Here’s Hitchens (from one of his live debates):

What’s motherly about her? Hideous virgin and fraud, and fanatic and fundamentalist, shriveled old bat. [She was] as far from the nature of motherhood as a woman could decently get. . . We have to have the fortitude to say… to those who are afflicted, to those who are poor, to those who really are suffering, we should say honestly that those who offer them false consolation are not there friends. Who doesn’t know by now that the cure for poverty is not charity in Calcutta. Who doesn’t know that? Why did we decide to forget what we learnt over the generations that charity is an insult to the poor and a way of prolonging poverty; that Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor, she was a friend of poverty. That there is only one cure for poverty, and that is, by the way, the liberation of women. And which works every time and against which all religions have set its face every time. And against which Mother Teresa has spent a lifetime campaigning, to ensure that misery and poverty and dirt and disease and ignorance would be continued so that there would be ever more people to testify to the Catholic faith.

Hitchens is accurate in his description of Teresa being a fraud. It has recently been revealed that she did not believe in the tripe she was peddling pretty much all her life. She did not have faith in her god. This did not come as a surprise to me because I had concluded that she was a supremely shrewed, cunning, and intelligent person. The way she manipulated the press, the way she used the high-ranking politicians (and the way she allowed herself to be used by them in turn), the way she rubbed shoulders with convicted frauds as long as they enriched her order, the way she handed out indulgences to mass murderers — it all indicated that she was nobody’s fool and she could not have possibly believed in the simple-minded nonsense that the Catholic church expects its flock to believe.

But apparently she wanted to believe in that vile nonsense. And being unable to believe, she was a tortured soul. Perhaps there is some justice in the world after all: at least she suffered a bit. Not a whole lot compared to the suffering that she inflicted by her evil machinations but still suffered. There is no hell but perhaps she did inhabit a bit of hell on earth. Unfortunately though, it is possible that if she had not been so tortured by her lack of faith, perhaps she would have been a little less merciless in her actions. A good person does not even unintentionally harm innocent humans. The evil she represents is absolute because she knowingly increased suffering and pain.

If she had toiled in obscurity whatever her motivation, if she was just another misguided monkey trying to save fish, if she had been just one more missionary hell-bent on converting the heathens — I would not waste my breath on her. But she was celebrated by the powers of the Western world, and celebrated by the morons in the Indian press, awarded all kinds of honors by the stupid Indian government, and finally given a state funeral. The louder these powers speak about her holiness, the more the general population gets brainwashed into believing a falsehood. So I consider it my duty to expose the evil she embodied. I am laying out the evidence and voicing my opinion. To this end, the best spokesman I have found is Christopher Hitchens. May his tribe increase.

Here is part 1 (of 3) of one of Hitchens’ documentary on Teresa titled “Hell’s Angel”.

Here are Part 2, and Part 3.

Teresa was absolutely against abortion, and even just plain contraception. At the very least, if one opposes abortion, one should at least be absolutely for contraception. She was vile. And absolute opposition to abortions leads to murder. Don’t believe me? Read this report in the Guardian titled “Killer Law” on Nicaragua’s anti-abortion legislation. Not pretty, is it? Check your pulse if it does not make your blood boil.

I am sure that I will continue to write against Teresa. For now, let me close with a letter that a friend of mine forwarded to me. It is part of a letter-writing campaign addressed to those in charge of the international airport in Kolkata.

4 November 2007

To
The Director
NSCBI Airport Kolkata
Kolkata 700052

Dear Sir

As a lover of Kolkata and frequent visitor to your city I was shocked to see, just at the entrance to the check-in section of the international airport, a large portrait of Mother Teresa.

The late nun has caused and is causing IMMENSE harm to Kolkata’s reputation through the worst kind of negative publicity. Most people in the world believe that Kolkata is one mass of disgusting slums where nothing except the most dire poverty exists. This belief system cuts through national, religious and social boundaries.

Let me assure you that without the oppressive yoke of the Teresa myth Kolkata would have enjoyed many many more visitors. Also Kolkata’s business prospects have been irrepairably harmed by the Teresa association.

We, the undersigned, therefore, ardently request you to remove the portrait of Mother Teresa from such a vantage point. We do not have any religious issues about her, as we are drawn from many religions (and none). But we deeply care about Kolkata and its honour and dignity.

Yours faithfully
Dr Z K Kittler

Copy: Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Chief Minister, West Bengal

Kolkata, whatever its miseries, does not deserve the punishment that Teresa so mercilessly administered it. I do pity Kolkata but I also feel contempt for the ignorance of the people of Kolkata that they so shamelessly acquiesce to their own debasement.

