Teresa, Bright and Dark

Not many years later, she became a world-class celebrity with the film (and book) about her: "Something Beautiful for God," authored by the worldly English eccentric Malcolm Muggeridge. After that, her star power was so intense that the Church forgot Macaulay's wisdom and gave up any attempt to discipline her apparently enthusiastic fundamentalism. If Santayana was right to define fanaticism as "redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim," then Mother Teresa's international crusade against divorce, abortion and contraception was the tribute that doubt paid to certainty: a strenuous and almost hysterical effort to drown out the awful fear of "absence." One strongly suspects that, like not a few overpromoted figures, she suffered from more self-hatred the more she was overpraised. (After receiving one of many international prizes, she wrote: "This means nothing to me, because I don't have Him.")

Not perhaps to push my analysis too far, but it could also explain some of the things that alarmed even her defenders: the accepting of stolen money from the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti, for example, or the compromises she made with the tyrannical Indira Gandhi or the shady Charles Keating of savings-and-loan notoriety. Who cares about ignoble surrenders to the things of this impure world if they will fuel the endless drive to abolish misgiving through overwork? The same goes for the alarming doctrinal excesses. Every Catholic is supposed to regard abortion as an abomination (and, if it matters, I concur). But surely it takes someone both insecure and fanatical to exceed the official teaching and to tell the Nobel Prize audience, as she did, that abortion is the greatest threat to world peace?

Toward the end of her days, we have been informed by Archbishop D'Souza of Calcutta, her troubled and sleepless condition gave rise to such concern that she was subjected to an exorcism. According to this same clerical authority, the medieval banishment of the demons allowed her a good night's sleep before her death. One is glad to learn of it, and to know that she found a sort of peace. But since then, she has been posthumously exploited for having worked a medical "miracle" from beyond the grave: an episode which (to put it mildly) no respectable Bengali physician can confirm. I say it as cal—ly as I can-the Church should have had the elementary decency to let the earth lie lightly on this troubled and miserable lady, and not to invoke her long anguish to recruit the credulous to a blind faith in which she herself had long ceased to believe.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of "The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice." His most recent book is "God Is Not Great." 

© 2007