The Missionary Position

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 honoured, 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 Yean, by Edward Ie 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 leukaemia 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.

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-fulfilment 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

Intercession, 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 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