From: nyxfer%panix.com@UMCVMB.missouri.edu (N.Y. Transfer)
Subject: Op-Ed: The Mother Teresa Fraud
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: University of Missouri
Resent-From: "Rich Winkel" <MATHRICH@UMCVMB.missouri.edu>
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1992 17:00:46 GMT



Via The NY Transfer News Service ~ All the News that Doesn't Fit

from The Nation, April 13, 1992

                         MINORITY REPORT
                     by Christopher Hitchens
                  (reprinted without permission)

  This column heartily endorses Governor Brown's campaign against
Bill (Spoiler) Clinton for the Democratic nomination and urges its
millions of loyal readers to call 1-800-426-1112. However, this
column cannot sit idly by and tolerate Jerry Brown's repeated
encomiums for the woman calling herself "Mother" Teresa of
Calcutta, a dangerous, sinister person who properly belongs in the
caboose of the Pat Buchanan baggage train.

  I first encountered M.T. in Calcutta in early 1980. While
touring one of the less fashionable quarters of the city, I
scheduled a drop-by at the Missionaries of Charity in Bose Road.
Instantly put off by the mission's motto ("He that loveth
correction loveth knowledge"), I nonetheless went for a walkabout
with M.T. herself and had a chance to observe her butch style at
firsthand. There was something in the way she accepted the kisses
bestowed on her feet, taking them as no more than her due, that
wasn't quite adorable, but I held my peace until we got to the
orphanage. Although built on a tiny scale in relation to the
problem, this was in many ways an exemplary place. A small vacant
cot told that one innocent hadn't made it through the night. I was
about to mutter some words of praise for the nurses and was even
fumbling in my pocket when M.T. announced, "You see, this is how
we fight abortion and contraception in Calcutta."

  Squeamish as I am on the abortion question, I had seen enough of
Bengal to know that the last thing -- arguably the very last thing
-- that it needs is a campaign against population control. M.T.'s
avowed motive somewhat cheapened the ostensible work of charity
and made it appear rather more like what it actually was: an
exercise in propaganda. Propaganda for the Vatican's heinous
policy of compelling the faithful to breed, and of denying where
it can the right of nonbelievers to get hold of birth control. I
have met numerous relief workers in my reporting life, many of
them battling in conditions far worse than Bose Road, but they
have usually been doing the work for its own sake.

  After this experience with the leathery old saint, I kept up an
M.T. watch of sorts. I wasn't surprised to see her turn up in
Haiti a few years later, as a kind of paid confessor to the
Duvalier gang. When Michele Duvalier started emulating Eva Peron
in her enthusiasm for Potemkin clinics, M.T. was on hand to
sanctify the vulturelike regime. "I have never seen the poor
people being so familiar with their heads of state as they were
with her," croaked M.T. approvingly. "It was a beautiful lesson
for me. I've learned something from it." She then jetted off to
Beirut to bind up Lebanon's wonds as a guest of the Phalangists.

  The "beautiful lesson" imbibed in Haiti was soon to be shared
with the long-suffering people of Albania. (M.T., whose family
name is Bojaxhiu, was born in the Albanian-speaking Yugoslav
province of Kosovo and has been since the death of John Belushi
the world's most famous Albanian.) In August 1989 she made an
official visit to the worst of all Stalinist tyrannies, as the
personal guest of Nexhmije Hoxha, official wndow of the dictator
and a rival in tempestuousness to Michele Duvalier herself. M.T.,
who has long been allied with the more fanatical wing of the
"Greater Albania" movement, laid a wreath on Enver Hoxha's tomb
and made impassioned speeches about the "brothers and sisters" of
Kosovo. She certainly knew what she was doing. Ramiz Alia, Hoxha's
successor, had in his younger days been a member of the
ultrafascist Albanian Youth of the Lictor. Under the direct
patronage of Mussolini and the Vatican, this outfit stood for the
twin objetives of Greater Albania and the forcible conversion of
the Balkans to Catholicism. M.T., having lent her imprimatur to
the most thuggish elements of Albanian irredentism, spent the rest
of her visit as the guest of Health Minister Ahmed Kamberi and
made a number of affecting remarks about the breauty and spirit of
the children in Stalinist orphanages. No doubt the motto about
lovers of correction and lovers of knowledge was ready to hand.

  Having prostituted herself for the worst of neocolonialism and
the worst of Communism, it was an easy and worldly step to the
embrace of the worst of capitalism. During the heroic period of
the S&L bonanza, M.T. nursed at the ample tit of Charles Keating,
of Lincoln Savings and Loan of California. According to Nan
Goldin, who made the splendid PBS "Frontline" documentary "Other
People's Money," the ghoul of Calcutta received "$1.4 million and
use of a company plane" from the ascetic Keating when he was at
the height of his charitable powers. Patricia Johnson, Keating's
P.R. flack, recalls that Keating "carried in his pocket a crucifix
that Mother Teresa had given him when they first met. And he
carried it always." Another bargain for Mr. Keating. I wonder
where the money is now.

  Brave and honest humanitarian workers are to be found all over
the globe, and though I have never met one, there are conceivably
some modest and self-sacrificing missionaries also. How has the
extraordinary deception of M.T. come to be perpetrated so widely?
As far as one can determine, the M.T. myth began after a British
poseur named Malcolm Muggeridge found himself on the steps of St.
Paul's. A likeable old sinner in his way, Muggeridge took to piety
and censure in his senescence and could usually induce the BBC to
film him standing next to some phony shroud or blubbering wooden
statuette. Ready to spend time -- but not _too_ much time -- among
the lepers and beggars, Muggeridge got himself to Calcutta and
struck pay dirt with a flying visit to Bose Road. And a star was
born.

  "The Pope is still fornicating with the Emperor," wrote Dante in
one of his pithier staves, and with M.T. one sees yet again the
alliance between ostentatious religiosity and the needs of crude
secular power. This is of course a very old story indeed, but when
one surveys the astonishing, abject credulity of the media in the
face of the M.T. fraud, it becomes easier to understand how the
sway of superstition was exerted in medieval times. Jerry Brown
currently suffers from the "perception" that he is somewhat
rudderless intellectually. He couldn't make a better move than
dropping the hell bat over the side.

                              ***

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