Mother Teresa

It was not at all my intention on this fine Sunday morning to tackle this subject and for an obvious reason that will soon become apparent, it is not the best day to do so. After reading several headlines such as these - “Mother Teresa Is Made a Saint by Pope Francis” and “Pope Declares Mother Teresa a Saint and Model of Mercy” - why would I feel compelled to be contrary about the canonization of Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu? Or, to put it another way, “Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute?  For less obvious reasons I should also steer clear of this topic since I really can’t say that I read those articles, nor do I know much about Catholicism. I should add, however, that my ignorance does not incline me to feel hostile toward Catholics who, I am sure,  would at least tolerate my cartoonish rendering of the Pope, if I had the ability to draw one.  My attitude toward religion can perhaps best be summarized by the fact that I agree with this definition of Faith which is “The quality by which we are enabled to believe that which we know is untrue.” As I said, I was not even interested enough to read the articles.

The problem is that I am a disciple of the late Christopher Hitchens, the creator of the "shriveled old lady’"description above. He also called her a “fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud”, and even worse a “thieving, fanatical Albanian dwarf.” His attitude toward religion is summed up in his book - God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.  By the way, he also said unkind things about Princess Di.

At this point you are probably not likely a fan of the man and are wondering why I am. From this description you might see why:

“The descendants of the great readers I have mentioned are too often merely fluent know-it-alls, of whom Christopher Hitchens might be considered the exemplar. There he is, every week or month, in the Nation, Vanity Fair, the London Review of Books, writing about history, politics, books, public figures, virtually anything that comes down the freeways of our global culture. I personally have seen Christopher Hitchens in public debate while so weary or drunk or both that he can hardly have known whether he was even facing his audience, or whether there was an audience --and yet not a detail of his argument was dropped and not any of his long and well-turned sentences were slurred. His speech, like his writing, is precise, often brilliant, sometimes spellbinding, rarely inelegant; and yet one feels--as with many of his high-journalistic peers--that all this knowledge (or at least all this information) is not really reading-derived, but has been acquired more or less by osmosis, by rubbing elbows with his journalistic peers in Washington, London, New York, Paris, Delhi, Tehran, or wherever. I might note that this fluency is something few Americans seem to possess; perhaps it stems from admirable European secondary education. I might note too that it is mainly those high journalists who seem to command the steadily released energies of their Victorian counterparts, Bagehot, Macaulay, Saintsbury.” p.123 in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Larry McMurtry.

Plus, Hitchens  generally offers good and solid reasons in his arguments and I wondered what they were in this case.

Although a disciple, I confess to not having read his book about Mother Teresa: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Since you are unlikely to, I suggest that you look up the Wikipedia entry for Hitchens and in it you will find another link to a thorough analysis of and synopsis of The Missionary Position..., also in Wikipedia. Some of the criticisms of the saintly one are quite serious and go beyond just questioning the ‘miracles’ that are a prerequisite for sainthood. It is argued, among other things,  that perhaps she was more interested in conversion than charity and often less interested in the source of some donations (those, e.g. from Jean-Claude Duvalier and Charles Keating), and ensuring the money was properly used. And, of course, she was not in a position to do much about the population problem.

Given that the sources above are good and that I obviously am not well-read on this subject, I will abandon you here having simply played the contrarian. In the short bit of poking around I did this morning, however, I did discover a couple of Canadian connections that are interesting and which will allow me to end on an impartial note by offering them to you.

Back in the last century, a Canadian priest (Father Kolodiejchuk) was chosen to be the “postulator” (promoter) of the canonization of Mother Teresa and in 2001 he delivered 32,400 pages of documentation to the Vatican. (see: “The Mission: In his 16 Years as a Priest, Father Brian Kolodiejchuk of Winnipeg Has Never Tackled a More High-pressure Job: It is up to Him to Persuade the Vatican to make Mother Teresa a Saint,” Christopher Guly, The Ottawa Citizen, Sept. 2001). One imagines it was positive, although Hitchen’s views were supposedly recorded.

More recently and more negatively, some  Canadian academics have offered their views. Here is an English abstract of the article which they have written:

“The impact of Mother Teresa’s work has no religious or geographical boundaries. In the four parts of this text, we try to understand this phenomenon. We first present the method used to collect the available information and then discuss a few biographical considerations to clarify her mission and the media’s contribution to her popularity. The third part identifies four stumbling blocks on her way to canonization: her rather dogmatic religious views, her way of caring for the sick, her political choices, and her suspicious management of funds that she received. Fourth, we discuss some elements of her life related to beatification, including her “night of faith,” the exorcism to which she was subjected as well as the validity of the miracle attributed to her. In conclusion, we question why the criticism of which she has been the target has been ignored by the Vatican.”

Source: “Les côtés ténébreux de Mère Teresa,” Serge Larivée, Carole Sénéchal, and Geneviève Chénard Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, September 2013; vol. 42, 3: pp. 319-345.
There are other critical articles to offset the positive. See, for example: "Why Mother Teresa is Still No Saint to Many of Her Critics," Adam Taylor, Washington Post, Sept. 1, 2016.

I have faith in Hitchens, but you can decide for yourself.