I like this:
LAMB: We can come back to Henry Kissinger possibly. There's so much to talk
about, I want to move to Mother Teresa. You have a piece in here that was in
The Nation in April 1992, called "Ghoul of Calcutta." Mother Teresa?
HITCHENS: Mother Teresa, the ghoul of Calcutta. I always had real doubt in
my mind as to whether there really was this saintly person. If you ask people why
they think Mother Teresa's so great, they'll always say, "Isn't it true that she
spends her time always helping out the poor of Calcutta?" But if you really push
them, they don't know anything about her at all. They just take it on faith, as saints
always are taken.
So I went to Calcutta, actually for another reason. I thought while I was there I'd
go and look her up, and I was rather appalled by what I found. She showed me
around her mission and announced that the purpose of the mission is to run the
campaign in Calcutta and Bengal against abortion and conception. As it happens,
I have my doubts about abortion. I find I'm very squeamish on the subject, but
one thing that Calcutta definitely does not need is a campaign waged by an
Albanian Catholic missionary against the limitation of the population. It rather, to
me, spoiled the effect of her charitable work. She was saying, actually, this is not
charity; it's really just propaganda. I think the Vatican policy on population
control is calamitous.
So that aroused my curiosity anyway. It had been a bit of a disappointment
meeting her then, and I didn't like her manners particularly, either, as she went
around among the poor. Then I found her turning up as the defender of the
Duvalier family in Haiti, saying how lovely they were and how gentle and
beautiful. I found her turning up as Charles Keating's personal best friend in the
Lincoln Savings & Loan scandal, taking a lot of money from his for a private
plane, giving him blessings and crucifixes in return. I found her turning up in
Albania where she's a supporter of a very extreme right nationalist party. And
quite a few other such things.
I thought, hey, I don't like any of these things singly or together, and, second,
when does she ever get time for the poor old poor of Calcutta. She's forever on
some, "scumbag's," Lear jet going around cashing in on everyone else's belief that
she's a saint. I think this is probably how medieval religion was worked. You
took the faithful as credulous, and you reckoned that they would believe whatever
you said.
LAMB: Let me just take her side for purposes of discussion. Let's say that she
went to the Duvalier family and got money, went to Charles Keating and got
money and moved it over to the poor. Wouldn't that be charity?
HITCHENS: I don't think it's necessary for someone who is supposedly
conse-crated to the mission of charity and who's world famous for it to ever have
to beg for money. If she ever wanted it, she knows where to go for it. People
would open their pockets and, I think, their hearts. The fact is, I don't know if she
got any money from the Duvaliers. What she was doing was defending them as a
dynasty in Haiti, and everyone knows what the record of the Duvalier family is.
She did get money from Keating, and I actually ask in my piece, you know,
would she care, would anyone care to say that they know where it's gone
because she must have known or should have known that that money doesn't
belong to Keating and doesn't belong to her. It's stolen money.
But the fact is she was giving him in return various kinds of absolution in his
campaigns, and I think this is because he started off life as morals cop. He was
another of the prohibitionists who began his career as an anti-pornography
person. She's evidently, it seems, on call for people with dubious characters of
this kind. I just thought it was worth pointing out. I can't tell you the mail I got
about it. 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.
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