Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice is an essay by British-American journalist and polemic Christopher Hitchens published in 1995.
This is a critique of Mother Teresa's work and philosophy, the founder of the international Roman Catholic religious congregation, and challenges the mainstream media's assessment of his charitable efforts. In a length of 128 pages, it was reissued in paperback and ebook form with a preface by Thomas Mallon in 2012.
The thesis of this book, as summarized by one critic, is that "Mother Teresa is less interested in helping the poor than using them as a source of tireless depravity, fueling the expansion of her fundamentalist Catholic faith." The response to the Hitchens argument largely falls on the ideological line, with some criticisms contradicting his evidence and the other his understanding of the religious phenomena represented by Mother Teresa.
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Hitchens discussed Mother Teresa's problem several times before publishing The Missionary Position . In 1992 he devoted one of his regular columns on the The Nation to him. In 1993 he discussed it during an interview in C-SPAN Booknotes, noting a public reaction: "If you touch the idea of ​​sanctity, especially in this country, people feel you've taken something from them personally. fascinated because we wanted to underestimate other religious beliefs as tribes and superstitions but never dared to criticize us ourselves. "In 1994 he contributed to a 25-minute essay broadcast on British television. A critic of the New York Times thought the show should entice other journalists to visit Calcutta and conduct their own investigations. He recounted his work on television production at Vanity Fair in early 1995. In the introduction to Missionary Position, he describes this activity as "early polemic", part of the "battle" and estimates that the Missionary Position represents the expansion of a "about a third" television script.
The back cover of the first edition contains some adult praise which praises the book and also one that quotes New York Press: "If there is a hell, Hitchens will go there for this book."
Events later
In 2001, Hitchens testified against the archdiocese of Washington who was considering the cause of Mother Teresa's sanctity. He describes his role as a traditional devil advocate who is accused of doubting the sanctity of the candidate. Mother Teresa was beatified in October 2003. Hitchens marked the occasion by questioning the speed of the modern beatification process and illustrating the "blatant falseness" of the miracles attributed to it. He repeated his thesis briefly: he was "not a poor friend, he was a friend of poverty and" a friend to the worst of the rich. "He wrote that the press should be blamed for" gentle, cool-headed propaganda, no need to take a decision "on his behalf.He canonized as Saint Teresa of Kolkata in September 2016.
Maps The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
Synopsis
This introduction is intended for Mother Teresa's acceptance of an award from the Haitian government, which Hitchens used to discuss her relationship with the Duvalier regime. From his praise to the corrupt first family of the country, he wrote, "Another question arises... everything touches the issue of purity, simplicity, humility and devotion to the poor." He added another example of Mother Teresa's relationship with powerful people with what she regarded as a dubious reputation. He quickly reviewed the sacred reputation of Mother Teresa in books devoted to her and explained the process of beatification and canonization under Pope John Paul II. Finally, he refused the argument with Mother Teresa herself and said she was more concerned with the public view of him: "What's happening here is argument not with cheats but with the deceived ones."
The first part, "A Miracle", discusses Mother Teresa's popular outlook and focuses on the BBC documentary 1969 Something Extraordinary to God that takes it to the attention of the general public and serves as the basis for a book with the same title by Malcolm Muggeridge. Hitchens says that Calcutta's reputation as a place of poverty, "hell hole", is inappropriate, but it still provides a sympathetic context for Mother Teresa's work there. He quoted from a conversation between Muggeridge and Mother Teresa, giving his own comment. He quoted Muggeridge's description of "technically unaccountable light" filmed in the interior of Home of the Dying as "the first authentic photo miracle". Hitchens compared this to the cameraman's assertion that what Muggeridge thought was a miracle was the result of them using the latest Kodak film.
The second section, "Good Works and Heroic Deeds", has three chapters:
- Reaffirming that Mother Teresa served her religious beliefs and reputation, Hitchens questioned popular belief that Mother Teresa remained in charge of the physical needs of the poor. He cites several people who have visited his institutions or worked on them to establish that the medical care provided is not comparable to that provided at home care, lacks diagnostic services, and avoids even basic pain medicines. He says that instead of asceticism, its institutions are characterized by "simplicity, rigidity, violence and confusion" because "when the requirements of dogma conflict with the needs of the poor, it is the last who gives way." He quotes a former member of his ordinary describing the baptism of a dying man committed without their consent. Hitchens reviews the moral teaching of the Catholic Church about abortion, sympathizes in general but rejects the first time with its "absolute decision" that does not distinguish between the fertilized egg and the next stage of development, and the second from its prohibition on birth control. Noting the conservative Catholics who disagree with this last teaching, he identifies Mother Teresa as "the most consistent reactionary figure." Hitchens cited his speech while receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979: "Today, abortion is the worst crime, and the greatest enemy of peace." Hitchens went on to state that women become empowered when given the right to contraception. She writes that giving women control of their fertility and empowering them is the only known cure for poverty.
- Hitchens describes the prize money given by Mother Teresa, "the extraordinary contribution of the government, the big foundations, the company and the citizens," to question whether its recognition that poverty does not affect poverty. He described his relationship with the capitalist Charles Keating, who gave him $ 1.25 million before being punished for his role in a savings and loan scandal (1986-1995). He entered a facsimile from a letter he wrote to testify about Keating's good character, followed by a letter from the prosecutor's office for Mother Teresa detailing the Keating crime, thousands of people she "teased without blinking" for $ 252 million. The prosecutor asked him to do "what would Jesus do if he had the money stolen... if he was exploited by the thief to calm his conscience". Soothing ends by noting that the letter has no answer.