Susan Shields, formerly a senior nun with the order, recalled that one year there was roughly $50m in the bank account held by the New York office alone. Much of the money, she complained, sat in banks while workers in the homes were obliged to reuse blunt needles. The order has stopped reusing needles, but the poor care remains pervasive. One nurse told me of a case earlier this year where staff knew a patient had typhoid but made no effort to protect volunteers or other patients. “The sense was that God will provide and if the worst happens – it is God’s will.”

The Kolkata police force and the city’s social welfare department have promised to investigate the incidents in the Daya Dan home when they have seen and verified the distressing footage we secretly filmed. Dr Aroup Chatterjee, a London-based Kolkata-born doctor, believes that if Daya Dan were any other care home in India, “the authorities would close it down. The Indian government is in thrall to the legacy of Mother Teresa and is terrified of her reputation and status. There are many better homes than this in Kolkata,” he told us.

Nearly eight years after her death, Mother Teresa is fast on the way to sainthood. The great aura of myth that surrounds her is built on her great deeds helping the poor and the destitute of Kolkata, birthplace of her order, the Missionaries of Charity. Rarely has one individual so convinced public opinion of the holiness of her cause. Her reward is accelerated canonisation.

But her homes are a disgrace to so-called Christian care and, indeed, civilised values of any kind. I witnessed barbaric treatment of the most vulnerable.

Actually, it’s boasting to say that I “discovered” any of this. It was all there in plain sight for anyone to notice. But in the age of celebrity, nobody had troubled to ask if such a global reputation was truly earned or was simply the result of brilliant public relations.

“Wait a minute,” said a TV host in Washington a few nights ago, when I debated all this with Mr John Donahue of the Catholic Defence League. “She built hospitals.” No, sir, you wait a minute.

Mother Teresa was given, to our certain knowledge, many tens of millions of pounds. But she never built any hospitals. She claimed to have built almost 150 convents, for nuns joining her own order, in several countries. Was this where ordinary donors thought their money was going?

Furthermore, she received some of this money from the Duvaliers, and from Mr Charles Keating of the notorious Lincoln Savings and Loan of California, and both these sources had acquired the money by – how shall I put it? – borrowing money from the poor and failing to give it back.

How could this possibly be true? Doesn’t everyone know that she spent her time kissing the sores of lepers and healing the sick? Ah, but what everyone knows isn’t always true. You were more likely to run into Mother Teresa being photographed with Nancy Reagan, or posing with Princess Diana, or in the first-class cabin of Air India (where she had a permanent reservation).

You could see her in Ireland, campaigning against a law which would permit civil divorce and remarriage (though she publicly defended Princess Diana’s right to be divorced).

You could encounter her on the podium in Stockholm, accepting yet another huge cheque and telling the Nobel audience that the greatest threat to world peace was… abortion. (Since she added that contraception was morally as bad as abortion, she essentially held the view that condoms and coils were a deadly threat to world peace. The Church does not insist on that degree of fundamentalism.)

And when she got sick, she would check herself into the Mayo Clinic or some other temple of American medicine. As one who has visited her primitive “hospice” for the dying in Calcutta, I should call that a wise decision. Nobody would go there except to check out, in one way or another.

“Give a man a reputation as an early riser,” said Mark Twain “and that man can sleep till noon.” Give a woman a reputation for holiness and compassion and apparently nothing she does can cause her to lose it.

I have been a severe critic of Mother Teresa ever since I came to know of what her mission was all about. Christopher Hitchens was one of the first to provide a devastating critique of her. The Ghoul of Calcutta, as he called his piece on her, is as honest an appraisal of her as anyone has ever done. His book The Missionary Position was a welcome counterbalance to the hagiography that was built around her myth. I started a small collection of critical pieces about M. Teresa some years ago. Through my interest in her, around 1997 I came to meet Hitchens when he was visiting Berkeley for a conversation with Gore Vidal. Last year I met Chatterjee in London, again in connection with a review of his book that I had written on my blog.

What exactly is my main grouse with M. Teresa? I think that she was evil. She manipulated others and cheated them, and she did so on the backs of Kolkata’s miserable. She was the most famous “beggar lord” – a person who makes a living by taking the money that people give to beggars and using that money for some other purpose. In her case, it is suspected that the money is funneled to the Vatican so that she would get on the fast tract to being canonized.

