The Missionary Position

subsequently.

Of course if the purpose of Mother Teresa’s work is that of strict religious proselytization and the founding of an order toward that end, there can be no conceivable objection to her employing charitable donations in order to decorate an altarpiece with the things of this world. But those who make the donations are, it seems, not always aware that this is the essential point. Mother Teresa, to her credit, has never claimed otherwise. She did not even bother to use the biblical story of the spikenard ointment in reassuring Muggeridge, telling him instead that ‘you will be daily on the altar close to the Body of Christ’. Muggeridge was not then a Catholic, so he had no grounds on which to object that this was a doubly tricky use of the notion of transubstantiation. He thought of the spikenard alibi all by himself. ((This is the passage in which Jesus breaks a costly box of unguent exclusively on his own feet To the naive objection that the luxury item might with greater effect have been sold for the relief of poverty, he rejoins, ‘The poor you have always with you.’ I remember as a child finding this famous crack rather unsatisfactory. Either one eschews luxury and serves the poor or one does not If the poor are always with us, on the other hand, then there is no particular hurry and they can always be used to illustrate morality tales. In which case, it might be more honest for their prophetic benefactors to admit that the poor have us always with them.)

Modesty and humility are popularly supposed to be saintly attributes, yet Mother Teresa can scarcely grant an audience without claiming a special and personal relationship with Jesus Christ In the following exchange between Muggeridge and his star, who is the one demonstrating the self-abnegating modesty?

Muggeridge: When I think of Calcutta and of the appallingness of so much of it, it seems extraordinary that one person could just walk out and decide to tackle this thing.

Mother Teresa: I was sure then, and I’m still convinced, that it is He and not I.

Here is a perfect fit between interviewer and subject: Muggeridge finds the poor of Calcutta to be rife with ‘appallingness’, and Mother Teresa says that there would be no point in trying if one was not mandated by heaven. A little further on in the interview, Muggeridge inquires as follows:

So you wouldn’t agree with people who say there are too many children in India?

Mother Teresa: I do not agree because God always provides. He provides for the flowers and the birds, for everything in the world that he has created. And those little children are his life. There can never be enough.

Muggeridge approves of this reply, saying moistly that Mother Teresa might as well be asked if there are too many stars in the sky. The entire dialogue is conducted in a semi-surreal manner, as if nobody had ever made any reasoned point about family planning or population policy. To say that there are too many children is to miss the point, because they are born already. But to say that there cannot be too many people is (and not only in India) to commit at least the sin of hubris. Mrs Indira Gandhi — a political patron of Mother Teresa’s, incidentally — once embarked upon a criminal campaign of forced sterilization in India. Clearly there are many ways of getting the population question wrong. On the other hand, there is no rational way of saying that the question does not arise. And if it were true that God ‘always provides’, then, obviously, there would be no need for the Missionaries of Charity in the first place.

Before leaving Muggeridge’s milestone behind us, it is necessary to record one more of the interchanges between him and his guru:

Muggeridge: You don’t think that there’s a danger that people might mistake the means for the end, and feel that serving their fellow men was an end in itself? Do you think there’s a danger of that?

Mother Teresa: There is always the danger that we may become only social workers or just do the work for the sake of the work…. It is a danger; if we forget to whom we are doing it. Our works are only an expression of our love for Christ. Our hearts need to be full of love for him, and since we have to express that love in action, naturally then the poorest of the poor are the means of expressing our love for God.

In the film of Something Beautiful for God, there is a sequence in which Mother Teresa takes an abandoned and undernourished child in her arms. The child is sickly looking and wizened and without much of the charm that babies possess at that age, but the old lady looks down at her with dauntless encouragement and enthusiasm and says, ‘See. There is life in her.’ It is an undeniably affirmative moment. We would not be worse off if there were many more like it. But, just as Mother Teresa rather spoiled her own best moment for me by implying that her life’s work was a mere exercise in propaganda for the Vatican’s population policy, she cheapens her own example by telling us, as above, that humanism and altruism are ‘dangers’ to be sedulously avoided. Mother Teresa has never pretended that her work is anything but a fundamentalist religious campaign. And in the excerpt above we have it on her own authority that ‘the poorest of the poor’ are the instruments of this; an occasion for piety.

Good Works and Heroic Virtues

Fan Ch’ih asked about wisdom. The master said: ‘To work for the things the common people have a right to, and to keep one’s distance from the gods and spirits while showing them reverence can be called wisdom.’

Confucius, Analects Book VI, 22

No Philosopher was on hand to tell him that there is no strong sentiment without some terror, as there is no real religion without a little fetishism.

Joseph Conrad, Victory

Star light, star bright… we look up and we hope the stars look down, we pray that there may be stars for us to follow, stars moving across the heavens and leading up to our destiny, but it’s only our vanity. We look at the and fall in love, but the universe cares less about us than we do about it, and the stars stay in their courses however much we may wish upon them to do otherwise. It’s true that if you watch the sky-wheel turn for a while you’ll see a meteor fall, flame and die. That’s not a star worth following; it’s just an unlucky rock. Our fates are here on earth. There are no guiding stars.

Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh

I

Those prepared to listen to criticism of Mother Teresa’s questionable motives and patently confused sociological policy are still inclined to believe that her work is essentially humane. Surely, they reason, there is something morally impressive in a life consecrated to charity. If it were not for the testimony of those who have seen the shortcomings and contradictions of her work firsthand, it might be sufficient argument, on the grounds that Mother Teresa must have done some genuine good for the world’s suffering people.

However, even here the record is somewhat murky and uneven, and it is qualified by the same limitations as apply to the rest of Mother Teresa’s work: that such work is undertaken not for its own sake but to propagandize one highly subjective view of human nature and need, so that she may one day be counted as the beatific founder of a new order and discipline within the Church itself. Even in the quotidian details of ostensibly ‘charitable’ labour,