Christopher Hitchens - The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

I bought The Missionary Position today after seeing a report on the news about a Canadian study that reached the same conclusion about Mother Teresa as Hitchens did; namely that she did very little to actually alleviate suffering but instead ran a massive propaganda machine that benefited from the plight of the poor and saw their suffering as noble. I expected the book to be virulently anti-Catholic, but it wasn't. Hitchens uses for evidence almost entirely Mother Teresa's own words and actions, with some reliance on former members of her order.

One of the strongest pieces of evidence that Hitchens has to support his thesis is the sheer amount of money that Missionaries of Charity took in compared to how much was spent on things like doctors and medical equipment. The results are staggering, and show a woman who was far more concerned with her own dogma than with actually relieving the suffering of the poor. Her hypocrisy is also stunning, as Hitchens points out that while supposedly advocating for the poor she hobnobbed with a variety of dictators whose regimes were supported on the backs of the poor and oppressed. It also bears mentioning that while she refused to provide adequate medical equipment or care for the suffering under her care, when she was faced with health problems she had nothing but the best medical attention.

My biggest problem with Mother Teresa is one that I had before reading The Missionary Position, although the book helped to solidify it. Namely, it is that Mother Teresa was more concerned with the so-called holiness of suffering experienced by the poor than with alleviating their pain (as evidenced by her telling a man who was wracked with pain that he was being kissed by Jesus rather than spending money on painkillers or doctors to help him). Her care for their souls far outstripped her care for their suffering, as one former member of her order has claimed that she authorized secret baptisms of non-Catholics without their permission. In addition, her own words condemn her as someone who was ultimately unconcerned with the poor. She explicitly said that caring for the poor was not an end in and of itself (she actually referred to this way of thinking as a danger!), but that caring for them was a way to reach heaven. This is important: she was not caring for them because they were suffering, or even because she wanted to help them get into heaven. She worked with them so that she herself could get into heaven.

Hitchens does a masterful job of exposing Mother Teresa's hypocrisy by doing what he set out to do: judging her reputation by her actions rather than her actions by her reputation.