Christopher Hitchens' book is a blistering indictment of the cult of Mother Teresa. It investigates systematically the innards of Mother Teresa's charity in Calcutta and exposes it mostly as a sham with a great chasm lying between myth and reality. Hitchens is an anti-thiest (as he likes to call himself) and so has no sympathy for religion and belief in God. Still, this book is purely a rational exercise in simply evaluating Mother Teresa's reputation by her actions and words instead of the other way around. In doing so, he finds that the Mother is just one more 'holy' person of dubious distinction. For me as an Indian, it is a familiar tale, as India is so full of fraudulent Gurus and Swamis who amass money, selling the idea of Liberation and Heaven to gullible devotees and followers.
Contrary to the widely-publicised image of Mother Teresa as a compassionate nun saving countless number of poor Indians from dying, Hitchens demonstrates the following to be the truth:
1. That the Calcutta charity did not like to spend its vast wealth in providing care to save the sick and dying. It rather spent the money on establishing more convents across the world, all doing similar dubious work.
2. That it was a Catholic cult based on glorifying poverty, suffering, subjection and death. The cult was focused on prosyletization above saving lives. The dying poor were allowed to die, but die as Christians, because then only Jesus would save them. Towards this end, sick and dying Indians of other faiths would be brought to the charity and baptized, often without their knowledge, as they lay awaiting death.
3. That the conditions in the so-called 'hospital' of the Calcutta charity were often unhygienic and the staff poorly trained. They re-used needles over and over and washed them in cold, tap water instead of sterilizing them. Many inmates died not because they were incurable but because the charity wouldn't spend the money necessary to save them.
4. That Mother Teresa took multi-million dollar donations from shady and dubious characters like Charles Keating, Papa doc Duvalier and others and repaid the debt by interceding on their behalf. For example, she wrote to Judge Lance Ito in support of Charles Keating, who cheated ordinary hard-working Americans to the tune of $250 million.
5. That she was just a reactionary figure who advocated the rights of the unborn child even as she let adults and children under her care die for lack of desire to spend money to save them; that she glorified poverty and suffering and denounced materialism even as she sought and accepted millions of dollars as donations.
There is a thread that links people like Mother Teresa and the other high-profile Gurus and Swamis in India. It is not a surprise that they all tend to be reactionary, have outmoded views and are mostly out of touch with the pulse of society. Most of the Gurus tend to be people who grew up in rural parts of India in the 1930s and 1940s, when the social mores were highly repressive compared to today. Women were terribly discriminated against and constrained, caste oppression was pervasive and illiteracy was rampant. These gurus would have often only had a few years of religious education which mostly reinforced such prejudices. They were often un-exposed to secular science based education. Much later, when they get anointed as Swamis by some vested interests in urban India, they bring all their baggage into their 'liberating' Ashrams. Often, men and women are severely segregated in these ashrams because that is what the gurus know society to be. They are often against women's education and empowerment. They often patronize the rich and powerful and practise caste discrimination. In a similar way, Mother Teresa grew up in a rural Albanian/Macedonian region in the 1930s and had only church-influenced education. She also never had any exposure to the enlightened European education. So, it is not a surprise that she is against contraception in an India that sought to reduce population growth. It is not a surprise that she thought that abortion is the biggest crime. It is not a surprise that she patronized frauds like Duvalier and Keating because they gave her big donations and professed themselves to be good Christians.
Christopher Hitchens has done a great service by tearing the mask of such people who think that they have a hotline to God.
The book is written in Hitchens' trade-mark style of hard-hitiing prose. One can see it even in the choice of the title. As an example, I would cite the following:
Commenting upon the decision of advice columnist Ann Landers to share one of Mother Teresa's prescriptions for improving the world ("smile more"), Hitchens writes," ...it is doubtful whether a fortune-cookie maxim of such cretinous condescension would have been chosen by even Ann Landers unless it bore the imprimateur of Mother Teresa, one of the few untouchables in the mental universe of the mediocre and the credulous".
This is vintage Christorpher Hitchens!
The book is not a polemic but a well-argued, rational critique. In fact, the foreword to the twelfth edition by Thomas Mellon sums up the book so well that one can hardly do better in a review. I loved it.
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