December 14–21, 1995

book quarterly

Lives Of The Saints

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

By Christopher Hitchens

Verso, 98 p., $12.95.

Last year, when Vanity Fair and The Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens co-produced Hell's Angel, a British TV documentary slamming the works of Mother Teresa, international outrage ensued. The show was labeled blasphemous, and Hitchens received several death threats and countless "How dare you!" letters and comments.

Good journalists, of course, are supposed to ask the inappropriate questions. This being said, I was nevertheless disappointed in Hitchens' new book on Mother Teresa. While he raises plenty of legitimate concerns, the book is marred by the personal nature of his attack on the former Agnes Bojaxhiu, and by his larger assault on religion itself.

Hitchens is highly persuasive in illustrating just how dangerous Mother Teresa's hospice work is. Relying on a first-hand visit to her Calcutta mission, as well as testimony from ex-staffers and medical experts, he paints a Dickensian view of her patients' suffering in inadequate medical conditions — not enough money to run lab tests, needles used and reused without sterilization. Meanwhile, Mother Teresa accrues over $50 million in bank accounts and globetrots with dignitaries asking for more bucks, pleading poverty. Certainly we should be as skeptical about Mother Teresa's financial dealings as we've been about the financial dealings of Jim and Tammy Faye Baker.

What keeps The Missionary Position from being a greater book is Hitchens' genuine hatred of Mother Teresa. He uses anything and everything to paint her as a phony, from photo-ops with malevolent world leaders to name-calling (from "religious fundamentalist" to "demagogue" to "Gorgon"). This isn't a reporter examining both sides of an issue; this is a guy with a vendetta.

Throughout the book Hitchens throws in historical epigrams denouncing religion as superstition. He maligns the odious Christian Coalition for positively quoting Mother Teresa, and he concludes that religion "is a means for marketing hope and of instilling ethical precepts on the cheap."

When Amazing Grace author Jonathan Kozol spoke in Center City last month, he remarked that one reason the Christian Coalition came to power has been the vacuum created by the Left's refusal to discuss spiritual matters. The Missionary Position is effective in raising questions about one of the world's great spiritual icons. But it fails to acknowledge that people of all ideologies still hold deep spiritual beliefs, and that while exploiting religion is wrong, religion is not — in and of itself — evil.