The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

Rating:
Summary: The grand jury would indict...
Review: If you're looking for the case against Mother Teresa, this is not it. Christopher Hitchens's purpose was narrower, and intelligently so. The Missionary Position is only an indictment of Mother Teresa.

But don't let that "only" fool you. What Hitchens does superbly here is wonder, quite persuasively, "Why hasn't anyone ever questioned this woman?" He alleges sufficient particularized facts to create a reasonable doubt about the means and ends of someone whose saintliness has always been taken for granted. Hithchens's charges are compelling enough to make you conclude discovery and a wider investigation are necessary, but he never carries out a full-on prosecution.

Besides consorting with unsavory characters (and taking their money), Mother Teresa's greatest trespass, according to Hitchens, was accepting the mantle of compassionate caretaker of the poor, while harboring a philosophy that celebrates suffering and does little for the poor but let them wretch, surreptitiously convert them, and let them die so that they might go to heaven. Meanwhile, her well-to-do patrons in the developed world sleep well at night after having written her a check, knowing that they have done good. Her unbending opposition to any contraception also doesn't win her any points in Hitchens's scorecard, but what does he expect from a Catholic nun?

If you believe in God, you might take offense to how easily and unapologetically Hitchens dismisses any notions of a creator or afterlife or other mysticisms. But if this is the case, I don't think this book was written for you; I think he wrote this book assuming (at the very least) an informed secularism on the part of the reader. As always, Hitchens proves to be a good and interesting writer, and I recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: Inflammatory whistle-blowing.
Review: Mother Teresa has become a cliche -- in and outside India. A figure known so well for charity and generosity that even the late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi -- who was incidentally also called a Mother by millions of Indians -- couldn't resist her (media) charm. Indira Gandhi sterilization for the masses as a govt. policy, while the subject of her affection was openly against birth control and undid what is right for the country.

Such is the charm of Mother Teresa that the government of India is planning on instituting an award on her name. While, in fact, Mother Teresa has tarnished the image of India. In a way, probably, Mother Teresa symbolizes all that is wrong with India -- and the world, and much more.

Mr.Hitchens provides a compelling picture of Mother Teresa; her cunning and clever manipulation; her innate instinct for dramatization and image building. It is a story of how the old religion meets the glitter of the new mass media.

Mr.Hitchens insinuates and is 'ad hominem' at times. Which clearly could have been avoided; he would rather let the 'evidence' do the talking -- which he provides enough of.

Although the investigation on Mother Teresa is not exhaustive, whatever Mr.Hitchens presented was worth looking at. All that the media presents as digestible is sometimes not; Mr.Hitchens' book proves that. Saints have no souls and evil is peddled with dogma.

Rating:
Summary: Contribution to the world?
Review: How can one review this book without reflecting on the mind behind it? Do you wonder what makes it tick?

What is his goal, his motive in writing? Maybe to make his living and reputation off the attraction many people have to controversy? His motive then is materialistic, not surprising in our culture.

Ironically, his own understanding of humanity would assume that his motive was evil and completely selfish.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt, based on the anger underlying this book, it seems possible that his goal is to teach people that human nature is evil. That anything that looks good is not good at all, but always has an evil motive behind it. Maybe he really believes it. Maybe he is motivated by great hurt done to him by someone who looked good to the world but was a hypocrite.

Does he have a long term goal to prove that there is none righteous, not even one? If so, the Bible already makes that point.

But doesn't he wonder why so many people look for someone good to admire? If all people were completely evil, would anyone admire Mother Theresa? Does he miss the reality that there is a part of human nature that reaches for the good?

Mother Theresa's goal was to love the unloved. She didn't pretend that it was to heal the dying. Her motive was love for God, who called her to reflect a facet of his love. She had buildings built to house people who shared this goal. In fairness, nothing he writes proves that this was not her goal or motive. Just that he disagrees with the value of her goal.

I admit, I haven't read all of Christopher Hitchens' work. When young, I used to muck the manure out of the stable where our horses were sheltered because I liked horses, not because I was enthralled with manure. If The "Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice" was written with a theme different than the discovery of unrighteousness human nature in someone admired by many people(what a new and revolutionary discovery!), I missed it.

Do you wonder what the epitaph will be on Christopher Hitchens' tombstone? If he is remembered at all, will it be for discovering some unrighteousness in people who are admired for goodness?

Mother Theresa will probably be remembered as long as this world continues. Whatever she did wrong will be unimportant because she spent so many years modeling human love for the unloved; a love each of us were created to enjoy and desire. The kind of love that might have quenched the anger in Christopher Hitchens' life.

I would rather share a tiny part of Mother Theresa's epitaph, wouldn't you?

