The Missionary Position
Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
Book Edition Details
Summary
Mother Teresa, an icon of altruism or a shrewd manipulator? In "The Missionary Position," Christopher Hitchens dismantles the halo surrounding the revered figure, challenging readers to scrutinize her legacy with an unflinching lens. Far from the saintly image celebrated worldwide, Hitchens paints a portrait of a woman whose alliances and actions suggest a far murkier narrative. Was her mission truly about aiding the impoverished, or did it serve more self-serving ends? This provocative exposé invites you to question the myth and explore the possibility of a darker truth. With biting wit and incisive critique, Hitchens turns the spotlight on the intersections of power, faith, and deception, leaving you to decide where the truth lies.
Introduction
The veneration of Mother Teresa represents one of modern society's most unexamined pieties, a carefully constructed mythology that transforms a religious fundamentalist into a secular saint. Through rigorous investigation of documented evidence, testimonies from former volunteers, and analysis of her own words and actions, this examination reveals the profound disconnect between public perception and documented reality. The work demonstrates how contemporary media culture creates and sustains illusions that serve political and religious agendas while obscuring uncomfortable truths about power, money, and institutional manipulation. The central thesis challenges readers to abandon reflexive reverence and apply critical reasoning to sacred cows of public discourse. By examining financial records, medical practices, political associations, and theological motivations, the analysis exposes how seemingly charitable work can serve as propaganda for dogmatic religious campaigns. The methodology combines investigative journalism with philosophical skepticism, revealing how societies construct myths that comfort the privileged while perpetuating the suffering they claim to address. This deconstruction serves as a broader lesson about the necessity of subjecting all public figures and institutions to rational scrutiny, regardless of their supposed moral authority.
The Manufacturing of Miracles and Media Myths
The transformation of Agnes Bojaxhiu into the globally revered "Mother Teresa" began with a demonstrable fabrication that reveals the mechanics of modern myth-making. Malcolm Muggeridge's 1969 BBC documentary claimed to have captured miraculous divine light illuminating Mother Teresa's work in Calcutta's Home for the Dying. This supposed miracle became foundational to her international reputation, repeated endlessly in books, articles, and devotional materials as evidence of supernatural intervention. The truth emerged years later from Ken Macmillan, the BBC cameraman who actually filmed the sequence. Far from witnessing divine illumination, Macmillan explained that they had simply used new Kodak film stock that performed better in low light conditions than expected. When he began to credit the improved technology, Muggeridge interrupted him, declaring it "divine light" and transforming a technical achievement into religious propaganda. This episode represents the first documented refutation of a claimed miracle by its actual creator, yet the false narrative continued to spread globally. The implications extend far beyond a single incident. This fabricated miracle demonstrates how modern communications technology accelerates the transmission of myths to credulous audiences. The collaboration between a celebrity journalist seeking compelling content and a religious figure building her reputation created a template for manufacturing sanctity through media manipulation. The persistence of the false narrative, despite clear debunking, reveals how societies prefer comforting illusions to uncomfortable truths. The miracle fraud establishes a pattern of deception that permeates the entire Mother Teresa phenomenon. When examined critically, her claims of supernatural intervention consistently dissolve into natural explanations, political calculations, or outright fabrications designed to enhance her mystical reputation and institutional power.
Doctrine Over Medicine: The True Mission Revealed
The medical practices within Mother Teresa's institutions expose the fundamental deception at the heart of her supposed humanitarian mission. Dr. Robin Fox's 1994 investigation for The Lancet documented shocking conditions that prioritized religious ideology over patient care. Clinics failed to provide basic diagnostic procedures, strong pain medication, or proper sterilization of medical equipment, despite receiving enormous donations that could have funded world-class facilities. Former volunteers provide devastating testimony about the deliberate neglect masquerading as spiritual care. Patients with treatable conditions were allowed to die in agony while staff focused on secret baptisms and religious conversion rather than medical intervention. Susan Shields, who worked within the Missionaries of Charity for nearly a decade, revealed how approximately fifty million dollars accumulated in bank accounts while sisters were forbidden from spending money on patient care, forced instead to maintain artificial poverty while manipulating donors through false claims of destitution. The true purpose becomes clear through Mother Teresa's own words: the poor serve as instruments for expressing love of Christ, not as human beings deserving effective medical treatment. She explicitly stated that suffering resembles Christ's crucifixion, essentially sacralizing pain and poverty as spiritually beneficial. This theology transforms genuine humanitarian work into religious theater, where the suffering of the poor becomes raw material for demonstrations of piety. Medical professionals working in the facilities consistently reported that Mother Teresa's approach fundamentally differed from legitimate hospice care or poverty alleviation. The systematic rejection of modern medicine, proper pain management, and basic hygiene protocols reveals an organization more concerned with propagating fundamentalist religious doctrine than relieving human suffering or improving living conditions for the destitute.
