The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

by Christopher Hitchens

  It should be underlined that the state of affairs described by Dr. Fox was not that obtaining in some amateur, impoverished clinic in a disaster zone. Mother Teresa has been working in Calcutta for four and a half decades, and for nearly three of them she has been favored with immense quantities of money and material. Her “Home for the Dying,” which was the part of her dominion visited by Dr. Fox, is in no straitened condition. It is as he described it because that is how Mother Teresa wishes it to be. The neglect of what is commonly understood as proper medicine or care is not a superficial contradiction. It is the essence of the endeavor, the same essence that is evident in a cheerful sign which has been filmed on the wall of Mother Teresa’s morgue. It reads “I am going to heaven today.”

  According to many other former volunteers, Dr. Fox may have paid his visit on an unusually good day, or may have been unusually well looked after. Mary Loudon, a volunteer in Calcutta who has since written extensively about the lives of nuns and religious women, has this testimony to offer about the Home for the Dying:

  My initial impression was of all the photographs and footage I’ve ever seen of Belsen and places like that, because all the patients had shaved heads. No chairs anywhere, there were just these stretcher beds. They’re like First World War stretcher beds. There’s no garden, no yard even. No nothing. And I thought what is this? This is two rooms with fifty to sixty men in one, fifty to sixty women in another. They’re dying. They’re not being given a great deal of medical care. They’re not being given painkillers really beyond aspirin and maybe if you’re lucky some Brufen or something, for the sort of pain that goes with terminal cancer and the things they were dying of …

  They didn’t have enough drips. The needles they used and re-used over and over and over and you would see some of the nuns rinsing needles under the cold water tap. And I asked one of them why she was doing it and she said: “Well to clean it.” And I said, “Yes, but why are you not sterilizing it; why are you not boiling water and sterilizing your needles?” She said: “There’s no point. There’s no time.”

  The first day I was there when I’d finished working in the women’s ward I went and waited on the edge of the men’s ward for my boyfriend, who was looking after a boy of fifteen who was dying, and an American doctor told me that she had been trying to treat this boy. And that he had a really relatively simple kidney complaint that had simply got worse and worse and worse because he hadn’t had antibiotics. And he actually needed an operation. I don’t recall what the problem was, but she did tell me. And she was so angry, but also very resigned which so many people become in that situation. And she said, “Well, they won’t take him to hospital.” And I said: “Why? All you have to do is get a cab. Take him to the nearest hospital, demand that he has treatment. Get him an operation.” She said: “They don’t do it. They won’t do it. If they do it for one, they do it for everybody.” And I thought—but this kid is fifteen.

  Bear in mind that Mother Teresa’s global income is more than enough to outfit several first-class clinics in Bengal. The decision not to do so, and indeed to run instead a haphazard and cranky institution which would expose itself to litigation and protest were it run by any branch of the medical profession, is a deliberate one. The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection. Mother Teresa (who herself, it should be noted, has checked into some of the finest and costliest clinics and hospitals in the West during her bouts with heart trouble and old age) once gave this game away in a filmed interview. She described a person who was in the last agonies of cancer and suffering unbearable pain. With a smile, Mother Teresa told the camera what she told this terminal patient: “You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.” Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer’s reply: “Then please tell him to stop kissing me.” There are many people in the direst need and pain who have had cause to wish, in their own extremity, that Mother Teresa was less free with her own metaphysical caresses and a little more attentive to actual suffering.

  After I had helped to make Hell’s Angel, a documentary about Mother Teresa’s shortcomings which was screened on Channel Four in England in the autumn of 1994, I received a number of communications from former volunteers and even from former members of the Missionaries of Charity. Some wished to remain anonymous and some seemed actuated by motives of revenge or other personal disorders. My practice in citing the ones I consider to be genuine is as follows: the person must have been willing to be quoted by name and to give bona fide answers to some background questions. Let me instance Ms. Elgy Gillespie, author, journalist and sometime editor of The San Francisco Review of Books. Experienced in the care of AIDS patients, she spent some time at Mother Teresa’s San Francisco branch:

  Sent to cook in her hostel, tactfully named “The Gift of Love” (it is for homeless men with HIV), I found a dozen or so very sick men; but those who weren’t very sick were exceptionally depressed, because they were not allowed to watch TV or smoke or drink or have friends over. Even when they are dying, close friends are not allowed. They are never allowed to drink, even (or especially) at the funerals of their friends and roommates and some have been thrown out for coming home in drag! When I mentioned the Olympics to them, they looked even more depressed. “We are not watching the Olympics,” said a sister from Bombay, “because we are making our Lenten sacrifice.” When they’re very sick and very religious (which is often the case …) this doesn’t matter, but with brighter men or older men it seems intolerable.

  A Guatemalan writer that I befriended there was desperate to get out, so a friend of mine who also cooks there (an African American who is a practicing Catholic) adopted him for as long as she could. He became much sicker and when she begged him to go back because she couldn’t mind him, he begged her to keep him because he knew they didn’t medicate enough, or properly, and was afraid he would have to die without morphine … I am now cooking occasionally for the homeless men at the Franciscans where one of the patients, Bruce, is an ex-Mother Teresa and neither he nor the priest have a good word to say for the Sisters at “The Gift of Love.”