Rating:
Summary: wonder where Mother is now?a very hot suana, perhaps?
Review: At face value, this book is damning to the reputation of Mother
Teresa. And this is exactly where most reviews should end. But in my opinion, this book is well written, terse and funny. Morality has nothing to do with Christianity, and this is the sad part about religion in general. Yes, Chris Hitchens is not Mother Teresa's biggest fan, but he writes this book through facts, and and the questionable deeds of the subject herself. That's why this book has been really helpful to me. I know nothing about Mother Teresa except the saintly portraiture I see on television once in a while and sadly, on top of my patients' overhead tables who are dying or suffering from pain. She was a patient at one of the most exclusive hospital in Torrey Pines in California sometime in the early 90's. People that work there still talk about it as though they were visited by the Virgin Mary herself. But when I ask basic questions like, Why did she have to came all the way here in La Jolla, CA to ge treated? Who is she anyway? And stuff like, who paid for her treatment? I was treated like a bothersome child and at worst a heretic for asking such questions. I guess we have lost our own ability to be objective. In conclusion,I value this book for being a tool of objectivity. I should drop a start though, because it was too short.

Rating:
Summary: Good points - bad book
Review: While Hitchens raises some valid points in this brief tract, they are badly served by the intensely vituperative, partisan and anti-religious language that he uses. This is unfortunate, because it undermines the credibility of his arguments.

I do agree, however, that Mother Teresa has (or had) some explaining to do regarding her interaction with brutal dictators in Albania and Haiti, her intervention in the Keating Five case, her organizations inability to properly account for donated funds, and her apparent indifference to alleviating poverty.

Good points - bad book.

Rating:
Summary: A fair and balanced examination......
Review: It takes courage to write about something, or someone, that is popularly believed to be beyond reproach. Hitchens has done exactly this in his examination of Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity. The book informs the reader concerning the inconsistencies surrounding Mother Teresa's ideals and the way in which those ideals were actualized.
I came away from the book repulsed by the dichotomy between Mother Teresa's "theory and practice," but conversely I am willing to concede that she was most probably a victim of the Catholic Church's imperative of saintliness at all costs. It's quite regrettable and the book clearly shows how this can lead not only Mother Teresa, but any of us, to a point where objectivity is replaced by a sort of illogical religious fervor that blurs boundries and hinders clarity.
Mother Teresa no doubt was a good person trying to put balance into an unbalanced world. But after reading this book the reader is left with a sense of just how much her own modes of operation and thought were off-balance......

Rating:
Summary: Resist the Hegemony
Review: It's always amazing to hear how masses and masses of people accept stories and opinions as fact without looking into the story itself or even picking up a book. Read this and then read more. Hegemony does not put out stories that does not enforce the status quo so you have to look for them.

Christopher Hitchens assembles contradictory information to Mother Teresa's saintliness and does it quickly and succinctly. You are not drowned in tons of conspiracy theories but it will open up your mind to new things.

Rating:
Summary: The saint who destroyed the image of Calcutta.
Review: I do not know anything about Catholicism so I would not dispute mother's religious ideology. But one thing I know is MC is surely not about helping the poor.

1. Any small charitable organization (including many catholic/christian organizations)in Calcutta do thousand times more to help the poors of Calcutta. Although MC does some charitable work, it is so miniscule given the amount of donation it recieves I would call it only a religious organization, certainly not a charity.

2. Contrary to popular belief, MC helps primarily christians or makes sure those who recieve help converts to Catholicism. Of course there are exceptions. I am against any religion which do not consider people of other religion as equally worthy human beings.

3. In the last 30 years of her life, mother spent overwhelmingly more time touring the Western world than working with the poor in Calcutta. I doubt whether even 0.01% of Calcutta's poor ever even saw her.

