[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
[escepticos] RV: That Mother Teresa book review
----------
> De: Brian Siano <siano en cceb.med.upenn.edu>
> A: WIZARDS-STAR-LIST en SSR.COM
> Asunto: That Mother Teresa book review
> Fecha: miércoles 10 de septiembre de 1997 4:23
>
> This isn't part of that now-dead argument: someone asked me to
> post this to the list, so here it is. It's an unpublished
> review of Christopher Hitchens' book _The Missionary Position_,
> and I hope y'all like it. (Reading it over, I noticed a few
> stylistic rough spots that I would love to clean up, and the
> translation to plain text stripped out the italics, so it
> might not read as well as I'd like.)
>
> Copyright 1996 Brian Siano. You know the drill.
>
> The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice by
> Christopher Hitchens
> 98 pages. Verso.
>
> 1969 was the year Agnes Bojaxhiu's star began to rise. That
> was the year Malcolm Muggeridge, who had "taken to piety and
> censure in his senescence and could usually induce the BC to film
> him standing next to some phoney shroud or blubbering statuette,"
> journeyed to the reliable hellhole of Calcutta to film his BBC
> documentary Something Beautiful for God. It was this documentary
> that presented Agnes-- better known as Mother Teresa-- as an
> exemplar of humble Christian charity, selflessly working to
> alleviate the suffering of the poorest of the poor in her Home
> for the Dying. It's a safe bet that Mother Teresa will be granted
> sainthood some day in the future, and Muggeridge's documentary
> provides us with the miracle required by the Catholic Church.
> According to Muggeridge's book, his cameraman, Ken
> MacMillan, had claimed that filming was impossible in the poorly-
> lit cells of the House of the Dying. However, the footage shot
> within the walls came out suffused with a warm glow; this
> Muggeridge immediately characterized as the "Kindly Light" one
> sees in haloes around saints' heads.
> Sixteen years lay between Muggeridge's documentary and the
> refutation of this "Kindly Light" myth. During that time, Mother
> Teresa has grown into an international example. Her missions have
> expanded throughout the world. She is regularly feted by heads of
> state and industry. Few living religious figures enjoy such
> adoration, which is by no means confined to devout Catholics:
> popular and secular culture is awash in references to her work as
> shorthand for the austere life of selfless poverty. Sure, the
> Dalai Lama is justly respected as the leader of a country ruined
> by invaders, and the Pope gets a free ride in the domestic press.
> But nobody outdoes Mother Teresa as the humble saint.
> I can't express how damn good it feels these days, to be
> able to refer to "that authoritarian, crackpot psychobitch Mother
> Teresa," and watch people give me that horrified expression. Half
> of Christopher Hitchens' slim volume is the joyous spectacle of
> watching one of the nation's sharpest essayists look at the
> world's leading saint with a cold, critical eye. "It still seems
> astonishing to me" Hitchens writes in his foreword, "that nobody
> had ever before decided to look at the saint of Calcutta as if,
> possible, the supernatural had nothing to do with it."
> The other half of Hitchens' book is the horror that
> accumulates over its spare 98 pages. Take, for example, one of
> Teresa's most notable donors; the notorious Charles Keating,
> whose Lincoln Savings and Loan had engineered the disappearance
> of $252 million of other people's dollars. Keating, a long-time
> crony of censorious fanatics and Republican law-and-order
> efforts, gave Teresa $1.25 million of those dollars and the use
> of "his" private jet. Teresa, in turn, provided a personalized
> crucifix, lots of favorable press, and a letter to Judge Lance
> Ito begging for clemency in the sentencing of this oily
> hypocrite. A letter from Keating's prosecuting attorney to
> Teresa, explaining who Keating is and how he'd acquired his
> wealth, and suggesting that Teresa return the money to its
> owners, has gone unanswered for three years.
