يطرح كريستوفر هيتشنز كعادته موقفاً مثيراً للجدل حول حياة واحدة من أشهر الشخصيات مفاده أنه في حين يعرف معظم الناس الأم تيريزا على أنها بطلة الفقراء والمدافعة عن المرضى، إلا أن الواقع يختلف كثيراً عن ذلك. إرث تيريزا الحقيقي هو المرافق الطبية الرديئة وسيئة الإدارة، دعمها الأنظمة الدكتاتورية، واهتمامها بعلاقاتها العامة مقابل معاناة الآخرين. ( )

I've heard of Christopher Hitchens for years, but this is the first time I've read anything by him. In this book, he takes on the iconic Mother Teresa and exposes the duplicity in her messages. His claims are well documented and supported by people who have worked with Mother Teresa.

If it is true that her missions provide inadequate care for the dying while she has accumulated millions in donations, that is, in my mind, a criminal act. If she, and her church, were really concerned about the poor, they would not advocate so strongly against contraception.

Where I disagree with Mr. Hitchens is when he talks about forgiveness...and whether Mother Teresa has a right to forgive -- among others -- him. I think we all have the right to forgive what we perceive to be wrongs against ourselves and those we love. Forgiveness, to me, is a personal thing.

This book opened my eyes to two facts. First, the saying that religion is the opiate of the masses. I realized more fully that most of the powerful elite -- not just the leaders of various religions -- want the poor to be faithful. This helps maintain the power inequality in our western societies. China seems to have a different perspective, seeing religion as a rival to the state. So, the book broadened my thinking about who benefits from religion

Secondly, the book can be read as a testament to the lack of investigative journalism. Mother Teresa is good, so no major news media seems to have looked into the story of her financing or life. ( )

It's always a joy to read Hitchens. This essay is not too controversial by today's standards but I guess it will still have the capacity to offend some. Sadly, those people are unlikely to ever read it. ( )

When you read a book and you can hear the author's voice clearly in your mind... I miss Hitch. Short, interesting read. ( )

We should always be careful who we place on a pedestal, and we should always keep our eyes open when we do. Mother Teresa is the best example of this - she is regarded as a saint by so many, and yet - why? In this longform essay, Christopher Hitchens sets himself the task of demolishing the mythology of the Albanian nun, and so proves himself the ultimate iconoclast along the way. A quick read - but then everything Hitchens wrote is a quick read, it's so good. ( )

Perhaps a little short - as others have said, it would have been good to see Hitchens take twice as many pages to eviscerate Mother Theresa. Nevertheless, Hitchens is always a great read and he covers the topic reasonably completely. ( )

In attacking the legacy of Mother Teresa, Christopher Hitchens' aim in this polemic is true. It is not so much that she loved the poor but that she fetishized poverty, replacing humility with abjectness and spirituality with anti-materialism. Her missions refused – on dogmatic principles – to deliver proper medical care to the poor and needy who visited, and the places stayed that way for decades, even after the flood of donations that resulted from her fame. (And Hitchens asks: Where did all that money go?) It was a conscious decision to enhance the suffering of the poor, the better to experience 'the glory of God'. Needless to say, Hitchens is not a fan of this needless cruelty.

He also points out that it is hypocritical, for whenever 'Mother' herself became ill, she checked into the finest clinics that (other people's donated) money could buy. "There is no conceit equal to false modesty," Hitchens says on page 91, and in the nauseatingly pious Teresa, doing more harm than good, he has the archetype of the foolish religionite he so despised.

You can understand why Hitchens' takedown caused a bit of a stir back when it was published, but you may also wonder whether it is worth reading this book nowadays, given that Mother Teresa is long gone. Well, Hitchens also throws a few punches towards her champions. Politicians and vested-interest-types got a lot of mileage out of their donations to her missions, with the armour provided by their association with her proving very useful indeed (not least to the dictators she also graced with her patronage). Hitchens reserves his best powder for Teresa herself, but these champions in media, politics and elsewhere also get theirs. Their purchased indulgences, and eagerness to use the suffering of the poor as an opportunity to demonstrate their goodness, are what we would nowadays call 'virtue-signalling'.

However, the book is not comprehensive. It is disappointingly short; a sort of cursory overview of what Mother Teresa really was, as opposed to what the media made her out to be. Hitchens introduces each of the points but never goes into great depth about any of them, and before you know it the chapter has moved on and soon the book has ended. The Missionary Position has the right strategy – "judging Mother Teresa's reputation by her actions and words rather than her actions and words by her reputation" (pg. 103) – but does not go on the campaign. It is a fine war map, but with the individual battles left unfought. ( )

I already knew Hitchens' criticism of Mother Theresa's work, but it was still interesting to read the argument in full form. Did you ever wonder what happened to all the money donated to Mother Theresa? I did.

