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Missionary Position

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I do not know anything about Catholicism so I would not dispute mother's religious ideology. But one thing I know is MC is surely not about helping the poor.

1. Any small charitable organization (including many catholic/christian organizations)in Calcutta do thousand times more to help the poors of Calcutta. Although MC does some charitable work, it is so miniscule given the amount of donation it recieves I would call it only a religious organization, certainly not a charity.

2. Contrary to popular belief, MC helps primarily christians or makes sure those who recieve help converts to Catholicism. Of course there are exceptions. I am against any religion which do not consider people of other religion as equally worthy human beings.

3. In the last 30 years of her life, mother spent overwhelmingly more time touring the Western world than working with the poor in Calcutta. I doubt whether even 0.01% of Calcutta's poor ever even saw her.

Of course I do not mind the above things and mother had a constitutionally guranteed right to religious freedom and to spend her organizations money the way she wants, but as a Calcuttan I do take offense in her extremely negative (if not outright lying) portyal of Calcutta. Just like any other third world or Indian cities, Calcutta also has its share of poverty but it is by no means greater than any other city of India. In reality, Calcutta is better off than most of the other cities in India. Not only it had a very vibrant cultural/social/political life for last 200 years, till date it continues to be the cultural capital of India and one of the most tolerant, multi-cultural, liberal city of India. Calcutta boasts the best public traportation system among Indian cities, it is not as densely populated as Delhi or Mumbai and it is not as polluted as Delhi. The real estate price in Calcutta will be higher than London, believe it or not!! Yes, there are homeless people in Calcutta (so are there in New York), but most of them are not beggars. They do odd jobs but not rich enough to afford a home. There is no wide-spread hunger in Calcutta, food is plenty, cheap and available in vast quantities. The government does enough to take care of the poor and I can gurantee, that even if you search really hard, you wont see the kind of squalor and poverty in Calcutta that mother made her Western followers believe. Interestingly, most of the Westerners get frustrated by not seeing enough poverty when they visit Calcutta, so the locals arrange some kind of poverty tour! and they search hard and find out the most wretched place (usually populated by illegal immigrants from Bangladesh or rural areas of neighboring states) to get the Western tourist see what they want to see. Her negative portryal of Calcutta caused the city to lose millions of dollar on tourism revenue, since no one wants to visit this nightmarish place. Some of you might find it hard to believe but in my 24 years of life in Calcutta I never saw the kind of poverty mother's followers tend to assume about Calcutta. The worst part is, mother fed her followers with such exaggerated image of poverty to raise money but in reality did not do anything about it or atleast nothing of any significance. No wonder the people of Calcutta, the so called recipient of her generosity does not care at all about her charitable work, but they do respect her because she brought a Nobel Prize (incidentally two more Indians won that prize before her from Calcutta)to the city and they are unaware of the stories mother tells rest of the world about Calcutta. I do not question her holiness, but I think by constantly lying about Calcutta, she used faudulent means to raise money and did not use the money for which it was raised in the first place.

I am still amazed, that the old, innocous looking, saintly woman had the capacity to pull-off one of the biggest frauds in recent history and even managed to get a nobel prize for God knows what contribution to peace! I dont know whether the truth will make any dent in the belief of her admirers, but it is the truth and you have to visit Calcutta to realize it.

P.S: I suggest a book (Mother Teresa The Final Verdict)in the following web-site for a more revealing account of her activities.

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I have always thought very highly of Mother Theresa, until a few years ago, when I visited one of her clinics on a medical trip. It was a nursery, filled to the brim with pathetic crying babies, or those too scrawny and weak to even move. Many of them lay in urine soaked beds. I started to cry at the sight of their misery, it was just so appalling, and mind you, this is not the first time I have seen sick babies or dire poverty.

But what was most shocking was when one of the doctors in my group asked where the money had gone. She apparently had been here last year, and she and others raised $25,000 for this particular nursery--they had sent the money a few months before we arrived to buy cribs, diapers, formula and medicine. The nursery was exactly the same now as it had been a year ago.

The sister in charge said something to the effect that they had to give the money to the main MC office--or something like that. They never saw a penny of it. One of the babies died during our visit--of starvation. He could have been saved very easily.

My doubts began at that time, and I read more about Mother Theresa, how her nuns were spreading AIDS and hepatitis by using unclean needles in their clinics. You can buy bleach to sterilize needles for just a few pennies, but yet, they didn't even have that. Where then, does the millions go that is donated to this woman and her charity?