  Many volunteers at hostels and clinics from Calcutta to San Francisco have comparable tales to relate. Especially impressive is the testimony of Susan Shields, who for nine and a half years worked as a member of Mother Teresa’s order, living the daily discipline of a Missionary of Charity in the Bronx, in Rome and in San Francisco. I have her permission to quote from her unpublished manuscript, In Mother’s House, which is an honest, well-written account, offered by a woman who left the Missionaries of Charity for the same reason that she joined it—a love of her fellow humans.3 If her memoir reads like the testimony of a former cult member, this is because in many ways it is. She relates that, within the order, total obedience to the dictates of a single woman is enforced at every level. Questioning of authority is not an option.

  I was able to keep my complaining conscience quiet because we had been taught that the Holy Spirit was guiding Mother. To doubt her was a sign that we were lacking in trust and, even worse, guilty of the sin of pride. I shelved my objections and hoped that one day I would understand the many things that seemed to be contradictions.

  …

  One summer the sisters in the Rome novitiate were given a great quantity of tomatoes. They couldn’t give the tomatoes away because all their neighbors had grown their own. The superior decided that the sisters would can the tomatoes and eat them in the winter. When Mother came to visit and saw the canned tomatoes, she was very displeased. Missionaries of Charity do not store things but must rely only on God’s providence.

  …

  In San Francisco the sisters were given use of a three-storey convent with many large rooms, long hallways, two staircases and an immense basement.… The sisters lost no time in disposing of the unwanted furnishing. They removed the benches from the chapel and pulled up all the carpeti
ng in the rooms and hallways. They pushed thick mattresses out the windows and removed all the sofas, chairs and curtains from the premises. People from the neighborhood stood on the sidewalk and watched in amazement.

  The beautifully constructed house was made to conform to a way of life intended to help the sisters become holy. Large sitting rooms were turned into dormitories where beds were crowded together.… The heat remained off all winter in this exceedingly damp house. Several sisters got TB during the time I lived there.

  …

  In the Bronx, plans were being made to establish a new home for the poor. Many of the homeless were sick and needed more permanent accommodation than that offered by our night shelter. We had bought a large abandoned building from the city for one dollar. A co-worker offered to be the contractor and arranged for an architect to draw up plans for the renovations. Government regulations required that an elevator be installed for the use of the disabled. Mother would not allow an elevator. The city offered to pay for the elevator. Its offer was refused. After all the negotiations and plans, the project for the poor was abandoned because an elevator for the handicapped was unacceptable.

  This last anecdote may be familiar to some readers, because the New York press (which is fanatically loyal to Mother Teresa, as are most branches of the journalistic profession) wrote up the incident as a case of “politically correct” bureaucracy insisting on the rights of the disabled and negating the efforts of the missionaries. The truth is the exact reverse.

  It might be argued that extreme simplicity, even primitivism, is to be preferred to a luxurious or corrupting style of the sort that has overtaken religious orders in the past. Ms. Shields told herself things like this for years. However, she realized that, rather than a life of ascetism, theirs was a regime of austerity, rigidity, harshness and confusion. As might be expected, when the requirements of dogma clash with the needs of the poor, it is the latter which give way.

  She was disturbed that the poor were the ones who suffered from the sisters’ self-righteous adherence to “poverty.” She knew of immense quantities of money, donated in all sincerity by people “from all walks of life,” which lingered unproductively in bank accounts, the size of which even many of the sisters knew nothing about. The sisters were rarely allowed to spend money on the poor they were trying to help. Instead they were forced to plead poverty, thus manipulating generous, credulous people and enterprises into giving more goods, services and cash. Ms. Shields became uncomfortable with the deceit, pretense and hypocrisy—the ancient problem of the Pharisees and the too-ostentatious public worshippers:

  The flood of donations was considered to be a sign of God’s approval of Mother Teresa’s congregation. We were told that we received more gifts than other religious congregations because God was pleased with Mother, and because the Missionaries of Charity were the sisters who were faithful to the true spirit of religious life. Our bank account was already the size of a great fortune and increased with every postal service delivery. Around $50 million had collected in one checking account in the Bronx.… Those of us who worked in the office regularly understood that we were not to speak about our work. The donations rolled in and were deposited in the bank, but they had no effect on our ascetic lives or on the lives of the poor we were trying to help.

  Without an audit, it is impossible to say with certainty what becomes of Mother Teresa’s hoards of money, but it is possible to say what the true purpose and nature of the order is, and to what end the donations are accepted in the first place. Susan Shields again:

  For Mother, it was the spiritual well-being of the poor that mattered most. Material aid was a means of reaching their souls, of showing the poor that God loved them. In the homes for the dying, Mother taught the sisters how to secretly baptize those who were dying. Sisters were to ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a “ticket to heaven.” An affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. The sister was then to pretend she was just cooling the person’s forehead with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptizing him, saying quietly the necessary words. Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa’s sisters were baptizing Hindus and Moslems.

