Mommie Dearest (Slate trashes Mother Teresa!)

Slate- MSN ^ | 10/20/03 | Christopher Hitchens

[Barney Gumble]

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 and contraception, but they are not required to affirm that abortion and contraception are the greatest threat to world 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.

[TheCrusader]

"That's why she refuses to allow terminally ill patients in her "hospices" to receive painkillers That is quirky. I thought the official Catholic Church's doctrine was that these medications are just fine."

Ahem, hospices are not hospitals or clinics, they are not authorized to give out medications. They are where the destitute dying go to die with dignity and love.

[adam_az]

And yes, NFP does work. (from a Protestant who's used it not because of religious conviction.) You just have to learn how... and it requires self discipline. Surprise surprise.

Other techniques work as well. You are a fool if you think the "rhythm method" makes you somehow a superior person.

[Bullish]

I don't beleive in the catholic religion and I don't beleive in saints. I do however, belive in Jesus Christ.

Having said that, I believe Chris Hitchens is right on the money. MT and the catholic church are frauds. All the proof has been out there for ages.

[NYer]

Thank you, Barney, for posting this article.

It's 'open season' on the Catholic Church; catholic bashing is 'de rigueur'. The media began with the sinners and have now moved on to the sinless.

It is obvious that Slate is completely ignorant of the works performed by Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Nearly 50 years ago, Mother Teresa found a woman "half eaten by maggots and rats" lying in front of a Calcutta hospital. The diminutive Roman Catholic nun sat with the woman until she died. Soon after, she began a campaign for a shelter for people to die with dignity. Until her death, she made a mission of caring for the human castoffs the world wanted to forget.

When is the last time 'Slate' scraped a human being off the street, leaving portions of his back that had adhered to the asphalt, and carried him home to wash, feed and clothe him, and, more importantly, give him a death with dignity. Nah! It is so much easier to quell the conscience by denigrating those who do, ascribing ulterior motives to them.

[adam_az]

Nah, there were some other minor differences too. Such as the 500 hospices for the sick and dying that Mother Teresa founded, and the fact that she forsook her considerable family wealth to live a life of poverty while toiling in the gutters of Calcutta to minister to those dying in the streets with festering sores. She also lived a life of chastity to immitate Jesus, something that ol' Jesse Jackson would have to snicker at. Oh, did I mention that she always refused to sleep on a mattress and chose the cold, hard floor as a gesture of love and solidarity for the poor people she so dearly loved?

Does that include her visits to high priced western health clinics, while she lets people rot without pain releif in her "hospices," telling them that suffering brings salvation? She's a mother alright - the mother of all hypocrites.

[The Red Zone]

Ahem, if a doctor prescribes a medication to someone in a hospice they can't take it?

[adam_az]

Hitch's statement calling Mother Teresa a "fraud" because she opposed birth control gives the game away. He is really just opposed to Catholics who take their faith seriously.

And while it's OK with you for Catholics to moralize to the rest of us heathens, if one of us question Catholic cachetisms, we are "anti-catholic?"

You can shove that hypocricy right up your inquisition-hole. ;)

[adam_az]

They said this about Jesus when he sat and ate with sinners. Yawn.

Can you show me where it's written that Jesus lionized the sinners as Theresa lionized the Duvaliers?

[Porterville]

I wouldn't worry about Christopher Hitchens, I think it is safe to say he is going to hell....

[adam_az]

I'm not Catholic, so I have no right to comment on MT's sainthood. Unless Hitchens is Catholic, he has no right to comment either.

Sure you do, as much as Catholics have the "right" to criticize us for not following their religion. Those damn victims of the inquisition - they should have just shut up too while they were being tortured.

[polemikos]

Christopher Hitchens has had it in for her for a very long time. I don't get it.

[ChinaGotTheGoodsOnClinton]

What do you know, a liberal who hates Catholicism, who in particular save his venom for CONSERVATIVE Catholics like MT and JPII.

I am surprized...NOT!

[adam_az]

"That's why she refuses to allow terminally ill patients in her "hospices" to receive painkillers That is quirky. I thought the official Catholic Church's doctrine was that these medications are just fine."

Hospices in the US regularly give out pain releif including strong opiates to termainally ill people.

[The Red Zone]

Does that include her visits to high priced western health clinics, while she lets people rot without pain releif in her "hospices," telling them that suffering brings salvation?

If this is the best she can do under her circumstances this is better than nothing, of course, but did she refuse to allow doctors -- even Catholic doctors -- to come in and prescribe additional aid? "As you do unto the least of them, so you do unto Me."

[willyboyishere]

You won't get my vote, everything Hitchens says about Mother Teresa is true, and he's expounded on her elsewhere at much greater length, and more comprehensively. Her reputation elsewhere in the world (especially India) is considerably more ambivalent than it is here, and in the Vatican, apparently. Teresa's motto to all those despots where she had a mission seemed to be "Keep maimin' 'em, our shoulders are broad", and the "love" she showed the dying was predicated on their willingness to die without help (real medical help) from her or her "organization".

[adam_az]

It's 'open season' on the Catholic Church; catholic bashing is 'de rigueur'. The media began with the sinners and have now moved on to the sinless.

What goes around comes around from those of us tired of being told we are "sinners" by the Catholic Church. Being told I'm a sinner by a Catholic is the real "Catholic Hate Speech!"

[Straight Vermonter]

"She said that suffering was a gift from God."

She did indeed say that. She meant that by suffering we can get closer to God. Her own order chooses poverty and living with the poor so they may learn to see God in this way. I think Mr Hitchens interprets her words in a way he knows to be untrue. I can not believe this woman ever wished poverty on anyone.

[Campion]

You are a fool if you think the "rhythm method" makes you somehow a superior person.

It's a good bet you know more about being a fool than about being a superior person.

[The Red Zone]

Well you are a sinner. And I am a sinner. And Mother Teresa was a sinner. The bible says so, regardless of what the Catholic Church may or may not say.