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From: mtepper@panix.com (Michele Tepper)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Mother Teresa 'Miracle' Debunked
Date: 5 Nov 1995 16:54:58 -0500

Christopher Hitchens has spent the last couple of years working to dispel the unquestioned and unquestionable aura of sanctity that follows Mother Teresa wherever she goes. His first salvos were fired in _The Nation_ and _Vanity Fair_, in the columns he writes for both magazines, and were followed up by the controversial Channel Four documentary, _Hell's Angel_ (1994), which I have not seen. Now, there is a book that amplifies on the points made in the documentary and apparently includes new information that was brought to his attention after the film aired in Britain: _The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice_ (1995, Verso: ISBN 1-85984-929-6).

It's a book well worth reading by any AFUrian of any religious stripe. Hitchens steers well clear of Catholic-bashing (his one theological complaint against the Catholic church -- its opposition to contraceptives -- is, he is quick to note, one shared by many devout Catholics as well) and outlines the ways in which Mother Teresa has been more of a friend to the powerful and greedy than to the powerless and needy.

He details the ways in which her good works have always been placed second to her work as a missionary, and shows how shoddily her clinics are run in the name of a cult of redemptive suffering. Dr Robin Fox, an editor of _The Lancet_, noted in a 17 September 1994 report that the ethos of Mother Teresa's Calcutta base of operations is "providence over planning" -- there are few medically trained personnel making decisions and no guidelines to help the untrained distinguish curable from incurable conditions so that the sisters may 'remain on equal terms with the poor' -- and that "the formulary includes no strong analgesics [for pain management]" (quoted on 38-39). The entire 'Good Works and Heroic Virtues' chapters of Hitchens's book is worth reading, even if you only flip through the book in the store, for more information on how Mother Teresa's missionary order fails to protect the health of its patients and does so consciously in the name of its ideological mission.

Hitchens also debunks some of the myths at the heart of her first fame in the West, including Malcolm Muggeridge's tacit claim that at least one of Mother Teresa's miracles (the prequisite for beatification and eventual canonization as a saint) has already taken place.

Since, as Hitchens notes, this "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" (27), both Muggeridge's telling and the debunking deserve to be quoted at length.

First Malcolm Muggeridge, in the 1971 book of the same name that grew out of his 1969 BBC documentary _Something Beautiful for God_, which first brought Mother Teresa to international fame:

"[The Missionaries of Charity's Calcutta] Home for the Dying is dimly lit by small windows high up in the walls, and Ken was adamant that filming was quite impossible in there. We had only one small light with us, and to get teh place adequately lighted in the time at our disposal was quite impossible. It was decided that, nonetheless, [their well-respected camera man, Ken Macmillan] should have a go, but by way of insurance, he took, as well, some film in an outside courtyard where some of the inmates were sitting in the sun. In the processed film, the part taken inside was bathed in a particularly beautiful soft light, whereas the part taken outside was rather dim and confused.... I myself am aboslutely convinced that the technically unaccountable light is, in fact, the Kindly Light [Cardinal] Newman refers to in his well-known exquisite hymn. ...[The love in the home is] luminous, like the haloes artists have seen and made visible around the heads of saints. I find it not at all surprising that the luminosity should register on a photographic film. ...I am personally persuaded that Ken recorded the first authentic photographic miracle."

Ken Macmillan's story of the filming is, however, somewhat different:

"During _Something Beautiful for God_, there was an episode where we were taken to a building that Mother Teresa called the House of the Dying. Peter Chafer, the director, said, 'Ah, well, it's very dark in here. Do you think we can get something?' And we had just taken deliver at the BBC of some new film made by Kodak, which we hadn't had time to test before we left, so I said to Peter, 'Well, we may as well have a go.' So we shot it. And when we got back several weeks later, a month or two later, we are sitting in the rushes theatre at Ealing Studios and eventually up came the shots of the House of the Dying. And it was surprising. You could see every detail. And I said, 'That's amazing. That's extraordinary.' And I was going to on to say, three cheers for Kodak. I didn't get a chance to say that though, because Malcolm, sitting in the front row, spun round and said: 'It's divine light. It's Mother Teresa. You'll find that it's divine light, old boy.' And three or four days later I was being phoned by journalists who were saying things like: 'We hear you've just come back from India with Malcolm Muggeridge and you were the witness of a miracle.'" (25-27)

Michele "these are the days of miracle and wonder" Tepper