The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
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| Author | Christopher Hitchens |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Mother Teresa |
| Publisher | Verso |
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Publication date
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1995 |
| Pages | 128 pages |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 33358318 |
| 271/.97 B 20 | |
| LC Class | BX4406.5.Z8 H55 1995 |
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice is an essay by the British-American journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens published in 1995.
It is a critique of the work and philosophy of Mother Teresa, the founder of an international Roman Catholic religious congregation, and it challenges the mainstream media's assessment of her charitable efforts. In length 128 pages, it was re-issued in paperback and ebook form with a foreword by Thomas Mallon in 2012.
The book's thesis, as summarized by one critic, was that "Mother Teresa is less interested in helping the poor than in using them as an indefatigable source of wretchedness on which to fuel the expansion of her fundamentalist Roman Catholic beliefs." The response to Hitchens's arguments fell largely upon ideological lines, with some critics contesting his evidence and others his understanding of the religious phenomenon Mother Teresa represented.
Hitchens addressed the subject of Mother Teresa on several occasions before publishing The Missionary Position. In 1992 he devoted one of his regular columns in The Nation to her. In 1993 he discussed her during an interview on C-SPAN's Booknotes, noting public reaction: "If you touch the idea of sainthood, especially in this country, people feel you've taken something from them personally. I'm fascinated because we like to look down on other religious beliefs as being tribal and superstitious but never dare criticize our own." In 1994 he contributed to a 25-minute essay broadcast on British television. A New York Times critic thought the show should provoke other journalists to visit Calcutta and conduct their own investigations. He recounted his work on the television production in Vanity Fair in early 1995. In the foreword to The Missionary Position, he described these activities as "early polemics", part of "a battle" and estimated that The Missionary Position represented an expansion of the television script "by about a third".
The back cover of first edition carried several of the customary blurbs praising the book as well as one that quoted the New York Press: "If there is a hell, Hitchens is going there for this book."
In 2001, Hitchens testified in opposition before the body of the Washington Archdiocese that was considering the cause of Mother Teresa's sainthood. He described his role as that of the traditional devil's advocate charged with casting doubt on the candidate's sanctity. Mother Teresa was beatified in October 2003. Hitchens marked the occasion by questioning the speed of the modern beatification process and describing "the obviousness of the fakery" of the miracle attributed to her. He repeated his thesis succinctly: she "was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty" and "a friend to the worst of the rich". He wrote that the press was to blame for its "soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda" on her behalf. She was canonized as Saint Teresa of Kolkata in September 2016.
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