The Missionary Position (3 page)

One good turn deserves another, and so Mother Teresa’s subsequent visit to Washington gave both Mrs. Clinton and Mayor Barry the occasion for some safe, free publicity. The new twelve-bed adoption center is in the rather leafy and decorous Chevy Chase suburb, and nobody was churlish enough to mention Mother Teresa’s earlier trip to the city in October 1981, when she had turned the light of her countenance on the blighted ghetto of Anacostia. Situated in near segregation on the other side of the Potomac, Anacostia is the capital of black Washington, and there was suspicion at the time about the
idea of a Missionaries of Charity operation there, because the inhabitants were known to resent the suggestion that they were helpless and abject Third Worlders. Indeed, just before her press conference, Mother Teresa found her office rudely invaded by a group of black men. Her assistant Kathy Sreedhar takes up the story:

They were very upset.… They told Mother that Anacostia needed decent jobs, housing and services—not charity. Mother didn’t argue with them; she just listened. Finally, one of them asked her what she was going to do here. Mother said: “First we must learn to love one another.” They didn’t know what to say to that.

Well, no. But possibly because they had heard it before. Anyway, when the press conference began, Mother Teresa was able to clear up any misunderstandings swiftly:

“Mother Teresa, what do you hope to accomplish here?”

“The joy of loving and being loved.”

“That takes a lot of money, doesn’t it?”

“It takes a lot of sacrifice.”

“Do you teach the poor to endure their lot?”

“I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.”

Marion Barry graced the event with his presence, of course, as did Reverend George Stallings, the black pastor of St. Teresa’s. Fourteen years later, Anacostia is an even worse slum and the Reverend Stallings has seceded from the Church in order to set up a blacks-only Catholicism devoted chiefly to himself. (He has also been in a spot of bother lately for allegedly outraging the innocence of a junior congregant.) Only Marion Barry, reborn in prison and re-elected as a demagogue, has really mastered the uses of redemption.

So behold again the photograph of Mother Teresa locked in a sisterly embrace with Michèle Duvalier, one of the modern world’s most cynical, shallow and spoiled women: a whited sepulcher and a parasite on “the poor.” The picture, and its context, announce Mother Teresa as what she is: a religious fundamentalist, a political operative, a primitive sermonizer and an accomplice of worldly, secular powers. Her mission has always been of this kind. The irony is that she has never been able to induce anybody to believe her. It is past time that she was duly honored, and taken at her word.

*   *   *

When I asked the electronic index at the Library of Congress to furnish me with a list of books on Mother Teresa, it printed out some twenty titles. There was
Mother Teresa: Helping the Poor
, by William Jay Jacobs;
Mother Teresa: The Glorious Years
, by Edward Le Jolly;
Mother Teresa: A Woman in Love
, which looked more promising but turned out to be by the same author in the same spirit;
Mother Teresa: Protector of the Sick
, by Linda Carlson Johnson;
Mother Teresa: Servant to the World’s Suffering People
, by Susan Ullstein;
Mother Teresa: Friend of the Friendless
, by Carol Greene; and
Mother Teresa: Caring for All God’s Children
, by Betsy Lee—to name but the most salient titles. Even the most neutral of these—
Mother Teresa: Her Life, Her Works
, by Dr. Lush Gjergji—proved to be a sort of devotional pamphlet in the guise of a biography, composed by one of Mother Teresa’s Albanian co-religionists.

Indeed, the overall tone was so strongly devotional that it seemed almost normal for a moment. Yet if you review the above titles out loud—Mother Teresa, helper of the poor, protector of the sick, servant to the suffering, friend of the friendless—you are in fact mimicking an invocation of the Virgin and improvising your own “Ave Maria” or “Hail Mary.” Note, too, the scale of the invocation—the
world’s
suffering people,
all
God’s children. What we have here is a saint in the making, whose sites and
relics will one day be venerated and who is already the personal object of a following that is not much short of cultish.