> Ah, yes, the money. Even as our homegrown evangelists are
> exposed as trinket salesmen, political kingmakers, bigots or
> mailing-list racketeers, Mother Teresa remains untouched by
> simple questions of fiscal accountability. She has received
> innumerable honors and prizes, many of which have large checks
> attached. "Nobody has troubled to total the amount of prize money
> received from governments and quasi-government organizations...
> and nobody has ever asked what became of the funds." Hitchens
> observes that the amount must be enough to provide Calcutta with
> "the finest teaching hospital in the entire Third World." Yet
> this has not happened.
> The best clue turns up in excerpts of an unpublished
> manuscript, In Mother's House, by a former Missionary of Charity
> named Susan Shields. Believe it or not, the money never gets
> used. "Around $50 million had collected in one checking account
> in the Bronx," Shields reports. "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."
> Shields's manuscript, and other materials collected by
> Hitchens, would provide a strong brief for the eternal damnation
> of Mother Teresa. Dr. Robin Fox, editor of The Lancet (9/17/94),
> reports that in Teresa's Calcutta operation-- which, we should
> recall, has been provided with uncounted millions for nearly
> thirty years-- analgesics are not used and medical diagnoses are
> rarely conducted. Mary Loudon, who'd worked in the Calcutta
> operation, writes:
>
> "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... The needles they reused over
> and over and over and you would see some of the nuns
> rinsing needles under the cold water tap."
>
> Keep in mind that Mother Teresa checks into the best medical
> clinics and hospitals when her heart acts up. I cannot improve
> upon Hitchens' summary of her efforts: "The point is not the
> honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based
> on death and suffering and subjection."
> Mother Teresa's choices for benefactors have their root in a
> bitter aphorism. God must love the poor and downtrodden;
> otherwise, why does he provide us with so many dictators,
> criminals, and mass murderers? In 1980, Mother Teresa was awarded
> the Legion d'honneur by Haiti's dictator, Jean-Claude Duvalier.
> Speaking of Mrs. Duvalier and her make-show clinics, Teresa
> stated, "I have never seen the poor people being so familiar with
> their head of state as they were with her. It was a beautiful
> lesson to me." The Duvalierist newspaper L'Asaut circulated
> photos, the TV stations ran the film of Teresa's praise every
> night for a week, and to date, not one word of protest over this
> use of her image has come from Mother Teresa. It's a lesson to
> the rest of us to consider the Church's support of the Duvalier
> regime.
> Mother Teresa's willingness to endorse the empty, hollow, or
> corrupt seems endless. In a photo studio, before a backdrop of
> Indian beggars, she lends her visage to John-Roger, a self-
> described messiah who claims to be Jesus' superior in "spiritual
> consciousness." She lays flowers at the grave of Albanian
> dictator Enver Hoxha-- whose murderous punishments of religious
> worship should have given the Saint of Calcutta some misgivings.
> Kleptocrat Marion Barry and health-care saboteur Hillary Clinton
> make certain to accompany Teresa on her visit to a well-off
> Washington adoption center. Teresa campaigns against abortion
> rights on behalf of Margaret Thatcher. Robert Maxwell uses photos
> of himself and Teresa to defraud thousands in a charity scam.
> Indira Ghandi initiates a brutal program of sterilization to
> control India's population, and buys PR by providing Teresa with
> funding. Ronald Reagan spends his eight years in office
> supporting the Dergue junta of Ethiopia, which used starvation
> tactics against Eritrean insurgents: and Teresa praises Reagan
> for his Ethiopia policies while receiving he Presidential Medal
> of Freedom. And Teresa rushes to Bhopal in the aftermath of the
> Union Carbide chemical disaster, and offers the stirring counsel
> that surviving victims "Forgive, forgive, forgive."
> "The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone,
> somewhere, is doing something for the Third World," Hitchens
> writes. "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...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."