Political Alliances and Financial Contradictions
Mother Teresa's political associations demonstrate her systematic alignment with authoritarian regimes and corrupt power structures, contradicting claims of apolitical charity work. Her effusive praise for Haiti's Michèle Duvalier, documented in regime propaganda publications, exemplifies her pattern of legitimizing dictatorships through religious endorsement. Despite Haiti's extreme poverty and brutal oppression under the Duvalier regime, she publicly celebrated the ruling couple and accepted their honors while remaining silent about widespread human rights abuses. The financial relationship with convicted fraudster Charles Keating reveals the organization's knowing acceptance of stolen money. Keating donated over one million dollars obtained through systematic theft from small investors, receiving in return Mother Teresa's public endorsement and a personal intervention during his criminal trial. When prosecutor Paul Turley requested that she return the stolen funds to their rightful owners, she ignored his appeal entirely, demonstrating calculated indifference to the victims of the financial crimes that funded her operations. Her political interventions consistently supported conservative religious positions in democratic societies while maintaining convenient silence about atrocities committed by allied dictatorships. She actively campaigned against reproductive rights in Ireland, Spain, and the United States while refusing to criticize genocide in Rwanda where the Catholic hierarchy played a complicit role. Her meeting with Ronald Reagan provided crucial legitimacy for Central American policies that included supporting death squads and undermining elected governments. These patterns expose Mother Teresa as a sophisticated political operative who leveraged her reputation for supposed unworldliness to advance specific ideological agendas. Her selective moral outrage, strategic silences, and calculated alliances reveal an organization functioning as an arm of institutional power rather than a genuine advocate for the powerless and oppressed.
From Saint-Making to Critical Analysis
The Vatican's accelerated canonization process under John Paul II transformed Mother Teresa's beatification from religious recognition into political theater, demonstrating how institutional Christianity manufactures sanctity to serve contemporary ideological needs. Her rapid elevation through the sainthood bureaucracy coincided with the Church's broader campaign to reassert conservative doctrine against secular humanist influences, making her a powerful symbol for religious fundamentalism worldwide. The discovery of Mother Teresa's private letters revealed decades of spiritual doubt and religious emptiness, fundamentally undermining the narrative of mystical certainty that justified her authority over others. Her admission of experiencing "darkness and coldness and emptiness" while publicly claiming divine guidance exposes the profound dishonesty underlying her entire public persona. This spiritual uncertainty makes her dogmatic pronouncements about abortion, contraception, and the beauty of poverty even more ethically problematic. The broader implications extend beyond one individual's deceptions to illuminate how modern societies construct and maintain myths that serve elite interests. The Mother Teresa phenomenon demonstrates the collaboration between religious institutions, political operatives, and media organizations in creating false narratives that comfort the privileged while rationalizing the continued suffering of the poor. Her example reveals how claims of spiritual authority can mask very worldly ambitions for power and influence. Critical examination of sacred figures like Mother Teresa serves essential democratic functions by subjecting all claims to authority to rational scrutiny. The persistent refusal to investigate her contradictions and deceptions represents a broader abdication of intellectual responsibility that enables the exploitation of both generous donors and desperate recipients of supposed charity.
Summary
The systematic deconstruction of Mother Teresa's reputation reveals how contemporary societies create and sustain myths that serve institutional power while masquerading as humanitarian concern. Her transformation from Albanian nationalist to global icon demonstrates the sophisticated manipulation of media, religious authority, and public sentiment to advance specific political and theological agendas. The evidence exposes not innocent charity work but calculated propaganda that exploited both the generosity of donors and the desperation of the poor to build personal authority and institutional influence. This analysis provides essential lessons about the necessity of applying rational skepticism to all claims of moral authority, particularly those that demand reverence rather than investigation. The case serves as a paradigmatic example of how critical thinking can penetrate constructed myths to reveal the complex political realities they obscure, offering readers tools for examining other supposedly sacred figures and institutions with similar rigor and intellectual honesty.
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By Christopher Hitchens
