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Of Mother and her good deeds - The Observer

Yoginder Sikand ()
28 September 1996

Title : Of Mother and her good deeds
Author : Yoginder Sikand
Publication : The Observer
Date : September 28, 1996

With branches in over 100 countries, the Missionaries of
Charity, over which Mother Teresa presides, is among the
largest charitable organisations in the world. Scores of
books have been written in praise of the Mother, and in
recognition for her services she has been awarded with
the Nobel Peace Prize. For millions of people she is
almost a saint and so it comes as a rude shock when
someone grows so bold as to declare that in actual fact
Mother Teresa is ,,a religious fundamentalist, a politi-
cal operative, a primitive sermoniser and an accomplice
of' worldly, secular powers."

This somebody is no obscure person. British Journalist
Christopher Hitchens first shot into prominence when a
documentary that he made on Mother Teresa, Hell's Angel,
was screened on the BBC's Channel Four in 1994. Predict-
ably, that film had stirred a horet's nest not just in
Britain but in India as well, where Mother Teresa has her
headquarters, for, as its very name suggests, it sought
to seriously bring into question the hallowed image that
has been built around the Mother. Now, in a just-re-
leased book, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in
Theory and Practice Hitchens carries his battle against
the Mother even further, raising issues, many serious,
others trite, that are sure to further stoke the fires of
controversy.

Hitchens' allegation, in a nut shell, is this: The rich,
white West likes to imagine that someone, somewhere is
doing some-thing for the miserable millions of the `Third
World'. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely
into the motives or activities of anyone who fulfills,
however vicariously, this mandate. It is here that the
missionary - in this case Mother Teresa, the most famous
of them all - steps in.

As ever, writes Hitchens, the true address of the mis-
sionary is to the self-satisfaction of the West and not
to the needs and concerns of the 'Third World' downtrod-
den. The Mother,s lepers, orphans and the terminally
ill, then, are simply, 'raw material for the demonstra-
tion of compassion.' "They are," he says, "in no position
to complain, and their passivity and objection is consid-
ered a sterling trait."

The very fact that Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Chari-
ty order runs largely on western donations is, for
Hitchens, reason enough to suspect its motives. Hitchens
provides documentary proof to back up what would other-
wise have seemed a wild and completely baseless charge.
Thus, he refers to the Haitian government newspaper L'
Assault quoting Teresa during her visit to that country
in 1981 as speaking out in fulsome praise of the wife of
Haitian military dictator Jean Claude Duvalier whose
family's rule of terror in the Caribbean island has
reduced it to the status of the poorest country in the
world.

On another occasion, in 1985, Teresa is said to have met
with American President Ronald Reagan at the White
blouse. In a meeting with the Press soon after, she

declared that prior to the meeting she never knew that
Reagan 'loved the people so tenderly', but that later
when an Ethiopian nun had pleaded with her to set up a
mission in that war-ravaged country, the first person who
came to her mind to approach for assistance was none
other than Reagan himself. Not a word did she utter, of
course, about the Reagan administration's murky role in
exacerbating the war in Ethiopia and in propping up
brutal dictatorships in much of' the 'Third World'.
Besides, Hitchens writes, several notorious Western
frauds, including one American John Roger, who claimed to
have a spiritual consciousness superior to Jesus', are
known to have donated large sums to the Missionaries of
Charity.

Hitchens does deny that Mother Teresa's homes house
thousands of miserable orphans, diseased and terminally-
ill people all over the world. For those with not a soul
in the world to come for them the Missionaries of Charity
are probably the only glimmer of hope. Yet, far from
aiming at removing poverty, Mother Teresa actually makes
a fetish of it, glorifying it as somehow spiritually
ennobling.

Thus, Hitchens quotes Teresa as having once remarked, "I
think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept, their
lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. "I think,"
she went to add, "that the world is being much helped by
the suffering of the poor people." Apparently, as Christ
is said to have suffered on the cross so, too, must the
poor. Teresa, says Hitchens, has her own theory of
poverty -- "a theory of submission and gratitude" -- the
poor must ever remain dependent on the charity of the
rich. Teresa also has her own 'theory of power' as
exemplified by her flirting with the Reagans and Duvali-
ers of the world. And it is not that the vast sums of
money that the Missionaries of Charity receive from
their western patrons are necessarily being put to good
use. Hitchens, armed with enough evidence to drive home
his point, writes that in line with the Mother's theory
of redemptive suffering, little attention is actually
paid to the actual medical treatment of the inmates of
her homes. The dying poor are just good raw material for
her Missionary project and, the nuns have been instructed
to entice ignorant Hindus and Muslims to get baptised by
offering them the irresistable bait of a 'ticket to
heaven'. This, and a lot more, then alleges Hitchens,
all add up to show that Mother Teresa, the Saint of the
poor of the world, it actually little other than the
emissary of 'a very determined and very politicised
papacy.

Clearly one does not have to agree with all or even most
of what Hitchens has to say to realise that there is, a
modicum of merit in at least some of his arguments.



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