The third part, "Ubiquity", has two chapters:
- Hitchens describes the background and political events of Mother Teresa in Albania in the Balkans to establish the importance of her visit in 1990 to the Mother Albanian nationalist monument in Tirana, an expression of unstable Catholic expansionist sentiment in the former Yugoslavia.
- Hitchens notes the consistency with which Mother Teresa has supported strong interests in harmony with the helpless: Union Carbide after the Bhopal disaster of 1984, the administration of Margaret Thatcher, the administration of Ronald Reagan. He visited Nicaragua to side with CIA-backed Contra against the Sandinistas.
This book concludes with a short Closing Word.
Reviews
Amit Chaudhuri praised the book: "The Hitchens Investigation has been a solitary and bold endeavor," says Amit Chaudhuri, in a book titled "Hitchens Investigation has been very well written, with sanity and sympathy that calms irony." He commented that the portrait was "in danger of assuming one-dimensionality of Mother Teresa's admirer," and that she completed the book without much idea of ​​Mother Teresa's character and motivation. In The New York Times Bruno Maddox wrote: "Like all good pamphlets... very short, energetic and wildly over-written". He called his argument "somewhat reassuring", made "in perfect style." The Sunday Times says: "Dirty work but somebody has to do it." At the end of this elegant and brilliantly written polemic, it does not look good for Mother Teresa. "
Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, in a critical review that appeared in 1996 wrote: "If this sounds like nonsense, well, indeed." Although he admired Hitchens in general as a writer and a "provocateur," Donohue said that Hitchens "is greatly exaggerated as a scholar... careless in his research". Donohue released a book to coincide with the canonization of Saint Teresa, entitled "Unmasking Mother Teresa's Critics". In an interview, Donohue said, "Unlike Hitchens, who wrote a 98-page book with no footnotes, no final notes, no bibliography, no attribution at all, only 98 pages of unsupported opinion, I also have a short book But actually it has more footnotes than I have a page in the book.It's because I want people to check my source. "
The New York Review of Books provides a series of contrasting assessments from the views of Mother Teresa and Hitchens for several months, beginning with a review of The Missionary Position by Murray Kempton who invented the persuasive Hitchens that "love for the poor "by Mother Teresa with curiosity regardless of any hopes or even the desire to improve their mortal fate." Her essay matched the prose tone of Hitchen: "Charles Keating's impostor gave him $ 1.25 million - most dubious to grant himself - and he presents him with a 'personal cross', he undoubtedly finds sovereign use as an ornamental camouflage for him. "He condemned him for baptizing those" incapable of obtaining approval "and for his" service at the altar of Madame Duvalier. "Kempton sees Hitchens's work in contrast to the recognized and more representative atheism of a Christian whose protest" resonates with the rigors of orthodoxy "In response, James Martin, SJ, Cultural Editor of America magazine, acknowledged that Mother Teresa" received donations from dictators and other bad characters [and] tolerated inadequate medical conditions at her nursing home. "Without mentioning Hitchens, he referred to Kempton's" hysterical "reviews and made two points, that he took advantage of high-quality medical treatment for himself most likely at the insistence of other members of his order and that the care provided by his order was" consolation and solace. "" for the dying, not the "primary health care" as p another essay. Martin concluded his speech by stating that "there seems to be two choices" of poor people in the abandoned developing world: "First, to bend one's tongue that such a group of people should be there, secondly, to act: to provide comfort and solace to these people when they face death.Kempton chose the first Mother Teresa, because of all his mistakes, chose the latter. "
The literary critic and theologian Simon Leys writes that "the attacks directed at Mother Teresa all lead to one evil: she tries to be a Christian, in the most literal sense of the word." He compares that he receives "the hospitality of criminals, millionaires, and criminals" to Christ's relationship with unkind individuals, saying that on his deathbed he would prefer the comfort provided by Mother Teresa to serve "a modern social worker." He defended silently baptizing a dying man as "a sincere sign of genuine concern and affection". He concluded by comparing the treatment of Mother Teresa with the spit on Christ.
In response to Leys, Hitchens notes that in April 1996 Mother Teresa welcomed the divorce of Princess Diana after advising the Irishman against the right of civil divorce and remarriage in a national referendum in November 1995. She thought it supported her case that Mother Teresa taught a different gospel to the rich and the poor. He debates whether Christ ever praised someone like the Duvaliers or received the funds "stolen from small and humble depositors" by people like Charles Keating. He identifies Leys with a religious leader who "claims that all criticisms are rude, blasphemous and defamatory by definition". Leys replied in turn, writing that Hitchen's book contains a number of extraordinary people in basic aspects of Christianity and accused Hitchens of "complete ignorance of the Catholic Church's position on issues of marriage, divorce, and remarriage" and "hate strong and hard for Mother Teresa. "
In 1999, Charles Taylor of Salon called the Brilliant "Missionary Position " and wrote that it "should lay the myth of Mother Teresa's holiness to rest once and for all."
See also
Aroup Chatterjee
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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