If she believes that suffering is so holy, then one would think she would have wanted to be treated when she got sick, the same way that the poor are treated. But instead, Mother Theresa got top notch care. I guess when one is on the fast track to sainthood, they don't have to do their penance and suffering like the rest of us.

I don't think that she was an evil woman, and maybe she meant to do well at one time. But keeping medical care and food away from the hungry and sick is a crime. She became known for caring for the dying because that's what people did best in her clinic--die. True, many of them lived on the street, and she did offer than food and shelter. However, why allow someone to die when you have the means to save them?

I would like to know where all of the money that Mother Theresa got in donations has gone to. If she is a true Christian, she would have returned the donation made by Keating back to its rightful owners, the people he stole it from. But she didn't. She never even acknowledged it, only pleaded for clemency for the criminal who robbed 17,000 people of their life savings. One truly has to wonder about the "Christian" mind of such a person.

At any rate, my personal experience has convinced me that Hitchens is on to something. The sisters were basically doing nothing for these babies, not even holding them. Not even changing the worn cloth diapers that they wore. It was totally disgusting. Just waiting for them to die, what Mother Theresa does best.

I was a volunteer for the Missionaries of Charity at their "Gift of Peace" hospice in Washington, D.C. Christopher Hitchens's account of how places like this are run rings true with my own experience. For example, I was tending to an AIDS patient who had to go to the bathroom and I needed serious assistance. None was to be found because the sisters were at their prayers. It may strike some as strange that the nuns were attending to a god they cannot see while neglecting the poor man (who ended up leaving a quite visible souvenir of their neglect in his bed), but such are the lives of those who end up in such places.

Hitchens does a great job of documenting in this thin book the dictators and flim-flam artists who used Mother Teresa's iconographic presence to lend a patina of divine approval to their nefarious deeds. That Mother's approach to misery was to counsel others, especially the poor who usually had no other choice, to offer it up, rather than seeking to eliminate or ameliorate it, comes through loud and clear. The most egregious hypocrisy: Mother's houses reject such creature comforts for the poor as air conditioning and elevators for the handicapped and, most telling of all, adequate pain medication. But Mother Teresa herself was treated at some of the finest medical facilities in the world. To take vows of poverty in imitation of Jesus is one thing; it is quite another to insist that those you purport to serve must share in your misery.

This is an honest book. Some may conclude that it is derivative from the author's anti-religion bias. I very much doubt it. Rather, from the evidence amassed herin, as well as by such other scandels that the Church has (unsuccessfully, finally) tried to cover up, there may be some very good reasons for people to conclude that it is precisely when living vessels of clay are raised to altars around the world, it is a darn good time to check your wallet or pocketbook.

Mother Teresa probably wasn't an evil person. Rather, the portrait of her that emerges in Hitchens's book, for me at least, is of a rather pious egotist, with a considerable amount of worldly power, who believed herself to be so holy that she was incapable of seeing the appalling evil she inflicted and, believe you me, if half the things Hitchens says about her in this book are true, she did much harm in this world. Which is not to say she also didn't do good things, because she paradoxically did. The point is, she unfortunately also brought suffering and death to countless people that was easily preventable. If this lady, as the current regime in the church thinks, was a saint, then my name is Rasputin.

If you're looking for the case against Mother Teresa, this is not it. Christopher Hitchens's purpose was narrower, and intelligently so. The Missionary Position is only an indictment of Mother Teresa.

But don't let that "only" fool you. What Hitchens does superbly here is wonder, quite persuasively, "Why hasn't anyone ever questioned this woman?" He alleges sufficient particularized facts to create a reasonable doubt about the means and ends of someone whose saintliness has always been taken for granted. Hithchens's charges are compelling enough to make you conclude discovery and a wider investigation are necessary, but he never carries out a full-on prosecution.

Besides consorting with unsavory characters (and taking their money), Mother Teresa's greatest trespass, according to Hitchens, was accepting the mantle of compassionate caretaker of the poor, while harboring a philosophy that celebrates suffering and does little for the poor but let them wretch, surreptitiously convert them, and let them die so that they might go to heaven. Meanwhile, her well-to-do patrons in the developed world sleep well at night after having written her a check, knowing that they have done good. Her unbending opposition to any contraception also doesn't win her any points in Hitchens's scorecard, but what does he expect from a Catholic nun?

