The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

I

At a certain point in the period of its mediaeval ascendancy, the Church of Rome was forced to confront a problem of theory and of practice. If a human soul could only be redeemed by acceptance of the New Testament canon — the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ — then what was to become of those who had never heard the news? These were not heretics or infidels to be slain or burned but people who suffered from ‘invincible ignorance’. They fell into two categories: those who lived in parts of the world unvisited and untouched by the faith, and those who had died before the Christian era began. (There was also a third category, namely the disciples of Jesus himself, who had never read the Bible story, either. But they were, and remain, exempt.) Not much could be done for those who had expired before the birth of Christ, though Dante did his best for them and there are passages in the Creeds which speak of Jesus descending into hell in order to carry out some retrospective redemption. But for those who lived in non-Christian lands, it was decreed that the work of conversion was an imperative.

It is, in a sense, a pity that this work will always be remembered for its association either with conquest, with religious fratricide or with imperialism. Very frequently, the main consequence was sanguinary conflict between different branches of Christianity itself. (Long after the Catholic Crusaders got to Jerusalem, for example, they sacked Orthodox and Byzantine Constantinople.) In later epochs, both Catholic and Protestant missionaries penetrated the interiors of China and Japan and the remotest parts of Africa and South America, but their presence was indissoluble from that of the trading post and the garrison. In the course of a profitable partnership with slavery, colonialism and forced labour, the Christian ‘civilizing mission’ often came up against strongly entrenched local religions. Where it did not adapt to these, or eliminate their believers, it made little headway. In India, which was disputed as a prize between four principal European powers before passing under British suzerainty, the effect of Christianity has been relatively slight. The Indian authorities, who are suspicious to this day of the link between proselytization and foreign interference, have generally discouraged missionary activity. They have left Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity largely alone, however, in deference to the worldwide reputation of their founder. The Mother Teresa establishment in Calcutta, therefore, possesses elements of pathos and nostalgia: it is the chief and lonely relic of what was once a vast enterprise of conquest and crusading.

When the girl Agnes Bojaxhiu was born on 27 August 1910 in Skopje, to an Albanian Catholic family, the idea of the ‘mission’ as a vocation was still very much alive. And in that region, yesterday as today, allegiance to the Church was more than a merely confessional matter. It was, and is, imbricated with a series of loyalties to nation, region and even party. We know little enough of Agnes’s early life, and the devotional tracts written about her are not very illuminating, but it seems that her father Nikola, a prosperous shopkeeper, died in a nationalist squabble when the girl was only eight. The family was strongly religious and adhered to the Parish of the Sacred Heart, which in Skopje was synonymous with Albanian identity. Through the influence of a Jesuit priest she became interested in missionary work and at the age of twelve, on her own account, she first received the idea that her life should be dedicated to spreading the word among the poor. But she told Malcolm Muggeridge that ‘at the beginning, between twelve and eighteen, I didn’t want to become a nun. We were a very happy family. But when I was eighteen, I decided to leave my home and become a nun.’ Having entered a convent — the Congregation of the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Loreto — she left Skopje for Zagreb, and from there travelled to Dublin, where the Loreto Sisters have their headquarters to this day. Shortly after Christmas Day 1928, her ship made landfall in Colombo, en route to the Loreto mission in Bengal.

The account of Agnes’s early life given by Dr Gjergji is intriguing for its fragmentary character. We learn, for example, that the future Mother Teresa’s brother, Lazzaro, ‘went to Italy in 1939, remained there during and after the war, and finally died there’. We learn also that ‘When, in the fall of 1910, the Serbians reached Skopje, the missionaries had to limit their pastoral action to the city itself. Things got worse at the outbreak of war in 1914’. From this terse account we can only guess at the impact on the fervent Bojaxhiu family of the second Balkan war and the two world wars. However, a certain amount of background can be inferred.

Albanians divide between members of the Tosk and Gheg peoples, separated south and north, respectively, by the Shkumbini river. Most are Muslim, with an Orthodox Christian minority among the Tosks and a Roman Catholic one among the Ghegs. The Ghegs, who include the Bojaxhiu family, populate the much-disputed region of Kosovo. Now an ‘autonomous region’ of Serbia, Kosovo has an Albanian’ majority, but it is also home to the Orthodox Serbs’ holiest battlefield — the site of a fourteenth-century rout by the Turks.

