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

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice | Christopher Hitchens | 100% Accurate

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The Missionary Pos...

	The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice Christopher Hitchens Verso, 1997 - 98 pages average customer review:based on 138 reviews view larger image
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Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, feted by politicians, the Church and the world's media, Mother Teresa of Calcutta appears to be on the fast track to sainthood. But what, asks Christopher Hitchens, makes Mother Teresa so divine? In a frank expose of the Teresa cult, Hitchens details the nature and limits of one woman's mission to the world's poor. He probes the source of the heroic status bestowed upon an Albanian nun whose only declared wish is to serve God. He asks whether Mother Teresa's good works answer any higher purpose than the need of the world's privileged to see someone, somewhere, doing something for the Third World. He unmasks pseudo-miracles, questions Mother Teresa's fitness to adjudicate on matters of sex and reproduction, and reports on a version of saintly ubiquity which affords genial relations with dictators, corrupt tycoons and convicted frauds.

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A superb expose of a deeply hypocritical woman

During her lifetime, Mother Teresa was as close to canonization as it was possible to get without actually being dead. The front cover of Time magazine called her a "Living Saint". A cult of holiness surrounded her and in the eyes of the media and many politicians she could do no wrong. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and awarded numerous honors in the countries she visited.

The facts however didn't match the illusion and public perception and Christopher Hitchens had the courage to say so. He exposes her revolting attitude towards the dying, namely that they were there to die and to suffer; in that way they became closer to Christ. Care, compassion and alievement of pain were practically non-existent in her `clinics'. Standard clinical procedures and medical diagnosis was also spurned because they were materialistic. Provenance was to be preferred at all times. Hitchens also shows deceit was practiced as a matter of course towards those of other religions who were secretly baptized without their knowledge by sisters who were supposed to be caring for them.

Then there is her fawning over politicians, including some of the worst despots of the latter twentieth century. The Duvalier's of Haiti and Hoxha of her native Albania were amongst the most notoriously repressive regimes, yet as Hitchens documents, this living saint was there giving them her blessing. If she could preach her message against abortion and her present advocacy of unlimited population growth at the same time, so much the better. Not so much reducing the suffering in the world as adding to it would appear to be Mother Teresa's legacy.

There is also the little matter of money and as Hitchens points out, there is rather a lot of it, that was handed over in the name of charity or humanitarian support. Very little of this ever went to benefit the poor for whom it was intended. Rather it disappeared into unaudited bank accounts. One account in the Bronx had over $50 million dollars, yet Mother Teresa was on record as saying she wouldn't accept altruism. She was quite happy to accept money from fraudsters such as Charles Keating, but ignored a letter from the man investigating Keating's massive thefts requesting its return. It might also be asked where the money came from which allowed Teresa to fly around the world often at short notice. As far as I know, the world's commercial airlines have never operated a policy of free seats to the religious.

Hitchens' book does not set out to be a hatchet job but he has not surprisingly received a fair amount of criticism for writing it. However there has never been any convincing explanations put forward by Teresa's apologists to any of Hitchen's criticisms, yet there has been much silence since he former living saint was hoisted to a higher plane following beatification in 2003. For those who are determined to see Mother Teresa as the embodiment of religious holiness nothing will convince them of anything untoward. However, if you do have doubts about the abuse of religious power and the ways in which all manner of lies are justified on the back of adherence to religious dogma, this book will provide a most illuminating window into a highly corrupt world.

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The true story of mother Theresa. The chapter on her buddy Charles Keating is particularly enlightening.

Bitter-Sweet

I have been reading Hitchens' books quite avidly in the last half of the year, and this book landed in my hands after finishing the superb God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

I should confess I felt a little dirty as the pages started to turn. Despite my enjoyment of Hitchen's prose, this book left a bit of an aftertaste in my mouth, a disappointment similar to finding out that Santa does not exist.

But as terse and poignant it may read this book is not a bitter ad hominem attack on the person of Mother Theresa. It is rather a criticism on the ways that she, other people and even institutions have benefited from the artificial creation of her over-inflated saintly myth and the political/monetary advantages it procured.

The book sometimes reads a bit dry, but the information, quotations, official letters included made it worth my while. And at 98 pages, it is not too long a while.

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Just another globalist tool

I really didn't need to read this book to figure out that Mother Teresa was just another globalist tool and a propaganda/fundraising cash cow for the Catholic church but Missionary Position does a good job of driving that point home and giving good solid evidence to that fact. To give a few examples, the millions she took from the mega swindler Keating and never returned, her response to the Dupont chemical spill in India instead of seeking justice and calling to make Dupont acountable was telling people to "just forgive" so as not to cause any problems with the globalist corporats. Then of course there were the notoriously deplorable conditions in her hospitals and shelters, totally filthy, where they not only reused needles but their idea of sterilizing them was washing them with cold water! Also people were not given proper pain medication (Mother Teresa had this idea that the more you suffered the closer you were to Christ!) So you had things like this going on but at the same time it was found out in just the bank account for her shelters in the New York area there was $50 million dollars sitting idly. When the city of San Francisco donated a fully furnished shelter to her for a shelter for homeless men who had AIDS she promptly had all the couchs, beds and televisions thrown out insuring that the dying would live as comfortless as possible. All I can say is thankfully this cash cow for the forces of evil in this world is dead!

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