Daniel: Alright Sophia, quick—describe Mother Teresa in one sentence, but the version you grew up with. Sophia: Oh, easy. The sweet, wrinkly, blue-and-white-robed woman who was the literal definition of a living saint. The embodiment of selfless charity. Daniel: Perfect. Now, what if I told you the author we're discussing today described her as a "ghoul," a "fanatic," and an "ally of the rich and powerful"? Sophia: Wow. Okay, that's... quite the contrast. That’s not just a critique; that’s a complete takedown. Who would even dare to say that about Mother Teresa? Daniel: The one and only Christopher Hitchens, in his short, sharp, and utterly devastating book, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Sophia: Christopher Hitchens. Of course. The master of polemic, the famous contrarian. I should have known. This feels like a classic Hitchens move—taking aim at the most sacred of sacred cows. Daniel: It is. And this book didn't come out of nowhere. It was an extension of a television documentary he made for the BBC in 1994, which he provocatively titled Hell's Angel. Sophia: Hell's Angel? About Mother Teresa? That is just breathtakingly audacious. So he was on this crusade, so to speak, for a while. Daniel: Exactly. And he argues that the entire global phenomenon, the unshakeable image of her as a saint, was built on a foundation that was, at best, shaky and, at worst, a deliberate fabrication. It all starts with a so-called miracle.

Sophia: A miracle? I feel like I should know this, but I'm drawing a blank. What was the big miracle that launched her into superstardom? Daniel: It’s a fascinating story, and it's the perfect place to start because it shows how the myth was built. In the late 1960s, a well-known British journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, went to Calcutta to film a documentary for the BBC. It was called Something Beautiful for God. Sophia: Right, I think I've heard of that. It was hugely influential, wasn't it? It basically introduced her to the Western world. Daniel: It was the launchpad for her global fame. Now, part of the documentary was filmed inside her 'Home for the Dying'. As you can imagine, it was a very dark, dimly lit space. The film crew was worried. The cameraman, a man named Ken Macmillan, told Muggeridge, "Look, I don't think we're going to get anything. It's just too dark in here." But they filmed anyway. Sophia: And let me guess, when they developed the film, it was miraculously illuminated? Daniel: You got it. The footage from inside the hospice was, in Muggeridge's words, "bathed in a particularly beautiful soft light." The footage they shot outside, in the bright courtyard, was by contrast dim and confused. Muggeridge was instantly convinced. He went on television and wrote in his book that he had witnessed a miracle. He called it "divine light." Sophia: Wow. I mean, that's a pretty compelling story. If you're a believer, that's all the proof you need. Divine light, captured on film. Daniel: It's an incredible story. And it became the foundational miracle of the Mother Teresa brand. There's just one small problem. Sophia: Oh, I have a feeling I know where this is going. Daniel: The cameraman, Ken Macmillan, had a much simpler explanation. He later went on record to say that just before the trip, the BBC had received a new type of film from Kodak. It was an experimental, highly light-sensitive stock that they hadn't even tested yet. He decided to try it out in the dark hospice. Sophia: You're kidding me. The foundational miracle of her global image was... a product demo for Kodak? Daniel: That's the long and short of it. Macmillan said he was about to praise the new film stock when Muggeridge cut him off, shouting, "It's divine light! It's Mother Teresa. You'll find that it's divine light, old boy." The divine explanation was just a better story, and it's the one that stuck. Sophia: That is both hilarious and deeply unsettling. It shows how much we want to believe in these things. The mundane, technical explanation is just so much less satisfying than a miracle. It speaks volumes about us, the audience, as much as it does about her. Daniel: Hitchens makes that exact point. He quotes the Latin phrase, Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur—"The people want to be deceived, so let them be deceived." He argues that the world was so desperate for a saintly figure that we were willing to overlook the facts right in front of us. Sophia: But was this a one-off? Or was her whole operation built on this kind of... let's call it 'pious fraud'? Did she know the light wasn't a miracle? Daniel: Hitchens argues it's part of a much larger pattern of prioritizing faith over facts, and image over substance. And that desire to believe, that lack of scrutiny, allowed people to overlook what he says is the truly disturbing part—not the manufactured image, but the ideology behind the work itself.