In 1927 King Zog of Albania signed a treaty with Benito Mussolini which made Albania into an effective protectorate of Italian fascism. The treaty provided for the training of the Albanian military by Italian officers and the relocation of the Bank of Albania to Rome. Even before the subsequent Concordat signed between Mussolini and the Vatican, which gave papal imprimatur to the fascist project, the treaty established favourable conditions for the adoption of Roman Catholicism throughout Albania. The Church was permitted to open numerous schools, while the schools run by Greek Orthodox authorities were closed. (Greece took Albania to the World Court on this matter and in 1933 won a landmark case defining the rights of minorities to their own language and religion.) Nor did the advent of the Second World War diminish the enthusiasm of ‘Greater Albania’ for the Axis. Even as Hitler was taking over Athens, a delegation of Albanian notables waited upon Mussolini in order to present him with the crown of Skanderbeg, the Albanian national hero.

A striking fact about this period is the fealty of all Albanian extremists to the idea of ‘Mother Albania’. When Mussolini finally collapsed, the Albanian Communists, under the leadership of Enver Hoxha, echoed, at a meeting of Albanian political groups that included the fascists, the demand that Kosovo be incorporated into Albania after the war. Tito’s partisans were strong enough and (then) weighty enough in Moscow to negate this demand. But many of Hoxha’s postwar cabinet members were unpurged members of the Albanian Youth of the Lictor, a prewar fascist movement which cherished the idea of military expansion. (Hoxha’s successor as dictator, Ramiz Alia, was one of those who made this bizarre yet seemingly consistent traverse of the political spectrum.)

Before the war, the ideas of fascism, Catholicism, Albanianism and Albano-Italian unity were closely identified. Afterwards, religious identity was officially suppressed by Hoxha’s proclamation of the ‘world’s first atheist state’. None the less, the evidence implies that irredentist ideology persisted under Stalinist disguise and had at least as much to do with Albania’s foreign-policy alignments as did any supposed doctrinal schism over the canonical texts of Marx and Lenin. An Albanian Catholic nationalist, in other words, might, on ‘patriotic’ questions, still feel loyal to an ostensibly materialist Communist regime.

How else are we to explain the following entry from the Yearbook on International Communist Affairs 1990, published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and reviewing developments in all countries of the Communist world?

The ‘Mother Albania’ monument, it might be worth emphasizing, is not an abstract symbol of sentimental nationhood. It is the emblem of the cause of Greater Albania. A nearby museum displays the boundaries of this ambition in the form of a map. ‘Mother Albania’ turns out to comprise — in addition to the martyred province of Kosovo — a large piece of Serbia and Montenegro, a substantial chunk of formerly Yugoslav Macedonia and most of that part of modern Greece now known as Epirus.

I possess a film of ‘Mother Teresa’ making her homage to ‘Mother Albania’ — as well as to its patron, the pitiless thug Enver Hoxha — and it invites the same question as does the infamous embrace in Haiti: What is a woman of unworldly innocence and charity doing dans cette galère? Apologists have said, of the Albanian case, that it was only natural for Mother Teresa to make a few obeisances in order to visit the graves of her ancestors and, of the second, that a few compromises were necessary so that her order would be allowed to work freely in Haiti. Interestingly enough, these are not excuses that have been tendered by Mother Teresa herself, who keeps her own counsel on both matters (and on many others besides).

It is at least worth considering whether Mother Teresa made both of these trips (and many others) in furtherance of the more flinty political stands taken by hard-liners in her own Church. The personal conduct and the questionable policy are at least congruent in each instance. In the case of Haiti, the Vatican had long taken a position in favour of the ‘Duvalierist’ oligarchy. When the Reverend Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide began his campaign of charismatic populism against the regime, he encountered instant hostility from the Church hierarchy, which eventually suspended him from his order. By the time that Aristide had been triumphantly elected, ignominiously deposed by a military junta and finally restored to power by international intervention, the Vatican was the only government in the world which still retained formal diplomatic relations with the usurping dictatorship. Mother Teresa’s activism, then, was representative of the most dogmatic line taken by her Church.