The present Pope is unusually fond of the canonization process. In sixteen years he has created five times as many saints as all of his twentieth-century predecessors combined. He has also multiplied the number of beatifications, thus keeping the ante-room to sainthood well stocked. Between 1588 and 1988 the Vatican canonized 679 saints. In the reign of John Paul II alone (as of June 1995), there have been 271 canonizations and 631 beatifications. Several hundred cases are pending, including the petition to canonize Queen Isabella of Spain. So rapid and general is the approach that it recalls the baptism by firehose with which Chinese generals Christianized their armies; in one 1987 ceremony a grand total of 85 English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish martyrs were beatified in one day.

Sainthood is no small claim, because it brings with it the power to make intercession and it allows prayer to be directed at the said saint. Many popes have been slow to canonize, as the Church is generally slow to validate miracles and apparitions, because if divine intervention in human affairs is too promiscuously recognized, then an obvious danger arises. If one leper can be cured, the flock may inquire, then why not all lepers? Allow of a too-easy miracle and
it becomes harder to answer questions about infant leukemia or mass poverty and injustice with unsatisfying formulae about the Lord’s preference for moving in mysterious ways. This is an old problem, and it is unlikely to yield to mass-production methodology in the canonization division.

Although a “saint” traditionally is required to have performed at least one miracle, to have done “good works” and possessed “heroic virtues,” and to have demonstrated the logistically difficult quality of ubiquity, many people who are not even Roman Catholics have already decided that Mother Teresa is a saint. Sources in the Vatican’s “Congregation for Sainthood Causes” (which examines thorny cases like that of Queen Isabella) abandon their customary reticence and reserve in declaring Mother Teresa’s beatification and eventual canonization to be certain. This consummation can hardly displease her, but it may not have been among her original objectives. Her life shows, rather, a determination to be the founder of a new order—her Missionaries of Charity organization currently numbers some 4,000 nuns and 40,000 lay workers—to be ranked with St. Francis and St. Benedict as the author of a “rule” and a “discipline.”

Mother Teresa has a theory of poverty, which is also a theory of submission and gratitude. She has also a theory of power, which derives from St. Paul’s neglected words about “the powers that be,” which
“are ordained of God.” She is, finally, the emissary of a very determined and very politicized papacy. Her world travels are not the wanderings of a pilgrim but a campaign which accords with the requirements of power. Mother Teresa has a theory of morality too. It is not a difficult theory to comprehend, though it has its difficulties. And Mother Teresa understands very thoroughly the uses of the biblical passage concerning what is owed to Caesar.

As to what is owed to God, that is a matter for those who have faith, or for those who at any rate are relieved that others have it. The rich part of our world has a poor conscience, and it is no fault of an Albanian nun that so many otherwise contented people should decide to live vicariously through what they imagine to be her charity. What follows here is an argument not with a deceiver but with the deceived. If Mother Teresa is the adored object of many credulous and uncritical observers, then the blame is not hers, or hers alone. In the gradual manufacture of an illusion, the conjurer is only the instrument of the audience. He may even announce himself as a trickster and a clever prestidigitator and yet gull the crowd.
Populus vult decipi—ergo decipiatur
.

¹
“Madame President is someone who feels, who knows, who wishes to demonstrate her love not only with words
but also with concrete and tangible actions
.” [Emphasis added.]

²
“Madame President, the country vibrates with your life work.”

A Miracle

Convulsions in nature, disorders, prodigies, miracles, though the most opposite to the plan of a wise superintendent, impress mankind with the strongest sentiments of religion.

David Hume,
The Natural History of Religion

Upon the whole, mystery, miracle and prophecy are appendages that belong to fabulous and not to true religion. They are the means by which so many Lo heres! and Lo theres! have been spread about the world, and religion been made into a trade. The success of one impostor gave encouragement to another, and the quieting salvo of doing some good by keeping up a pious fraud, protected them from remorse.

Tom Paine,
The Age of Reason

Thus we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification.