But siphoning money to the Vatican does not immediately brand her as evil, in my book. Hitler also supported the Vatican and that was not his most egregious fault. No, M. Teresa did far worse than just steal from the poor to enrich the fabulously wealthy. She compounded the problem that is the root cause of many of the world’s miseries. She cynically campaigned against birth control and contraceptives and did everything that she could to make the population problem more acute. The more born in misery and hopelessness, the more souls she would be able to save and more the brownie points that she would have to win the prize in heaven (sit next to Jesus Christ) and on earth (made into a saint by the bishop of Rome.)

My hope is that one of these days soon the Indians at least will wake out of their deep slumber of ignorance to realize that she has done incalculable harm to India, both in terms of the image that she advertised to the world about India, but even more tragically by catalyzing tens of millions of excess births that will result in decades of needless suffering and pain.

Too bad I don’t believe in hell and in a just power governing the universe. Otherwise I would have consoled myself with the thought that she would definitely end up in hell and suffer for all of eternity what she imposed on others.

Update: (Oct 26th, 2005) Here are two more articles, both by Christopher Hitchens, on Mother Teresa. In Oct 2003, Hitchens wrote The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.

One of the curses of India, as of other poor countries, is the quack medicine man, who fleeces the sufferer by promises of miraculous healing. Sunday was a great day for these parasites, who saw their crummy methods endorsed by his holiness and given a more or less free ride in the international press. Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. More than that, we witnessed the elevation and consecration of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human personality. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.

Earlier that year, he had argued why teresa should not be a saint in the Mirror (UK):

“Wait a minute,” said a TV host in Washington a few nights ago, when I debated all this with Mr John Donahue of the Catholic Defence League. “She built hospitals.” No, sir, you wait a minute.

Mother Teresa was given, to our certain knowledge, many tens of millions of pounds. But she never built any hospitals. She claimed to have built almost 150 convents, for nuns joining her own order, in several countries. Was this where ordinary donors thought their money was going?

Furthermore, she received some of this money from the Duvaliers, and from Mr Charles Keating of the notorious Lincoln Savings and Loan of California, and both these sources had acquired the money by – how shall I put it? – borrowing money from the poor and failing to give it back.

How could this possibly be true? Doesn’t everyone know that she spent her time kissing the sores of lepers and healing the sick? Ah, but what everyone knows isn’t always true. You were more likely to run into Mother Teresa being photographed with Nancy Reagan, or posing with Princess Diana, or in the first-class cabin of Air India (where she had a permanent reservation).

Dear Chief Minister of West Bengal Mr. Buddhadev Bhattacharya:

I have come to learn that there is some possibility of renaming Park Street as Mother Teresa street and erecting her statue.

I think this is a very bad idea. The image of Kolkata has been forever tarnished as a result of Mother Teresa’s activities. For greater details on why this is so, I would urge you to read what some neutral observers have to say about the lady. I have a few articles on the subject and I recommend a book by a son of Kolkata — Dr Aroup Chatterjee’s “Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict” which I have reviewed here.

We in India are totally brainwashed to accept uncritically anything that is Western and white. Mother Teresa, motivated by missionary zeal, used the poverty of the poor of Kolkata to enrich her mission. While I do not deny that India has abject poverty, she used that poverty and showcased it around the world not to solve the problem but to evoke pity from affluent people so that they would contribute to the welfare of her mission, not for the welfare of the people she so ruthlessly used.

I urge you to carefully review the evidence and reconsider.

Sincerely,
Atanu Dey

I have followed the Mother Teresa phenomenon with a sick feeling in my stomach because of a number of reasons. The primary reason for me is that she epitomizes what is the fundamental flaw that led to what we see in India around us today. The flaw is in not thinking through things, of busying ourselves with the symptoms of an ailment rather than eradicating the cause.

Mother Teresa ceaselessly championed for uncontrolled breeding. She did her best to derail any serious attempt at addressing one of the primary causes of poverty in the developing countries, namely, the growth of human populations way beyond that which can be sustained at a humane level. All she wanted was that there be sufficiently large number of abjectly poor in a place so she could gather brownie points to assure her place amongst the sainted. As she honestly put it, if there were no poor, there would not be any reason for hermission to exist. The poor, she held, were blessed because they suffer.

I feel that she should be called Teresa, the Merciless. Millions will be forced lead miserable lives because of what she has done and the institutions she supported (the Vatican, primarily) and the institutions she has created.

I expect hate mail as a result of this post. But I hope that the writer of hate mail at least read some of the articles which I have provided the links to above. My request is that you send me hate mail only after you have honestly read the articles.