The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

A Miracle

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:

Since Muggeridge’s time, the city has not only had its own enormous difficulties to contend with but it has also been the scene of three major migrations of misery. Having been itself partitioned by a stupid British colonial decision before independence, Bengal took the brunt of the partitioning of all India into India and Pakistan in 1947. The Bangladesh war in 1971 and, later, the sectarian brushfires in Assam have swollen Calcutta’s population to a number far greater than it can hope to accommodate. Photographs of people living on pavements have become internationally recognized emblems of destitution. Mother Teresa’s emphasis on ‘the poorest of the poor and the lowest of the low’ has served to reinforce the impression of Calcutta as a city of dreadful night, an impression which justly irritates many Bengalis.

The pleasant surprise that awaits the visitor to Calcutta is this: it is poor and crowded and dirty, in ways which are hard to exaggerate, but it is anything but abject. Its people are neither inert nor cringing. They work and they struggle, and as a general rule (especially as compared with ostensibly richer cities such as Bombay) they do not beg. This is the city of Tagore, of Ray and Bose and Mrinal Sen, and of a great flowering of culture and nationalism. There are films, theatres, university departments and magazines, all of a high quality. The photographs of Raghubir Singh are a testament to the vitality of the people, as well as to the beauty and variety of the architecture. Secular-leftist politics predominate, with a very strong internationalist temper: hardly unwelcome in a region so poisoned by brute religion.

When I paid my own visit to the city some years ago, I immediately felt rather cheated by the anti-Calcutta propaganda put out by the Muggeridges of the world. And when I made my way to the offices of the Missionaries of Charity on Bose Road, I received something of a shock. First was the inscription over the door, which read ‘He that loveth correction loveth knowledge’. I don’t know the provenance of the quotation, but it had something of the ring of the workhouse about it. Mother Teresa herself gave me a guided tour. I did not particularly care for the way that she took kisses bestowed on her sandalled feet as no more than her due, but I decided to suspend judgment on this — perhaps it was a local custom that I understood imperfectly. The orphanage, anyway, was moving and affecting. Very small (no shame in that) and very clean, it had an encouraging air and seemed to be run by charming and devoted people. One tiny cot stood empty, its occupant not having survived the night, and there was earnest discussion about a vacancy to be filled. I had begun to fumble for a contribution when Mother Teresa turned to me and said, with a gesture that seemed to take in the whole scene, ‘See, this is how we fight abortion and contraception.’

If not for this, it would have been trifling to point out the drop-in-a-bucket contribution that such a small establishment makes to such a gigantic problem. But it is difficult to spend any time at all in Calcutta and conclude that what it most needs is a campaign against population control. Nor, of course, does Mother Teresa make this judgment based on local conditions. She was opposed on principle to abortion and birth control long before she got there. For her, Calcutta is simply a front in a much larger war.

Muggeridge’s fatalistic revulsion from the actual Calcutta made him all the more receptive to Mother Teresa’s mystical prescription for the place, which is that it suffers from being too distant from Jesus. In consequence, his gullibility led him to write the following, which is worth quoting at length. a should preface the quotation by saying that Muggeridge’s BBC crew included a very distinguished cameraman named Ken Macmillan, who had earned a great reputation for his work on Lord Clark’s art-history series Civilisation.)

Nor was Muggeridge attempting to speak metaphorically. Of the love he observed in the home, he wrote that it was

Having gone on in this vein for some time, Muggeridge concluded:

Muggeridge did not exaggerate when he wrote ‘I fear I talked and wrote about it to the point of tedium’. So it is interesting to have the direct testimony of Ken Macmillan himself:

And a star was born. Ken Macmillan’s testimony came far, far too late to prevent the spread, largely by the televisual and mass-media methods that Muggeridge affected to despise, of the reported ‘miracle’. Rather than ‘the first authentic photographic miracle’, this episode is actually something considerably more significant. It is the first unarguable refutation of a claimed miracle to come not merely from another supposed witness to said miracle but from its actual real-time author. As such, it deserves to be more widely known than it is. But modern technology and communications have ensured instead that rumour and myth can be transmitted with ever greater speed and efficiency to the eyes and ears of the credulous. How splendidly we progress. Ever since Something Beautiful for God, the critic of Mother Teresa, in small things as well as in great ones, has had to operate against an enormous weight of received opinion, a weight made no easier to shift by the fact that it is made up, quite literally, of illusion.

Muggeridge gave numerous other hostages to fortune during the course of his film and his book. Only his adoring gaze, for example, inhibited him from seeing the range of interpretation that might be placed on the following anecdote:

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?

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:

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:

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.