If you believe in God, you might take offense to how easily and unapologetically Hitchens dismisses any notions of a creator or afterlife or other mysticisms. But if this is the case, I don't think this book was written for you; I think he wrote this book assuming (at the very least) an informed secularism on the part of the reader. As always, Hitchens proves to be a good and interesting writer, and I recommend this book.

At face value, this book is damning to the reputation of Mother
Teresa. And this is exactly where most reviews should end. But in my opinion, this book is well written, terse and funny. Morality has nothing to do with Christianity, and this is the sad part about religion in general. Yes, Chris Hitchens is not Mother Teresa's biggest fan, but he writes this book through facts, and and the questionable deeds of the subject herself. That's why this book has been really helpful to me. I know nothing about Mother Teresa except the saintly portraiture I see on television once in a while and sadly, on top of my patients' overhead tables who are dying or suffering from pain. She was a patient at one of the most exclusive hospital in Torrey Pines in California sometime in the early 90's. People that work there still talk about it as though they were visited by the Virgin Mary herself. But when I ask basic questions like, Why did she have to came all the way here in La Jolla, CA to ge treated? Who is she anyway? And stuff like, who paid for her treatment? I was treated like a bothersome child and at worst a heretic for asking such questions. I guess we have lost our own ability to be objective. In conclusion,I value this book for being a tool of objectivity. I should drop a start though, because it was too short.

I first read a portion of this book in the Washington Post a number of years ago. As I'd worked closely with Mother Teresa in Calcutta for a bit over two years, I was amused by it and bought several copies which I then gave to those I knew who painted halos on her. Now I admit to some mixed feelings (more on that later) but the book's strength is still formidable.

While working in an office that provided Mother with much of her food, a Scottish pharmacologist who'd been volunteering in the Home for Dying Destitutes visited. She proclaimed that the people she was taking care of there "don't need to die!" She asserted that most of the sisters caring for the destitute weren't very bright, and that there are means of keeping the destitute alive of which the Missionaries of Charity would not partake. After that, and after picking up a small child who died in my arms at the mother house not far from my residence, my eyes were more opened to that saint of Calcutta.

Incidentally, the child who died was the product of one of the "natural family planning" sessions the MC sisters held for Muslim women in Calcutta. That degree of naivete, as if the sisters who lived among them understood so pathetically little about Islam as to teach Muslim women of that means of birth control--in one of the most crowded square miles on planet earth--was enough to make one question Mother Teresa even if other things, many of which Hitchens points out, were not.

As for the intellectual level of the sisters, it's important to note that what I describe is typical in much of the Third World. As an Indian friend said, most of the sisters, if they had not become nuns, would have been stuck in their Indian village, in a prearranged marriage. Their entry into the sisterhood freed them and, in some cases, allows them to "see the world." I'm not saying that in a derisive way; were I in their shoes, I may do the same.

And there was one sister whose intelligence and sensitivity did impress me. She shared with me one day that she was concerned about children being adopted into families in, say, Denmark, which had negative population growth at the time. She wondered what would happen when the fad wore off of the obvious adoptions--brown children among the more pale Danes--and what social problems might come about as a consequence. As I'm not familiar with any Scandanavians, I don't know what may be happening there today.

The situation, though, also has its ironies. I know many a feminist who is impressed to no end with Mother Teresa, an allegedly strong woman. As I knew Mother, I guarantee to the feminists that such a label turns Mother over in her grave. Indeed, while some reviewers have commented on the MC sisters in the U.S., their commitment to AIDS patients, etc., I see most of the sisters as sheep, little girls despite their ages, following their leader, whoever she may be, with a girl's unquestioning attitude. That's not feminist, despite illusions to the contrary.

Mind you, I'm not in any way opposed to taking care of the poor. I'm as far from a Reaganite as one can imagine. But I had--and still have--close friends who are nuns in other orders in India who do far more for "human development" than the MCs do. Are they proclaimed saints? Not in this world they're not. But I don't blame Mother for that. Rather, I blame the media who are anxious to sell papers by finding one individual, a sort of Horatio Alger in reverse, who stands out. Thusly Saint Mother Teresa was born through the likes of Malcolm Muggeridge whom Hitchens covers mercilessly in his text.