Of course I do not mind the above things and mother had a constitutionally guranteed right to religious freedom and to spend her organizations money the way she wants, but as a Calcuttan I do take offense in her extremely negative (if not outright lying) portyal of Calcutta. Just like any other third world or Indian cities, Calcutta also has its share of poverty but it is by no means greater than any other city of India. In reality, Calcutta is better off than most of the other cities in India. Not only it had a very vibrant cultural/social/political life for last 200 years, till date it continues to be the cultural capital of India and one of the most tolerant, multi-cultural, liberal city of India. Calcutta boasts the best public traportation system among Indian cities, it is not as densely populated as Delhi or Mumbai and it is not as polluted as Delhi. The real estate price in Calcutta will be higher than London, believe it or not!! Yes, there are homeless people in Calcutta (so are there in New York), but most of them are not beggars. They do odd jobs but not rich enough to afford a home. There is no wide-spread hunger in Calcutta, food is plenty, cheap and available in vast quantities. The government does enough to take care of the poor and I can gurantee, that even if you search really hard, you wont see the kind of squalor and poverty in Calcutta that mother made her Western followers believe. Interestingly, most of the Westerners get frustrated by not seeing enough poverty when they visit Calcutta, so the locals arrange some kind of poverty tour! and they search hard and find out the most wretched place (usually populated by illegal immigrants from Bangladesh or rural areas of neighboring states) to get the Western tourist see what they want to see. Her negative portryal of Calcutta caused the city to lose millions of dollar on tourism revenue, since no one wants to visit this nightmarish place. Some of you might find it hard to believe but in my 24 years of life in Calcutta I never saw the kind of poverty mother's followers tend to assume about Calcutta. The worst part is, mother fed her followers with such exaggerated image of poverty to raise money but in reality did not do anything about it or atleast nothing of any significance. No wonder the people of Calcutta, the so called recipient of her generosity does not care at all about her charitable work, but they do respect her because she brought a Nobel Prize (incidentally two more Indians won that prize before her from Calcutta)to the city and they are unaware of the stories mother tells rest of the world about Calcutta. I do not question her holiness, but I think by constantly lying about Calcutta, she used faudulent means to raise money and did not use the money for which it was raised in the first place.

I am still amazed, that the old, innocous looking, saintly woman had the capacity to pull-off one of the biggest frauds in recent history and even managed to get a nobel prize for God knows what contribution to peace! I dont know whether the truth will make any dent in the belief of her admirers, but it is the truth and you have to visit Calcutta to realize it.

P.S: I suggest a book (Mother Teresa The Final Verdict)in the following web-site for a more revealing account of her activities.

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Rating:
Summary: Pathetic, actually made me sad at the state of the left
Review: What is so bad about Mother Theresa? She is a conservative Catholic who actually did what the left has failed at so patheticaly. Helped the poor physically, but much more restored their dignity. I remember when we were all swearing to each other in college that we were going to do the same thing. Well, we didn't always succeed and for someone like Hitchens the unkindest cut is seeing what we saw as the oppressor up on the pedistal we'd envisioned for ourselves.

I always considered myself a liberal especially in being an advocate for the poor. I've grown more and more shocked at the depths the left has fallen to. We had the best intentions, but many of our policies have failed. The public schools system is a mess (controlled exclusively by liberals for years), socialism (except in its european evolution which is indistinguishable from capitalism with a little keynes and some rhetoric) has been an indefensiable disaster which brought a mind numbing cost in life, happiness and freedom (despite what people say now we defended all of this from Vietnam to Cuba). We are bad at defense issues. Reagan was right about the USSR and the cold war, and today Russians and Eastern Europeans all but kiss the ground at the mention of his name (I lived there for several years, they are all would be republicans who would laugh in your face if you told them you were a 60s protester).

Here was one woman who saw something horribly wrong and damaging to human dignity, and she didn't write an article or bemoan some policy - she stepped up to the hot seat, and with all her flawed humanity at the table, did the right thing.

I think she is a miracle, and the left should look to her for an example. Our ideals were right, we were just not Mother Theresas. Maybe one day we can all become more like her and it will be us deserving the thanks, and not the scorn, of the poor.

Rating:
Summary: So, she was Catholic?
Review: Is this the worst that can be said? That Mother Theresa was Catholic (and so prayed, wanted to convert others to be Catholic and opposed abortion despite not having all the answers to India's population problem), and that people contributing to her order were contributing to an order (which built churches and convents as well as hospices and clinics) and not to a secular charity looking to impose a rigorous separation between its works and any religious views of its staff. I really don't think the people who contributed, and contribute, to her order were ever in confusion about this.

It actually reminds me a lot of the criticisms leveled against her by the local govt in Calcutta. Their emperor's new clothes like problem was that despite their views on how she should spend the money given to her, she did a lot more actual good for the poorest of the poor in Calcutta then they did. The fact she didn't solve all their problems in one stroke did not take away from the fact she gave people abandoned on the street to die a place to die with dignity and caring - something the local govt and various international agencies could not achieve despite annual budgets several times her orders.

The WHO, UN, USAID and the govts of Calcutta and India have not been able to solve Calcutta's medical situation. Hitchen's criticisms that she did not do more are laughable. What did he do? What did any of us do to compare to what this woman achieved in the alleviating of real human suffering and desperation.

I would like to live in a world with more Mother Teresas and only someone who has never really tried to do anything about real problems could wish for less Teresas and more Indian govt officials mismanaging funds as the truly poor are left to die in the streets.