Not the easiest read, at least for me. Fortunately I had a dictionary handy to look up all the missing vocabulary. The winning sentence contained 4 words that I didn't know. ( )

Punches pulled = 0 ( )

I was decidedly underwhelmed by this book. I had expected a proper scorching of the life and principles of Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, with mountains of inescapable evidence of her dogmatic religious worldview. Instead I found what I already know about her: she's a hypocrtical, authoritarian, money-grubbing, euthanasiatic-for-Christ, anti-female-rights, shoulder-rubber-with-goons dictator who answers to no one. Big deal, so is any televangelist, king, or Republican. ( )

A critique of Mother Teresa's actions and words and their disparity with her reputation. As short as this book was, I felt like it was actually too long. It may have been because the same information is more elegantly expressed in Chapter 10 of [b:God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything|43369|God is Not Great How Religion Poisons Everything|Christopher Hitchens|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1411218313s/43369.jpg|3442838]. Hitchen's assessment that Mother Teresa is interested in saving souls to the detriment of life, is presented with a lot of history and personal quotes to back it up. It's an example of a figure's reputation elevated to an undeserved degree; after a close examination of her actions, we find a deep moral chasm lies between the two.

It is of course, Hitchens, so it's very biting and a bit wordy. Like I said earlier, the material is better presented in 'God is Not Great'. ( )

An unfortunately titled book that is nevertheless a very well argued if strident argument against the notion that Mother Teresa was the selfless advocate for the poor that her reputation would suggest.

Hitchens argues that her work with the poor was less an attempt to alleviate their suffering than a desire to use them to promote a retrograde worldview; “to propagandize one highly subjective view of human nature and need, so that she may one day be counted as a beatific founder of a new order and discipline within the Church itself.” He backs this up with several lines of evidence.

He interviewed a number of former volunteers with Teresa’s “Missionaries of Charity,” documenting the substandard condition at a number of their facilities despite the enormous amounts of money they had been given. The hospice facilities for example, provided almost no palliative care, reused unsterilized equipment, and provided nothing in the way of physical comfort for the patients under their care. In one documented case a 15 year old boy became terminal after the nuns running the hospice facility neglected to get the boy proper medical care. Time after time, “Missionaries of Charity’ declined to provide the resources necessary to actually lift the poor under their care out of the poverty they were suffering under

As Hitchens points out, whenever the needs of the poor conflicted with her religious worldview, it was the religious view that won out. Militantly anti-abortion and anti-contraception, she viewed the over population she saw around her as evidence of God’s grace.

Her reputation as an political neophyte allowed her to escape criticism for letting her name and reputation be used by various crooks, thugs and dictators including the brutal dictator of Haiti Jean-Claude Duvalier, and crook Charles Keating, looking to exculpate their crimes in the eyes of the public. In fact the evidence shows she was not a political neophyte and knew quite well how and when she could use the support of such people without drawing criticism to herself. A blatant example of this is the letter she wrote to Judge Lance Ito asking that Charles Keating be shown leniency in his sentencing for bilking hundreds of millions of dollars from the unsuspecting investors he hoodwinked. When a prosecutor in the case wrote a reply explaining exactly what Keating had done and that perhaps the Christian thing to do would be to return the money she had been given by Keating so it could be returned to its owners, he was met with silence.

I’m not an uncritical fan of Hitchens. He sometimes went out of his way to be insulting (as the title of this books shows). His views on American politics and culture were juvenile and often ill-informed. and of course his support for the Iraq war was a spectacular blunder. Having said all that however, we need folks like Hitchens to stir up the pot and force us to take a critical look at the people and institutions we rely on to make sure we are not deluding ourselves about their effectiveness. This goes for religious institutions as well. Were the facilities under Mother Teresa’s direction subject to the same scrutiny as those run by secular non-profits or the government they would have been shut down, or their funds would have dried up as donors got word of their ineffectiveness.