Sigmund Freud,
The Future of an Illusion

I
ntercession, the hallmark of sainthood, requires the certification of a miracle. Mother Teresa is already worshipped as something more than human, but she has not transcended our common lot to the extent of being cited as a wonder-worker by Mother Church. The printout of the titles provided me by the Library of Congress showed that almost all were published in the 1980s and 1990s, and it wasn’t until I had been through the list that I noticed what was not there: a 1971 book by Malcolm Muggeridge which argued,
inter alia
, that Mother Teresa’s miracle had already taken place.

Muggeridge’s book,
Something Beautiful for God
, was the outcome of a BBC documentary of the same name, screened in 1969. Muggeridge, who made something of a career out of ridiculing TV and showbiz values, claims that he began the project with no idea of the impression it would help to create. “Mother Teresa’s
way of looking at life is barren soil for copy-writers,” he says, “and the poorest of the poor she cherishes offer little in the way of ratings.” If that disingenuous disclaimer was true when filming began, it ceased to be true very shortly after transmission had occurred, for it is from this film and this book that we can date the arrival of Mother Teresa’s “image” on the international retina.

Essential to Muggeridge’s project, essential indeed to the whole Mother Teresa cult, is the impression that Calcutta is a hellhole:

As it happened, I lived in Calcutta for eighteen months in the middle Thirties when I was working with the
Statesman
newspaper there, and found the place, even with all the comforts of a European’s life—the refrigerator, the servants, the morning canter round the Maidan or out at the Jodhpur Club, and so on—barely tolerable.

Since Muggeridge’s time, the city has not only had its own enormous difficulties to contend with but it has also been the scene of three major migrations of misery. Having been itself partitioned by a stupid British colonial decision before independence, Bengal took the brunt of the partitioning of all India into India and Pakistan in 1947. The Bangladesh war in 1971 and, later, the sectarian brushfires in Assam
have swollen Calcutta’s population to a number far greater than it can hope to accommodate. Photographs of people living on pavements have become internationally recognized emblems of destitution. Mother Teresa’s emphasis on “the poorest of the poor and the lowest of the low” has served to reinforce the impression of Calcutta as a city of dreadful night, an impression which justly irritates many Bengalis.

The pleasant surprise that awaits the visitor to Calcutta is this: it is poor and crowded and dirty, in ways which are hard to exaggerate,
but it is anything but abject
. Its people are neither inert nor cringing. They work and they struggle, and as a general rule (especially as compared with ostensibly richer cities such as Bombay) they do not beg. This is the city of Tagore, of Ray and Bose and Mrinal Sen, and of a great flowering of culture and nationalism. There are films, theaters, university departments and magazines, all of a high quality. The photographs of Raghubir Singh are a testament to the vitality of the people, as well as to the beauty and variety of the architecture. Secular-leftist politics predominate, with a very strong internationalist temper: hardly unwelcome in a region so poisoned by brute religion.

When I paid my own visit to the city some years ago, I immediately felt rather cheated by the anti-Calcutta propaganda put out by the Muggeridges of
the world. And when I made my way to the offices of the Missionaries of Charity on Bose Road, I received something of a shock. First was the inscription over the door, which read “He that loveth correction loveth knowledge.” I don’t know the provenance of the quotation, but it had something of the ring of the workhouse about it. Mother Teresa herself gave me a guided tour. I did not particularly care for the way that she took kisses bestowed on her sandaled feet as no more than her due, but I decided to suspend judgment on this—perhaps it was a local custom that I understood imperfectly. The orphanage, anyway, was moving and affecting. Very small (no shame in that) and very clean, it had an encouraging air and seemed to be run by charming and devoted people. One tiny cot stood empty, its occupant not having survived the night, and there was earnest discussion about a vacancy to be filled. I had begun to fumble for a contribution when Mother Teresa turned to me and said, with a gesture that seemed to take in the whole scene, “See, this is how we fight abortion and contraception.”