  Thus the smaller hypocrisy conceals a much greater one. “Our Constitution forbade us to beg for more than we needed, but the money in the bank was treated as if it did not exist.” And thus the affectation of modesty and humility masks both greed and ambition, not to say arrogance.

  I also have permission to quote from a letter I received from Emily Lewis, a seventy-five-year-old nurse who has worked in many of the most desperate quarters of the earth. At the time she wrote to me, she had just returned from a very arduous stint in Rwanda (a country about which Mother Teresa has been silent, perhaps because the Roman Catholic leadership in that country was complicit in the attempted genocide of the Tutsi people in the summer of 1994). Ms. Lewis’s testimony follows:

  My own experience of Mother Teresa occurred when she was being honored at the 1989 luncheon meeting of the International Health Organization in Washington, D.C. During her acceptance speech, she spoke at length of her opposition to contraception and her activities to save the unwanted products of heterosexual activity. (She also touched on AIDS, saying she did not want to label it a scourge of God but that it did seem like a just retribution for improper sexual conduct.) Although she said that God could find it in his heart to forgive all sinners, she herself would never allow a woman or a couple who had had an abortion to adopt one of “her” babies. In her speech Mother Teresa frequently referred to what God wants us to think or do. As my table-mate (an MD from Aid to International Development) remarked to me: “Do you think it takes a certain amount of arrogance to assume that you have a direct line to God’s mind?”

  Is it going too far to liken Mother Teresa to some of our infamous televangelists, turning their audiences on to what is in God’s heart and mind while encouraging and accepting all donations?

  The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate. The great white hope meets the great black hole; the mission to the heathen blends with the comforting myth of Florence Nightingale. As ever, the true address of the missionary is to the self-satisfaction of the sponsor and the donor, and not to the needs of the downtrodden. Helpless infants, abandoned derelicts, lepers and the terminally ill are the raw material for demonstrations of compassion. They are in no position to complain, and their passivity and abjection is considered a sterling trait. It is time to recognize that the world’s leading exponent of this false consolation is herself a demagogue, an obscurantist and a servant of earthly powers.

  3 It seems to me a disgrace that such an original piece of courageous work should have failed to find a publisher when the Pope can receive an advance of around $5 million for a book he did not write.

  II

  The Catholic Church is a limitless source of fascination, to believers as well as to doubters and unbelievers, because of its attitude toward sex and procreation. Its official dogmas, derived in the main from St. Paul but elaborated down the centuries, forbid clergy from being married and prohibit women from being clergy. Homosexual acts are condemned, as in a way are homosexual persons. Heterosexual acts taking place outside the bond of lawful matrimony are condemned, whether premarital or extramarital. The sexual act within marriage is frowned upon unless it has reproduction as its object. Solitary sex is taboo. The preaching of such a range of prohibitions, and its enforcement by male and female celibates, has been the fertile soil for innumerable reflections, autobiographies and polemics from the Confessions of St. Augustine to Mary McCarthy’s Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood.

  Reverence for life, especially in its vulnerable condition in utero, is a sine qua non of Catholic teaching, and one which possesses a great moral strength even in its extreme forms. A woman exper
iencing danger in childbirth, for example, is supposed to sacrifice her own life for that of the child. (Judaism, which has codes no less ethical, tends to mandate the opposite decision, for the greater good of the family.) When mass rapes occurred in the course of aggressive war in Bangladesh and later in Bosnia, Mother Teresa in the first case and the Pope in the second made strenuous appeals to the victims not to abort the seed of the invader and the violator. Give the child up for adoption, or raise it in a spirit unlike the one in which it was conceived—this was the injunction. While it can be seen as grotesque to lecture women who are in such desperate dilemmas, there is none the less something impressive and noble in the high priority the Church gives to potential life. Humans, it says, blaspheme when they throw away a fetus, because they cannot assume the right to dispose of another’s life and they cannot presume to know the future. Children born with appalling deformities in sordid and overcrowded homes have been known time and again, after all, to defy all material odds and become exemplary, or merely human.

  But the nobility of this essential teaching is compromised by the fact that it depends on an unnecessary theological assumption about “ensoulment”—the point at which Thomas Aquinas maintained that a life became human and immortal. Two objections can be made here, the first being that human life can and should be respected whether or not it is constituted by a creator with an immortal soul; to make the one position dependent upon the other is to make the respect in some way contingent. Second, if a fertilized egg is fully human, then all terminations of pregnancy at any stage and for any reason are to be regarded as murder. This offends against the natural or instinctive feeling in favor of the pregnant woman and the occupant of her womb, because it blurs the distinction between an embryonic group of cells and a human with a central nervous system. The distinction between abortions in the first and third trimesters, a distinction which speaks both to our ability to avoid casuistry and to our inborn wish to have a say in our own fates, is therefore null and void in Catholic teaching. Some of the coarsening in arguments on the other side of the case—arguments which bluntly and unscientifically define the fetus as a mere appendix to the woman’s body—no doubt result from confrontation with this absolutist edict.