable place for people to die than in seeking to heal them. Many have shown that she hoarded tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for no apparent purpose when these funds could have gone to build the finest hospitals and orphanages in India. And many Christian writers have shown that her faith bore only a passing resemblance to Christianity. But, as far as I know, this is the most significant (and only book-length treatment) of the subject, though at a mere 98 pages it reads more like an essay than a book.

As one who reads primarily books written by professed Christians, I was taken aback by Hitchens' prevailing attitude. "Given how much this Church allows the fanatic Mother Teresa to preach, it might be added that the call to go forth and multiply, and to take no thought for the morrow, sounds grotesque when uttered by an elderly virgin whose chief claim to reverence is that she ministers to the inevitable losers in this very lottery" (page 59). He is cynical, angry, hateful and sarcastic all at once. He despises the hypocrisy he sees in Mother Teresa and seems happy to extend his disillusionment to religion in general. He attacks not only Mother Teresa, but also Roman Catholic doctrine and practice, and even further, extends his attacks to Christianity and the Bible, especially Christian teaching on the sanctity of human life. And throughout, he uses only four footnotes, providing little evidence to support his claims. Despite all that, he argues effectively and some may even say, devastatingly.

In some ways this subject hardly seems to matter anymore, now that Mother Teresa has long since died. Yet her legacy lives on. Mother Teresa is still lauded as a hero by Catholics, Protestants and people of every other creed. It seems amply clear to those who are willing to look that her legacy is largely ficticious.

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I. Penning
5.0 out of 5 stars A very short, but essential readReviewed in the United Kingdom on October 25, 2020
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As an aethiest, I always felt there were aspects of church behaviour that were still beneficial to the world. In particular, acts of charity, including running schools, hospitals and hospices always seemed to me to be a situation where the good outweighed the bad; you might have had religion forced upon you, but at least you'd been educated and fed right?
And a name that rode high in that balance of accepting necessary evils was that of Mother Teresa. In fact, I believed that whilst churches and their leaders were morally bankrupt exploiters of the poor and the weak, she was somehow above that.
Short as it is, this book is going to be a tough read for many; if I as an aethiest found my view challenged by it, imagine how hard it is to accept if you actually believe that Mother Teresa was actually some sort of embodiment of God.
But because of this it is an essential read for both believers and non-believers; it's amazing how we have all been manipulated by this seemingly innocent individual.
It is a short book, and to be honest, I didn't enjoy the writing style. I also had issues with the title at the outset, feeling it to be unesseserily crass, but by the end, if that's what worries you, you really need to have a long hard think.
But above all, it is essential; an exposé of an individual who has painted themself as saintly, whilst supporting murderous regimes. Who has promoted themself as humanitarian, whilst denying the poorest in the world, basic pain management and the ability to control their own destinies so that she and her ilk can maintain their positions as saviours, whilst doing nothing of the sort.
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Philomena
1.0 out of 5 stars A Short Hatchet Job Highlighting Glaring Questions About Attention to DetailReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 10, 2022
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If you are going to pillory an icon then you ought to pay attention to detail. How accurate is this short hatchet job on a revered figure who lived a very long life and who was, as we all are, imperfect? Could nobody be found who was prepared to say a good word for her? The answer is no if all you have at your disposal is this short missive.

Two glaring errors leap out at anybody who has even a passing knowledge of Holy Writ, which suggest that the writer's methods of research were not particularly extensive. The first appears on page 24 (of the Kindle version). He declares that when he was visiting the Missionaries of Charity "I received something of a shock. First was the inscription over the door which read "He that loveth correction loveth knowledge". I don't know the provenance of that quotation but it had something of the workhouse about it". Clearly he could not be bothered to discover its provenance before wading in with his highly distorted interpretation. In fact it comes from Proverbs 12:1 and is concerned with the instruction and acquisition of wisdom and therefore with learning and bears no connection whatsoever to the horrors of the workhouse. Asking a local cleric, or even Mother Teresa herself, where this quotation originated from was clearly beyond his capacity.

The second is even more jarring and appears on page 29 where he proclaims sanctimoniously "This is the passage in which Jesus breaks a costly box of unguent exclusively on his own feet". In fact, and unsurprisingly, this story appears in all four Gospels and as these can hardly be described as lengthy documents it would not be an onerous task to check any quotation from them. In Matthew 26:7 and Mark 14: 3 an unnamed woman poured the ointment over his head, in Luke 7: 37/38 an unnamed woman identified as a sinner poured the ointment over his feet and in John 12:3 Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus poured the ointment over his feet. The writer had four different versions to choose from upon which he could expound, instead he supplied a fifth version contributed either by an extremely faulty memory or a fertile imagination. And if he has highlighted his own apocryphal tale that Jesus supposedly poured "a costly box of unguent exclusively over his own feet" how much of the rest of his diatribe can be relied upon as an impartial analysis of accurate information?
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Ed
5.0 out of 5 stars Eye-opening Book. Well Worth a Read!Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 14, 2016
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I really enjoyed this book, I thought that despite the short length Hitchen's makes his points clearly and concisely. There is no (that I can see) hyperbole and Hitchens states the facts about Mother Teresa (albeit I will concede, a selective view of the facts)

I was slightly surprised that it was so short considering Christopher's love for the written word but leading on from my earlier point, to make this book longer may have been to add pointless filler.

I suppose I am more disappointed with the tone of virtually all of the negative reviews I read. Most have something to say along the lines of: "I bet Christopher Hitchens has never done X for charity/the homeless" etc. Well to those people: Christopher Hitchens never claimed otherwise. To say that because he hasn't done these things makes his book bad, simply comes across as a way of avoiding the uncomfortable truths that are revealed in this book.

Overall, this book showed me new facts that I did not know before and after my own research I have come to a conclusion in agreement with that of Christopher Hitchens.
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CloselyObservedEnglish
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent IconoclasmReviewed in the United Kingdom on February 19, 2019
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We should always be careful who we place on a pedestal, and we should always keep our eyes open when we do. Mother Teresa is the best example of this - she is regarded as a saint by so many, and yet - why? In this long-form essay, Christopher Hitchens sets himself the task of demolishing the mythology of the Albanian nun, and so proves himself the ultimate iconoclast along the way. A quick read - but then everything Hitchens wrote is a quick read, it's so good.

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andrewmartin172
2.0 out of 5 stars A Missed OpportunityReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 5, 2019
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I was very disappointed in this book. To be fair, it is not the book's fault in that Mother Teresa's appalling behaviour and attitudes are now beyond dispute, and thus it has lost its capacity to shock. However it has two faults. Firstly, the writing style is elegant but lacks impact. Secondly, and more importantly, it is largely misdirected. Hitchens makes reference to the fact that someone so totally unworthy nevertheless became idolised by the media and the Catholic church, and yet leaves it largely unexplored. That is where the real scandal lies (as he himself acknowledges) and where the most telling points could, and should, be made.

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