Narrator: In January 1981, a revered global icon of charity visited one of the poorest nations on Earth. In Haiti, a country crushed under the brutal and corrupt dictatorship of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, Mother Teresa stood beside the First Lady, Michele Duvalier. She accepted the nation's highest honor from the regime and was filmed praising the dictator's wife, saying she had "never seen the poor people being so familiar with their head of state." This footage was then broadcast on state-run television for a week, a powerful piece of propaganda for a predatory ruling class. The image is jarring: the "saint of the gutters" lending her moral authority to a kleptocracy. This moment raises a profound and uncomfortable question: was the world's perception of Mother Teresa based on reality, or on a carefully constructed, and perhaps deliberately misleading, myth?

In his searing critique, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, author Christopher Hitchens argues that the truth is far more complex and disturbing than the beatific image. He peels back the layers of reverence to examine the woman behind the legend, revealing a figure whose work was driven less by a desire to alleviate suffering and more by a fundamentalist religious dogma that courted dictators, accepted dirty money, and glorified the very poverty it claimed to fight.

Narrator: The global adoration of Mother Teresa was ignited by a supposed miracle, one that turned out to be a trick of the light. In the late 1960s, the skeptical British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge traveled to Calcutta to film a documentary, Something Beautiful for God. One of the key locations was the Home for the Dying, a place so dimly lit that the film crew was concerned nothing would be visible on camera. The cameraman, Ken Macmillan, decided to try a new type of film stock that Kodak had just developed, though he had no idea how it would perform in such low light.

When the footage was developed back in London, the crew was stunned. The scenes shot inside the dark hospice were illuminated by a soft, ethereal glow. Muggeridge, in the midst of a profound religious conversion, immediately declared it a miracle. He proclaimed it was "divine light," a supernatural aura emanating from Mother Teresa herself. He wrote about it in his bestselling book of the same name, and the story became a cornerstone of her legend, proof of her divine favor.

Years later, however, the cameraman Ken Macmillan set the record straight. There was no miracle. The beautiful light was simply the result of the new, highly sensitive Kodak film. He had tried to explain this to Muggeridge at the time, but the journalist was already committed to the narrative of divine intervention. The "miracle" was a technical artifact, but the myth it created was far more powerful than the truth. This incident, for Hitchens, serves as a perfect metaphor for the entire Mother Teresa phenomenon: a story built on credulity and media amplification, which crumbles under the slightest critical scrutiny.

Narrator: While the world believed Mother Teresa's mission was to ease the suffering of the poor, Hitchens argues her true purpose was to promote a theology that celebrated suffering. Her work was not about ending poverty, but about using the poor as a means to express religious devotion. This became clear when she opened a mission in Anacostia, an impoverished neighborhood in Washington, D.C. When confronted by residents who wanted jobs and better housing, not charity, her response was telling. She later told a reporter, "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people."

This philosophy was reflected in the conditions of her missions. Numerous volunteers and visiting doctors reported a shocking lack of proper medical care. Dr. Robin Fox, editor of the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, visited the Home for the Dying in Calcutta and described the care as "haphazard." He saw treatable patients being left to die and noted a startling absence of modern analgesics for pain management. Needles were reused without proper sterilization, and diagnoses were often nonexistent. The focus was not on healing, but on providing a Catholic death, with sisters more concerned with baptizing the dying than with providing medical relief. The mission, Hitchens contends, was not a hospital; it was a cult of suffering designed to secure souls for Christ, not to save lives.

Narrator: For a figure lauded for her moral purity, Mother Teresa demonstrated a disturbing pattern of associating with and legitimizing some of the world's most unsavory characters. Her cozy relationship with the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti was not an isolated incident. She also accepted an "Integrity Award" and a $10,000 check from John-Roger, the leader of a corrupt and dangerous cult called the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA). The photograph of the two was staged, with destitute figures added to the background to enhance the image.

Her political alliances were consistently on the side of the hard-right and theocratic. She flew to Spain to campaign against the legalization of divorce and abortion. She met with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to support a bill restricting abortion access. In Albania, her ancestral homeland, she laid a wreath on the grave of the brutal Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha, a man who had viciously persecuted religion, and stood beside his widow without a word of criticism for his regime. Hitchens argues that these were not the actions of an apolitical humanitarian. They were the calculated moves of a political operator whose true cause was the advancement of a rigid, fundamentalist Catholicism, regardless of the company she had to keep.

Narrator: Mother Teresa famously took a vow of poverty and claimed her order did not accept money for its work. The reality was starkly different. Her organization received millions in donations, yet there has never been a transparent audit of its finances. Most troubling was the source of some of this money. Her most notorious benefactor was Charles Keating, the central figure in the American Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980s. Keating defrauded thousands of small investors, many of them elderly, out of their life savings.

During his years of fraud, Keating donated $1.25 million to Mother Teresa and gave her free use of his private jet. In return, she allowed him to use her name and prestige for his own benefit. When Keating was finally put on trial, Mother Teresa wrote a personal letter to the judge, asking for clemency. She described Keating as a kind and generous man who had "always been ready to help."

The prosecutor, Paul Turley, was so appalled that he wrote back to Mother Teresa. He carefully explained the nature of Keating's crimes and respectfully asked her to do the right thing: return the stolen money to the people from whom it was taken. He asked, "Ask yourself what Jesus would do if he were given the fruits of a crime." Mother Teresa never replied, and the money was never returned. This incident reveals a profound moral blindness, where the prestige and financial support of a wealthy criminal were valued more than the suffering of his thousands of victims.

Narrator: Ultimately, Christopher Hitchens's investigation concludes that the legacy of Mother Teresa is not one of selfless service, but of a cynical and highly effective religious and political campaign. The single most important takeaway from The Missionary Position is that Mother Teresa was not a friend to the poor, but a friend to poverty itself. Her mission was not to challenge the systems of injustice that create and sustain poverty, but to use the spectacle of suffering as a tool for proselytization and the promotion of a hardline, anti-contraception, anti-abortion, and pro-suffering ideology. She provided a spiritual justification for the status quo, comforting the powerful and corrupt while offering the poor only platitudes and a "beautiful" death.

The book leaves us with a challenging final thought that extends beyond its subject. It forces us to ask why we, as a society, are so desperate to believe in saints. What does our uncritical adoration of figures like Mother Teresa say about our own unwillingness to confront uncomfortable truths? Hitchens's work is a powerful reminder that true compassion requires not just faith, but reason, skepticism, and the courage to hold even our most revered icons accountable.