> It's apparently a difficult lesson to learn. The Missionary
> Position grew out of a Channel Four documentary by Hitchens
> titled Hell's Angel, broadcast in 1994. The response to this
> program was loud and immediate. The reliably deranged Paul
> Johnson fulminated that Hitchens had called Teresa a lesbian (he
> hadn't), and called it "diabolical," "loathsome and mendacious,"
> and "an extraordinary tissue of falsehoods and innuendoes,
> suggesting she approved of some of the vilest dictatorships on
> earth." (Geez, it's not like he titled the book Sacred Cow.) Even
> before seeing the program, Victoria Gillick-- known in England as
> an anti-abortion mother of ten-- complained, "I am interested in
> the motives of the two men, Tariq Ali and Channel 4 director
> Michael Grade, who have made this programme possible. The first
> is a Moslem, the second is a Jew. Why are these two attacking
> Catholics?"
> Reviews of The Missionary Position in the States haven't
> reached the grand mal levels of Gillick. But few seem willing to
> let go of the idea of Mother Teresa as a bona fide saint. Many
> reviews paired The Missionary Position against A Simple Path, a
> collection of talks by MT herself. Much was made of Hitchens'
> current job at Vanity Fair, as though this were some kind of
> compromise of integrity.
> Carlin Romano, writing in the Tampa Tribune, makes the
> following argument:
>
> Consider the charges. Mother Teresa, he warns, preaches
> conservative Catholic doctrine. Why shouldn't she?
> Because Mother Teresa offers medical services to the
> poor, Hitchens assesses her as if she were surgeon
> general of the world, obliged, as a medical
> professional, to meet the highest standards of medical
> care. Yet Mother Teresa, as Hitchens concedes, has
> always mingled her eschatological beliefs with her
> charity. Hitchens is right that a caretaker who thinks
> there's a better life around the corner may offer less
> than ideal E.R. services, but it's not clear that
> Mother Teresa blocks her charges from joining
> alternative health plans. If Hitchens is so outraged,
> why doesn't he organize a better HMO for Calcutta's
> destitute?
>
> And, in regards to the PR-for-evil examples, the book's
> contents are quickly flensed from memory:
>
> Yet if, by doing this, Mother Teresa manages to squeeze
> good works out of thugs, what's the harm? Does Hitchens
> really believe that the "credibility" a dictator gets
> from a stock Mother Teresa photo outweighs the good
> work her nuns may therefore be allowed to do? Isn't
> Mother Teresa being a good rationalist under the
> circumstances?
>
> Romano follows this with the requisite sweet purring over
> Hitchens' sad inability to understand "simple truths" about
> religion and God. One presumes Romano will be donning the
> sackcloth and ashes, or at least instructing his children in the
> doctrine of Papal infallibility.
> Hitchens closes The Missionary Position with a remark that
> anticipates the Romanos of the world. I have been rebuked and
> admonished for ridiculing the household gods of the simple folk,"
> he says. "But is it not here that authentic intellectual snobbery
> exposes itself? We ourselves are far too sophisticated to believe
> in God and creationism and all that, say the more advanced
> defenders of the Teresa cult. But we do believe in religion-- at
> least for other people. It is a means of marketing hope, and of
> instilling ethical precepts on the cheap. It is also a form of
> discipline."
> And what about that "Kindly Light?" Ken MacMillan explained
> its origin on Hell's Angel. He'd brought several reels of an
> experimental film stock from Kodak, and tried them out while
> filming Mother Teresa's operations, with surprisingly good
> results. Despite being told about the new film stock, Muggeridge
> insisted that the light was due to a miracle.
>
> --
> Q: Is there any other impression about the Mars landing and people's
> perception about it that you want to say?
> A: The most salient thing that strikes me is what I said at the top of
> this
> interview - which is, the incredible and dismaying dichotomy. On the
> one
> hand, we land a robot on Mars after two decades - and on the very same
> day, here are all these people buying hot dogs and looking around for
> space garbage in a rancher's field in New Mexico. And those are the
> smart ones. The stupid ones are the ones who went to Roswell, Ga.,
> because they didn't know the difference.
> Harlan Ellison, asked about public perceptions of the
> Mars landing, in the Dallas Morning News, July 13, 1997