Both Hitchens and Mother Teresa have passed away of course, so neither can elaborate or defend their positions. I have tried to look for a reasoned look at her work from a sympathetic viewpoint, but all seem to be of the hagiographic variety. I will keep looking

Missionary Position continues to have relevance due to the cautionary tale it highlights. ( )

One of the more famous of Hitchens' contrarian stances, this is a systematic repudiation of the saintly reputation Mother Teresa had built up. He examines the problems built up by the rush to acclaim her and then the uncritical adoration of her life and work. It dismantles supernatural claims (such as Malcolm Muggeridge's), why her religious attitudes were so detrimental to many in her care and the sophistry of her attitude to money. It even convincingly questions how much of her life and work was down to naivete and ignorance. A terrific corrective, overdue at the time of writing, but seventeen years after her death it's most useful now as a warning about uncritical adoration. ( )

bookshelves: essays, fraudio, published-1995, spring-2014, roman-catholic, nonfiction, christian, history, religion, tbr-busting-2014, politics, philosophy, india, calcutta, lifestyles-deathstyles
Read from March 04 to 05, 2014

Written by: Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Mallon (foreword)
Narrated by: Simon Prebble
Length: 2 hrs and 11 mins
Format: Unabridged

Description: A Nobel Peace Prize recipient beatified by the Catholic Church in 2003, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was celebrated by heads of state and adored by millions for her work on behalf of the poor. In his measured critique, Hitchens asks only that Mother Teresa's reputation be judged by her actions-not the other way around.

Among his many books, perhaps none have sparked more outrage than The Missionary Position, Christopher Hitchens's meticulous study of the life and deeds of Mother Teresa.

A Nobel Peace Prize recipient beatified by the Catholic Church in 2003, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was celebrated by heads of state and adored by millions for her work on behalf of the poor. In his measured critique, Hitchens asks only that Mother Teresa's reputation be judged by her actions-not the other way around.

With characteristic elan and rhetorical dexterity, Hitchens eviscerates the fawning cult of Teresa, recasting the Albanian missionary as a spurious, despotic, and megalomaniacal operative of the wealthy who long opposed measures to end poverty, and fraternized, for financial gain, with tyrants and white-collar criminals throughout the world.

Somewhat a redundant read given the year that I have finally got around to this and there was nothing in it that any intelligent person hadn't sussed out about the disservice she did to the Culcutta poor. Far better would have been if she could hand out dunkies and pain killers instead of telling them that pain brings you nearer to God, and it is everyone's duty (except hers, of course) to bring children to Christ. Powerful writing as always.

4* The Portable Atheist
TR God Is Not Great
TR Mortality
4* Arguably
TR Letters To A Young Contrarian
4* The Missionary Position

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Thank god for Christopher Hitchens, a true rebel, unpredictable, impossible to pin, but always to the point. This little book made me blame myself for being too gullible and uncritical - I have accepted unequivocally that Mother Teresa was an altruistic angel, only interested in helping the poor. She herself never hid the fact that she was a fundamentalist, reactionary zealot - it was just the media that underreported that side of her. The only problem with this book is that Hitchens hasn't put a lot of effort into it. A great part of the book are quotes from other people's work. That doesn't make it less hard hitting, but I wish he had spent more time on his own writing and particularily on her background story. ( )

Hitchen's wittily and succinctly destroys the idea that Mother Teresa was a paragon of virtue, charity and humility. Her associations with characters of dubious standing, her charities misuse of funds and her ascetic conservatism are all marshalled as evidence of a far from saintly woman. However, it is ultimately her Catholic faith that Hitchen's is most concerned about, particularly with in terms of how it led to some questions opinions about contraception and abortion.

Highly readable and lively prose, as might be expected from this late great. ( )

This book definitely changed my viewpoint on Mother Teresa. It gives a way to look at different perspectives on highly praised figure. Good read. ( )

A discussion of the popular nun's fundraising and caregiving. Hitchens pulls no punches in his description of the nun as someone who doesn't deserve the slavish devotion showered on her by the American public. A bit disappointing in that it could have been more thorough. ( )

My head just exploded.................Wow! What were those biases keeping me from seeing reality once again? How did I manage to keep Mother Teresa in a separate category from Falwell, Bakker, and Oral Roberts so long? Was it it because she was a woman? a Catholic? What?! I get the duality of human nature and still............Ouch!
Hitchens always backs up his work and does so once again. As usual, his claims are evidence based and he uses the letters from Mother Teresa herself and a response from a Deputy District Attorney from Los Angeles, Paul Turley, to tell the story. When Charles Keating was up for sentencing for his financial crimes, Mother Teresa wrote a letter to Judge Ito asking for justice and mercy for this man who had stolen millions from others, and given quite a bit to her through the Missionaries of Charity. DDA Turley wrote to her asking what she thought Jesus would do in her circumstances. Turley suggested she could help Keating make reparation by returning the stolen money he had given her to the people from whom Keating stole it. Turley offered to put her in touch with those people. She made no response and no transfer of funds.

