The Missionary Position by Christopher Hitchens Read Free Book Online

a case of “politically correct” bureaucracy insisting on the rights of the disabled and negating the efforts of the missionaries. The truth is the exact reverse.
    It might be argued that extreme simplicity, even primitivism, is to be preferred to a luxurious or corrupting style of the sort that has overtaken religious orders in the past. Ms. Shields told herself things like this for years. However, she realized that, rather than a life of ascetism, theirs was a regime of austerity, rigidity, harshness and confusion. As might be expected, when the requirements of dogma clash with the needs of the poor, it is the latter which give way.
    She was disturbed that the poor were the ones who suffered from the sisters’ self-righteous adherence to “poverty.” She knew of immense quantities of money, donated in all sincerity by people “from all walks of life,” which lingered unproductively in bank accounts, the size of which even many of the sisters knew nothing about. The sisters were rarely allowed to spend money on the poor they were trying to help. Instead they were forced to plead poverty, thus manipulating generous, credulous people and enterprises into giving more goods, services andcash. Ms. Shields became uncomfortable with the deceit, pretense and hypocrisy—the ancient problem of the Pharisees and the too-ostentatious public worshippers:
The flood of donations was considered to be a sign of God’s approval of Mother Teresa’s congregation. We were told that we received more gifts than other religious congregations because God was pleased with Mother, and because the Missionaries of Charity were the sisters who were faithful to the true spirit of religious life. Our bank account was already the size of a great fortune and increased with every postal service delivery. Around $50 million had collected in one checking account in the Bronx.… Those of us who worked in the office regularly understood that we were not to speak about our work. The donations rolled in and were deposited in the bank, but they had no effect on our ascetic lives or on the lives of the poor we were trying to help.
    Without an audit, it is impossible to say with certainty what becomes of Mother Teresa’s hoards of money, but it is possible to say what the true purpose and nature of the order is, and to what end the donations are accepted in the first place. Susan Shields again:
For Mother, it was the spiritual well-being of the poor that mattered most. Material aid was a means of reaching their souls, of showing the poor that God loved them. In the homes for the dying, Mother taught the sisters how to secretly baptize those who were dying. Sisters were to ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a “ticket to heaven.” An affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. The sister was then to pretend she was just cooling the person’s forehead with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptizing him, saying quietly the necessary words. Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa’s sisters were baptizing Hindus and Moslems.
    Thus the smaller hypocrisy conceals a much greater one. “Our Constitution forbade us to beg for more than we needed, but the money in the bank was treated as if it did not exist.” And thus the affectation of modesty and humility masks both greed and ambition, not to say arrogance.
    I also have permission to quote from a letter I received from Emily Lewis, a seventy-five-year-old nurse who has worked in many of the most desperate quarters of the earth. At the time she wrote to me, she had just returned from a very arduous stint in Rwanda (a country about which Mother Teresahas been silent, perhaps because the Roman Catholic leadership in that country was complicit in the attempted genocide of the Tutsi people in the summer of 1994). Ms. Lewis’s testimony follows:
My own experience of Mother Teresa occurred when she was being honored at the 1989 luncheon meeting of the