testimony, in warm encomium of the ruling couple, was shown on state-run television every night for at least a week. No protest against this footage is known to have been registered by Mother Teresa (who has ways of making her views widely available) between the time of the award and the time when the Haitian people became so ‘familiar’ with Jean-Claude and Michele that the couple had barely enough time to stuff their luggage with the National Treasury before fleeing for ever to the French Riviera.
Other questions arise as well, all of them touching on matters of saintliness, modesty, humility and devotion to the poor. Apart from anything else, what was Mother Teresa doing in Port-au-Prince attending photo opportunities and award ceremonies with the local oligarchy? What, indeed, was she doing in Haiti at all? The world has a need to picture her in a pose of agonized yet willing subjection, washing the feet of Calcutta’s poor. Politics is not her proper
Let us look again at the photograph of the two smiling ladies. In terms of received ideas about Mother Teresa, it does not ‘fit’. It does not, as people say nowadays, ‘compute’. Image and perception are everything, and those who possess them have the ability to determine their own myth, to be taken at their own valuation. Actions and words are judged by reputations, and not the other way around. So hold the picture to the light for an instant, and try to take an impression of the ‘negative’. Is it possible that the reverse black-and-white tells not a grey tale but a truer one?
Also before me as I write is a photograph of Mother Teresa standing, eyes modestly downcast, in friendly propinquity with a man known as ‘John-Roger’. At first glance, it would seem to the casual viewer that they are standing in a Calcutta slum. A closer look makes it plain that the destitute figures in the background have been added in as a backdrop. The picture is a fake. So, for that matter, is John-Roger. As leader of the cult known sometimes as ‘Insight’ but more accurately as MSIA (the ‘Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness’, pronounced ‘Messiah’), he is a fraud of Chaucerian proportions. Probably best known to the public for his lucrative connection to Arianna Stassinopoulos-Huffington — whose husband, Michael Huffington, spent $42 million of his own inherited money on an unsuccessful bid for a Senate seat in California — John-Roger has repeatedly claimed to be, and to have, a ‘spiritual consciousness’ that is superior to that of Jesus Christ. Such a claim is hard to adjudicate. (One might think, all the same, that it would be blasphemous to the simple outlook of Mother Teresa. Yet there she is, keeping him company and lending him the lustre of her name and image. MSIA, it should be noted, has repeatedly been exposed in print as corrupt and fanatical, and the Cult Awareness Network lists the organization as highly dangerous’.
It turns out that the faked photograph records the momentous occasion of Mother Teresa’s acceptance of a cheque for $10,000. It came in the form of an ‘Integrity Award’ bestowed by John-Roger himself — a man who realized his own divinity in the aftermath of a visionary kidney operation. No doubt Mother Teresa’s apologists will have their defence close at hand. Their heroine is too innocent to detect dishonesty in others. And $10,000 is $10,000 and, as Lenin was fond of saying (citing Juvenal),
One last set of photographs closes this portfolio. Behold Mother Teresa in prayerful attitude, flanked by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Marion Barry, as she opens an eight-bed adoption facility in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. It is a great day for Marion Barry, who has led the capital city into beggary and corruption, and who covers his nakedness by calling for mandatory prayer in schools. It is a great day as well for Hillary Rodham Clinton, who almost single-handedly destroyed a coalition on national health care that had taken a quarter of a century to build and mature.
The seeds of this multiple photo opportunity, which occurred on 19 June 1995, were sown the preceding March, as the First Lady toured the Indian subcontinent. Molly Moore, the fine
When the Clinton motorcade whisked through the Pakistani countryside yesterday, a long fence of brightly colored fabric shielded it from a sprawling, smoldering garbage dump where children combed through trash and several poor families had built huts from scraps of cardboard, rags and plastic…. In another instance, Pakistani officials, having heard rumors that the First Lady might take a hike into the scenic Margalla Hills overlooking the capital of Islamabad, rushed out and paved a 10-mile stretch of road to a village in the hills. She never took the hike (the Secret Service vetoed the proposal) but villagers got a paved road they’d been requesting for decades.
In such ways do Western leaders impress themselves momentarily upon the poor of the world, before flying home much purified and sobered by the experience. A stop at a Mother Teresa institution is absolutely
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 Michele Duvalier, one of the modern world’s most cynical, shallow and spoiled women: a whited sepulchre and a parasite on ‘the poor’. The