Similarly in the Balkans, the collapse and disintegration of Yugoslavia led to a recrudescence of essentially prewar rivalries. Croatia, with the support of the Vatican and Germany, declared itself an independent state and restored many of the signs and emblems of the wartime republic led by Ante Pavelic. Protected by the Vatican and the Third Reich, this government had massacred its Jews and embarked on a programme of forced conversion of Orthodox Serbs; those who resisted the crusade had been put to death. This memory alone, and the evident lack of regret for it, contributed to the evolution of a nationalist-religious paranoia among the Serbs, who subsequently launched a war of territorial and sectarian aggrandizement, destroying the cities of Vukovar and Sarajevo in the process. The Croatian ruling party, led by Franjo Tudjman, responded by carving out its own slice of Bosnia and demolishing the city of Mostar.

Even more ominously there existed, and still exists, the possibility that a generalized war could destroy the boundaries of the former Yugoslavia and once again pit Catholic against Orthodox as well as both, in various local combinations, against Islam. In Tetovo, the Albanian centre of western Macedonia, and in Kosovo too, local zealots speak of Greater Albania as the response to Greater Serbia, and they flourish their pictures of Mother Teresa.

II

Intervention, whether moral or political, is always and everywhere a matter of the most exquisite timing. The choice of time and the selection of place can be most eloquent. So indeed may be the moments when nothing is said or done. Mother Teresa is fond of claiming to be not so much above politics as actually beyond them, operating in a manner that is transcendental. All claims by public persons to be apolitical deserve critical scrutiny, and all claims made by those who affect a merely ‘spiritual’ influence deserve a doubly critical scrutiny. The naive and simple are seldom as naive and simple as they seem, and this suspicion is reinforced by those who proclaim their own naivety and simplicity. There is no conceit equal to false modesty, and there is no politics like antipolitics, just as there is no worldliness to compare with ostentatious antimaterialism.

Mother Teresa’s timing shows every sign of instinctive genius. She possesses an intuition about the need for her message and about the way in which this message should be delivered. To take a relatively small example: In 1984 the Indian town of Bhopal was the scene of an appalling industrial calamity. The Union Carbide plant, which had been located in the town to take advantage of low labour costs and government tax incentives, exploded and spilled toxic chemicals over a large swathe of the citizenry. Two and a half thousand persons perished almost at once, and many thousands more were choked by lung-searing emissions and had their health permanently impaired. The subsequent investigation revealed a pattern of negligence and showed that previous safety warnings at the plant had been shelved or ignored. Here was no ‘Act of God’, as the insurance companies like to phrase it in the fine print of their contracts, but a shocking case of callousness on the part of a giant multinational corporation. Mother Teresa was on the next plane to Bhopal. At the airport, greeted by throngs of angry relatives of the victims, she was pressed to give her advice and counsel, and she did so unhesitatingly. I have a videotape of the moment. ‘Forgive,’ she said. ‘Forgive, forgive.’

On the face of it, a strange injunction. How did she know there was anything to forgive? Had anybody asked for forgiveness? What are the duties of the poor to the rich in such a situation? And who is authorized to recommend, or to dispense, forgiveness?[5] In the absence of any answer to these questions, Mother Teresa’s flying visit to Bhopal read like a hasty exercise in damage control, the expedient containment of righteous secular indignation.

Here is another film clip, this time of Mother Teresa at the airport in Madrid. She has flown in to lend her support to the clerical forces who are contesting the post-Franco legislation enabling divorce, abortion and birth control. The crowd at the terminal is composed of the highly traditional Spanish Right, with here and there a blue shirt, and a right arm flung skyward. This is one of the first political votes to decide whether or not Spain will evolve into a secular society. Mother Teresa has taken her stand in this debate, and she has taken it unequivocally on the conservative side — all the while claiming to remain above politics. Any exertion of this privilege is really an abuse, just as it was in Knock.

In London in 1988, Mother Teresa paid a visit ostensibly to discuss the growing problem of the city’s homeless, who had forced the phrase ‘Cardboard City’ into the language by dwelling in cardboard structures in parks and on the Embankment. Having spoken briefly on this topic, Mother Teresa was ushered into 10 Downing Street to meet in private with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher was famously unsentimental about the denizens of ‘Cardboard City’ and indeed about most other forms of human failure and defeat, and it was not in any case the plight of the homeless that Mother Teresa wanted to discuss. The two women went into conclave on the matter of abortion, which was then the subject of a private member’s bill in the House of Commons, sponsored by the liberal MP David Alton. Mr Alton, who had sought to limit the availability of abortion, was in no doubt of the value of Mother Teresa’s intervention. He told reporters that her meeting with Margaret Thatcher was an immense boost to his campaign, and he took credit for arranging the womanly summit. Whatever else may be said of this meeting, which occurred on the eve of a decisive parliamentary vote and was attended by a circus of cameras and scribes, the term ‘non-political’ does not apply to it very easily.

