Christopher Hitchens vs. the Blessed Venerable Unassailable Saint Mātā-ji, aka Mother Teresa

15th December 2011

Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual ought to be someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them."

This morning I got further confirmation that Mother Teresa is not what the world would like us to believe she was. As I was reading that the Missionaries of Charity worldwide are praying for the soul of Christopher Hitchens, the touching sentiment arrived within seconds of news from India that her followers rejected my then partner’s offer to teach English in one of their schools because--his words a loose translation from the Hindi--“we don’t want fags.” Ah! homophobes. I was not surprised, but what a loss for the kids who might have really learned something from a very smart, educated guy, fluent in Hindi and English.

I’ve had history with the Missionaries here in San Francisco, though my personal contact has been no more than smiling at some of them on the bus.

Back in 1991, when I was running Maitri Hospice, I got a panicked call from the sister of a man who wound up in the Arc of Love, the Missionaries AIDS Hospice. The woman was completely outraged: her brother felt that he had been taken captive by religious fanatics who cut off his TV, made him say the rosary and beat the devil out of him with bunches of peacock feathers attached to the beds of recalcitrant patients.

I was never able to verify these practices because the Missionaries did not accept public funding and escaped the normal oversight required for hospice. So it’s only hearsay. I did speak with the guy who felt trapped there, and moved him up to the top of our waiting list. He moved to Peter Claver House and died before we had a bed.

After leaving Maitri, and dealing with my own PTSD, I went to work as the Assistant Director of The Spiritual Center for AIDS Services in Oakland, soon to become just “The Center” as the street folks, sex workers called us. The Center had been started by a few of the men Missionaries, and particularly one American guy with a deep sense of compassion and commitment to the poor. But he was also gay, came out, and left.

When Mātā-ji learned that a good portion of the infected sex industry workers still worked and that the majority of the injection drug users did not embrace total abstinence, she pulled her support. The Center was taken over by a ragtag group of outsider nuns, priests, gays, blacks, catholic lay people and Jews--Jacinta from the Sisters of the Holy Family was the main stay of the program, really our priest, who did the memorial services, hospital visits, and many hours of counseling; Anne who was a Franciscan ran a day care for kids with HIV and the children of women with HIV; an older Dominican woman, perhaps in her late 80’s, who sat at the door and greeted everyone warmly; a gay priest who did the reports to the CDC; a full cadre of catholic lay people from the suburbs who prepared meals everyday for about a hundred or so. The staff was rounded out with a few other gay men, a Latino Jew who was the social worker, case manager, a black lesbian who did drug and alcohol counseling, a huge handsome grounded brother who drove the van, getting folks to medical appointments.

So what’s my point other than my walk into the past to feel deep gratitude and love for a whole bunch of people who really did step up and gave of themselves during a terrible epidemic? When I wrote to foundations for money, the board chair, a good friend, told me to milk the Mother Teresa thing as much as possible. Which I did--until we heard through the grapevine that Mātā-ji was not going to be happy if she discovered that her name was associated with the project--that we’d bowed to the idols of case-management, drug counseling, and infectious disease control.

After all, her nuns had ripped out the carpet of the abandoned convent that they’d occupied on Church St. So of course they had the blessing of the Most-High on her hijacking social services to covertly turn the world to Jesus.

I throw my total support to Hitchens in the controversy, and will add some Buddhist prayer that his soul wind up No-Where, and not in a constricted heaven presided over by fanatics. It seems to me that there is more than enough evidence that “Mother Teresa makes no real effort at medical or social relief, and that her mission is religious and propagandistic and includes surreptitious baptism of unbelievers.”

And finally, from an interview with Christopher who makes my point very concisely:
http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/hitchens_16_4.html

Free Inquiry: According to polls, Mother Teresa is the most respected woman in the world. Her name is a by-word for selfless dedication in the service of humanity. So why are you picking on this sainted old woman?

Christopher Hitchens: Partly because that impression is so widespread. But also because the sheer fact that this is considered unquestionable is a sign of what we are up against, namely the problem of credulity. One of the most salient examples of people's willingness to believe anything if it is garbed in the appearance of holiness is the uncritical acceptance of the idea of Mother Teresa as a saint by people who would normally be thinking - however lazily - in a secular or rational manner. In other words, in every sense it is an unexamined claim.