Can you count the number of times you have heard the name of Mother Theresa given in conversation as a veritable paragon of virtue and holiness and kindness? Stuff it.
I was fooled. I remember the first articles I read about this devout, holy, self-sacrificing woman living in the worst slums of the poorest city (Calcutta) in the world offering only kindness and care and love to the lowliest outcasts, the vulnerable, the helpless. Malcolm Muggeridge, Christendom’s most pompous twit before he passed on, groveled before her with all the enthusiasm those who think their groveling will be taken for virtue can muster.
I even remember a SCTV skit in which a loud, bombastic “Lola Heatherton” (Catherine O’Hara) interviewed Mother Theresa and sang her Broadway Tunes. SCTV confined the parody to Heatherton– Mother Theresa was depicted (by Andrea Martin) with reverence. The point was that Mother Theresa was so holy that not even SCTV dared impugn her sanctified honor.
And then I stumbled into a crazy article somewhere– I can’t remember what magazine it was — that described how Mother Theresa inspected a home that had been donated to her order, for her novitiates, and I remember how she sternly ordered the hot water tank removed, and the mattresses and beds (they can sleep on the floor), and anything else that might make it a pleasant place to live.
I think the article was generally favorable to her and meant to celebrate her purity and austerity. I remember thinking a lot about it. What’s wrong with making a sacrifice, if it helps the poor? But getting rid of the hot water and the mattresses didn’t help the poor. It simply spread the suffering around. It was as if the point was not to alleviate suffering, but to increase it, out of some twisted sense of masochistic self-sanctification. A few years later, she was quoted as saying that the suffering the poor was “beautiful”. Not beautiful enough for herself, however. When she became ill, she checked into a nice, western hospital and received the best care available.
That bears repeating. While raising millions of dollars to preach to people who are dying and while making no effort to provide them with any kind of medical care, because, she says, their suffering is “beautiful”– she herself has accepted some of the finest medical care available from clinics in California.
Later on, I read more about Mother Theresa, and grew more and more disturbed by what I read. While she was receiving tens of millions of dollars in donations from thousands of benefactors around the world– and the Nobel Peace Prize– she was also appearing in public with Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier, to defend his regime against charges of corruption, and with Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. And of course, as an unrepentant traditionalist, Mother Theresa fought fanatically against the very idea of any form of birth control.
Ironically, she was embraced by some in the Christian right in America, including Ralph Reed, as representative of “family values”– as if she had never taken a vow of chastity. And as if Ralph Reed, and Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, had anything but contempt for Catholicism. She was politically useful to them.
According to Hitchens, after intervening in the referendum in Ireland to allow divorce, (she was opposed), she told the Ladies Home Journal that she was glad her friend, Princess Diana, was getting a divorce because she will be happier. Clearly, there is one set of rules for the poor….
What kicked it for me, though, was when I realized that what she was actually doing in the slums of Calcutta was not “helping”. She provided some comfort, yes, to the dying, but she did almost nothing to alleviate suffering or to make people’s lives better when she clearly could have. In fact, she actively opposed efforts to provide the poor with medical care and food, because, she said, it did not further the advancement of Catholicism. It merely distracted people from the real issue, which was, saving souls.
That’s not the gospel.