On a second point, Hitchens stated in a recent interview that there is one known answer to poverty, one and only one solution that has worked wherever and whenever it has been tried, in a variety of different cultures and circumstances. That solution is addressing issues of women's health and reproductive rights. Mother Teresa has throughout her life, preached against women's rights to use birth control. These are only two of the points Hitchens makes in The Missionary Position.

Read it and weep. ( )

Hitchens has nailed it again. I love his ability to dissect a subject or person without being influenced by popularly accepted beliefs. He is quite adept at digging beneath the surface. ( )

I was interested in Mother Teresa's interest in contraception and abortion. After reading a number of papers on the health effects of poverty, I added this to the reading list. The summary: medical care is scarce, diagnosis consists of 'you're dying,' analgesics will not get you into heaven, and Jesus doesn't like whiners. ( )

This book should be a mandatory read for everyone - if only to show how dangerous consumption of uncritical BS can be and where it can lead to. The subtitle of this book - "Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice" says it all and let me say it up front - the difference between the two is quite stark. It's been a while since I felt disgusted while reading a book - but it is hard not to when Mother Teresa's delusional religious fantasies are presented in stark contrast to her actual doings. It is hard to remain indifferent (forget about staying positive) when you read that "covert" baptisms of those on their death beds are common in a hospice with utter lack of medical care. How about workers washing needles under a stream of cold water in between application while millions of dollars fester in bank accounts of Mother Teresa's charities? I am at a loss of words here as I try to comprehend how deep religious dogma can be presented as a good thing in the mainstream media while there is plentiful evidence to the contrary. ( )

Not something you want to be seen carrying around campus at a Baptist school, but if you like the way Hitchens writes, there are worse ways to spend an hour or two. ( )

If you venerate Mother Teresa, or even if you just think she was a simple woman who sacrificed herself to aid the world’s poor and you want her to remain on a pedestal, don’t read this book. However, if you like to ask questions and look at things from a different angle than we are fed from the mass media, this is a fascinating book. And at only 98 pages, it’s also a quick read.
Every writer has an agenda, and Christopher Hitchens is less than subtle with his: I’ve heard him declare elsewhere that he has contempt for religion. So I expected a virulent attack on the poor old martyr. But that’s not what he delivered. Although Mother Teresa comes off poorly, his writing is not mean spirited. He looks at facts and events from a fresh perspective, and asks difficult questions. His information is drawn from his personal visit with Mother Teresa in India, and from interviews with medical workers and religious volunteers who assisted her over the years. Highly recommended. ( )

A saint? Give me a break! This woman was a hypocrite, a conniver, a shameless panderer from the wealthy, corrupt, and tyrannical, among whom are included Baby Doc Duvalier, Enver Hoxha of Albania, the Sandanistas in Nicaragua, and Charles Keating. This last “donated” $125 million to Mother Theresa from funds he looted from Lincoln Savings and Loan. The majority of shareholders in this scandal were the working poor and middle class families. Prior to his sentencing, Mother Theresa wrote a letter to the judge asking for mercy for Keating, “as Jesus would do.” When one of the prosecutors pointed out the source of the donation, and turned the tables and asked her “would Jesus keep a gift stolen from the poor?” he received no reply and no refund. A former employee of Mother Theresa reported that one checking account for the convent in Brooklyn contained over $50 million. The money was not to be used for the poor. MT frequently said poverty was a gift and to be born cheerfully. Instead of using the untold hundreds of millions of dollars to alleviate the suffering of the poor and dying, MT used the money to build and outfit convents to attract more members to her order. Most of these buildings boast gold ornaments, gold altar implements, and expensive vestments. When her order was offered an empty building to house the poor, she refused it, because regulations required the installation of an elevator to accommodate the handicapped. MT said that no such convenience should not be available to those that bore a gift from God. The city offered to pay for all renovation, including the elevator, but she refused and the project was abandoned.
Christopher Hitchens testified before the Vatican commission to determine whether or not MT should be moved along toward sainthood with beatification. The purported miracle was debunked by the photographer who shot some footage in a darkened room. He explained that some new, ultra-sensitive film was used.
Her establishments are nothing more than houses of death. They contain the barest of furnishings and rarely provide any pain medication, even aspirin, for those dying of cancer, plague, AIDS, leprosy, and other dreadful illnesses. Suffering, after all, is a gift from God and not to be shortened or alleviated. Interestingly enough, when MT was suffering from heart problems, she checked herself into the finest clinics in the world.
Disgusting.
--Jim, 9/23/07 ( )