And now a photograph, or pair of photographs. Mother Teresa is seated in earnest conversation with Ronald Reagan and his chief of staff, Donald Regan. Both men wear expressions of the most determined sincerity. The photo opportunity occurs inside the White House in May 1985. Mother Teresa has been chosen to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her companions for the day are Frank Sinatra, James Stewart and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, among other recipients. At the moment when the shutter falls on this shot, Ronald Reagan has every reason to be careful of Catholic susceptibility. His policy in Central America, which has resulted in his Cabinet officers defending the murders of four American nuns and the Archbishop of San Salvador, is deeply unpopular with the voters. One of his more daring lies — the claim that he had received a personal message from the Pope supporting his policy in the isthmus — has had to be refracted after causing considerable embarrassment. In the basement of the very building where Mother Teresa sits, a Marine Colonel named Oliver North (who forespoke the Catholic Church for evangelical Pentecostalism after being vouchsafed a personal vision) is toiling away on an enterprise which will nearly succeed in destroying the Presidency that spawned it.

Stepping on to the portico of the White House, flanked by Ronald and Nancy, Mother Teresa knows just what to say:

This kind of modesty — speaking for God and for the poor — is now so standard on her part that nobody even notices it. Then:

Here was greater praise than Reagan could possibly have asked or hoped for. Not only was he told that he ‘loved the people so tenderly’ but he was congratulated for his policy in Ethiopia. That policy, as it happened, was to support the claim of the Ethiopian ruling junta — the Dergue — to the supposed ‘territorial integrity’ of the Ethiopian empire, which included (then) the insurgent people of Eritrea. General Mengistu Haile Mairam had deliberately used the weapon of starvation not just against Eritrea but also against domestic and regional dissent in other regions of the country. This had not prevented Mother Teresa from dancing attendance upon him and thereby shocking the human-rights community, which had sought to isolate his regime. That very isolation, however, had provided opportunities for ‘missionary work’ to those few prepared to compromise. To invest such temporal and temporizing politics with the faint odour of sanctity, let alone with Mother Teresa’s now-familiar suggestion of the operations of divine providence (‘And next day it was…’) is political in the extreme, but the White House press corps, deliberately ignorant of such considerations, duly gave the visit and the presentation its standard uncritical treatment.

During this same period, Mother Teresa visited Nicaragua and contrived to admonish the Sandinista revolutionary party. The Cardinal Archbishop of Managua, Miguel Obando y Bravo, was at that time the official patron and confessor of the contras, and was paid an admitted and regular stipend by the Central Intelligence Agency. Also at that time, the contras conceived it as their task to make a special target of clinics, schools, dairies and other ‘soft target’ elements of the Nicaraguan system. And the contras believed — almost predictably — that they had on their side a miraculous Virgin who had appeared in the remote northern regions of the country. What they assuredly did have on their side was the most powerful state on earth, which openly announced that it would bring Nicaragua to heel by increasing the poverty and destitution of its wavering citizens. A consistent case might be made for following such a policy and for employing the Church in support of it, but however reasonable that case might be it could by no stretch of the imagination be described as a non-political one, or one animated by a love of the poor.

More lives were taken on purpose in the war on Nicaraguan ‘subversion’ than have been saved by all the missionaries in Calcutta even by accident. Yet this brute utilitarian calculus is never employed against Mother Teresa, even by the sort of sophists who would deploy its moral and physical equivalent in her favour. So: silence on the death squads and on the Duvaliers and noisy complaint against the Sandinistas, and the whole act baptized as an apolitical intervention by someone whose kingdom is not of this world.

Visiting Guatemala during the same period, at a time when the killing fields were becoming too hideous even for the local oligarchy and its foreign patrons, and at a time when the planned extirpation of the Guatemalan Indians had finally become a global headline, Mother Teresa purred: ‘Everything was peaceful in the parts of the country we visited. I do not get involved in that sort of politics.’ At least, for once, she did not say that everything was ‘beautiful’.