As I have reflected for a number of years on my experience in Calcutta and the rest of India (MC sisters telling lepers in colonies to be fruitful and multiply per Catholic teachings, thereby ensuring another generation of lepers) I've concluded that my biggest objection to the MC regime is that Mother Teresa unwittingly prevented change. Politicians, including Reagan, loved her as she said, "write a check and help the poor, the dying, and help these kids to be adopted." It never occurred to her that there must be something wrong with a system which enabled countless people to die miserably. And that extended to us in the "developed" world. How many people do you know who feel secure in having their Mother Teresa holy cards, maybe writing a check, but they'll still act and vote to perpetuate systems in which so, so many people die destitute.

Oh, the reason I have some mixed feelings toward the MC sisters now is that I'm still acquainted with some American nuns. Many of them are close friends, and women for whom I have a great deal of respect and love. But many too are living more comfortably than I am, e.g., having their community pay for their homes for which they then pay substantially less rent than I would pay. At least Mother Teresa and her sisters DID live and work among the poor.

Anyway, I still recommend the book. It puts much of the media hype, especially the tourists who'd visited Calcutta for two days, visited Mother Teresa, then returned to write news stories about how wonderful she is, into perspective with some of the things Mother REALLY did.

In addition to the above book please see the one by Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, "Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict". He has researched MT over many years and gives detailed evidence that seems to be incontrovertible. In fact, it was his efforts that gave birth to the TV documentary narrated by Hitchens. Chatterjee's book is published by Meteor Books, Calcutta (see their site www dot meteorbooks dot com). See also a review of the book on Amazon. In September 1998 the German magazine Stern published a devastating article entitled "Mother Teresa: Where are her millions?". A Google search using the article's title will lead you to websites that have reproduced it. The height of deceit, in the name of God! She will rot in hell.

Christian theology teaches that everyone is imperfect and tainted by Original Sin. All human beings are tempted by the sin of pride and other vices. Why should Mother Theresa be any different? There are indeed serious questions that were never adequately answered regarding the large sums of money at her disposal. Were they spent according to the wishes of the donors, or was much of it siphoned off to other endeavors that had little to do with assisting the hopelessly downtrodden? Did these unfortunates truly receive the best medical care possible? Is there any truth to the allegations that many of these patients were denied pain killers to supposedly prepare them spiritually for life everlasting? Why didn't Mother Theresa comprehend the cold fact that dictators and convicted criminals were giving her money stolen from other people? Would trained certified public accountants have found many abuses and squandering of funds? Alas, often even well meaning people unwittingly waste the resources under their direct responsibility. A good heart alone is not enough when managing a large organization.

It is intellectual dishonest to ignore "The Missionary Position." Christopher Hitchens is an avowed atheist, but this shouldn't be held against him. The author's rhetoric is admittedly a bit too aggressive and borders on the abusive. Nonetheless, Hitchens has presented some strong evidence that tarnishes the hagiographic memory of the often described Saint of Calcutta. The man deserves a point by point careful rebuke and not argumentum ad hominem attacks. This relatively short book earns a place among all the other works on Mother Theresa....

The very first book I ever reviewed on Amazon was this one. At the time I had never heard of Chris Hitchens and doubted his motives.

I now am very familar with him and his opinions and looking at this book a 2nd time come to the following conclusions:

Hitchens has as always written an honest book as in my review of many years past I don't dispute the facts he details

Hitchens is not convinced of a vast Vatican conspericy as I thought he is instead the classic anti-theist. He has no use for religion and his conclusions of Mother Teresa stem from that.

The Basic arguement of the book is Mother Teresa is no saint because she is more interested in Catholic doctrine and belief then the care of the poor and furthermore put those doctrines ahead of her mission. He is quite correct.

However he forgets that #1 without that belief none of the good done by her and the sisters would have been done, and #2. As a believing and devout Catholic if she put the work ahead of her belief then she would be sinning. This is not only biblical (He who loves mother or Father more than me is not worthy of me) but best addressed in Lewis's SCREWTAPE LETTERS #23 "...we do want and want very much to make men treat Christianity as a means...a means to anything --even to social justice...the Enemy (God) will not be used as a convenience."

Much like his view of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ the idea that the worship or belief in Christ as the primary cause for an action makes it less whole. If you believe religion is a waste of time then you will agree with both views. If you are a believer in Christ you will not.

Either way the book is worth reading. If only for the fact is is the only contrary view of Mother out there and is a more honest view than any other critic would give.