Sophia: The ideology. Okay, this feels like where it gets really dark. What was so wrong with her work? She was helping the poorest of the poor, right? That’s the whole story. Daniel: That is the story. But Hitchens forces us to ask a different, more uncomfortable question: what was she actually doing for them? Was she alleviating poverty and suffering, or was she using it for another purpose? Sophia: What other purpose could there be? Daniel: The promotion of a very specific, fundamentalist Catholic dogma. Hitchens's most damning piece of evidence is a quote from Mother Teresa herself. When asked if she teaches the poor to endure their lot, she replied—and this is a direct quote—"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." Sophia: Hold on. Read that again. "The world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people." That's... chilling. That's the opposite of every humanitarian impulse I can think of. The goal is to end suffering, not to find it beautiful. Daniel: Exactly. Hitchens calls this her "cult of suffering." The goal wasn't to build hospitals, to educate people, or to challenge the systems that create poverty. The goal was to ensure that the poor suffered in a way that glorified God. And this wasn't just a philosophical idea; it had very real, very grim consequences. Sophia: How so? What did that look like on the ground? Daniel: In 1994, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published a piece by Dr. Robin Fox, who had visited the Home for the Dying in Calcutta. He was appalled by what he saw. He described the medical care as "haphazard." He saw volunteers with no medical training making life-or-death decisions. He noted that needles were reused without proper sterilization. Sophia: Reusing needles? In a place full of people with infectious diseases? Daniel: Yes. And perhaps most shockingly, he noted a severe lack of strong painkillers. People with terminal cancer, suffering agonizing pain, were given aspirin or paracetamol, not morphine. When Dr. Fox asked why, the explanation was that the sisters believed suffering brought people closer to Jesus. Sophia: That is horrifying. It's one thing to have a personal religious belief about suffering, but it's another thing entirely to impose that belief on dying people by withholding adequate medical care. That's not charity; that's cruelty. Daniel: Hitchens argues it's the logical endpoint of her philosophy. If suffering is a gift, then to alleviate it with modern medicine is to interfere with God's work. This also explains her fanatical opposition to contraception and abortion. She famously called them "the greatest destroyers of peace today" in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Sophia: So she was actively fighting against the very tools that could prevent the unwanted pregnancies that often lead to the desperate poverty she claimed to be serving. The internal logic is just... it's a closed loop of dogma. Daniel: A completely sealed system. And that hypocrisy, Hitchens argues, wasn't just philosophical. It extended directly to her finances and her choice of friends.

Sophia: Okay, I've heard whispers about this part. The idea that she wasn't just a simple nun, but a player. Where does Hitchens take us? Daniel: He provides a whole list, but let's focus on two of the most jaw-dropping examples. First, Haiti in 1981. She pays a visit to the brutal dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier and his wife, Michele. Sophia: The Duvaliers? They were notorious kleptocrats who terrorized their own people. Haiti was one of the most impoverished and oppressed nations on earth under their rule. Why on earth would she go there and praise them? Daniel: Not only did she visit, she accepted Haiti's highest honor, the Legion d'Honneur, from them. And she was filmed for American television saying of Michele Duvalier, "I have never seen the poor people being so familiar with their head of state as they were with her. It was a beautiful lesson for me." Sophia: That's just... a staggering level of delusion or dishonesty. The Haitian people lived in terror of the Duvaliers and their death squads, the Tonton Macoute. For her to say that is to provide propaganda for a murderous regime. Daniel: The Haitian state-run TV played that clip on a loop for a week. It was an invaluable piece of PR for the dictatorship. But as bad as that is, Hitchens argues her relationship with an American fraudster is even more revealing. Sophia: Worse than cozying up to a dictator? Who was it? Daniel: A man named Charles Keating. In the 1980s, Keating was the central figure in the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal, one of the biggest financial frauds in US history. He stole over a billion dollars, wiping out the life savings of thousands of elderly and middle-class people. Sophia: I remember that name. A total corporate villain. What was his connection to Mother Teresa? Daniel: Before he was caught, Keating was a big-shot Catholic donor. He gave Mother Teresa 1.25 million dollars—stolen money, of course. He also let her use his private jet. In return, she gave him her prestige. When Keating was finally put on trial in 1992, Mother Teresa wrote a personal letter to the judge, Lance Ito. Sophia: No. What did it say? Daniel: It was a character reference. She wrote, "I only know that he has always been kind and generous to God's poor." She asked the judge for clemency. She used her immense moral authority to try and get a lighter sentence for a man who had ruined thousands of lives. Sophia: That is indefensible. The Duvalier story, you could maybe, maybe argue she was naive about foreign politics. But this is an American court case. The facts were public. She was actively intervening in the justice system on behalf of a crook. Daniel: It gets even worse. The prosecutor on the case, a man named Paul Turley, was so incensed that he wrote back to her. It's an incredible letter. He respectfully explained that Keating had stolen the money he gave her, and he asked her a simple question: "I ask that you do what Jesus would do... Ask yourself what Jesus would do if he were given the fruits of a crime; what Jesus would do if he were in possession of money that had been stolen... I submit that Jesus would promptly and unhesitatingly return the stolen property to its rightful owners." Sophia: Wow. What a powerful, direct challenge. What did she do? Daniel: She never replied. And she never returned the money. Sophia: Of course not. That says everything. So why? What was the motivation? Was it just greed? Was she just completely blind? Daniel: Hitchens's conclusion is that she was a true fundamentalist. In her mind, the work of her mission was the work of God. Anyone who funded that work was doing God's will, and the source of the money was irrelevant. The mission was above the law, above ethics, above everything. She wasn't a servant of the poor; the poor were instruments in her service to a rigid, unforgiving, and deeply political ideology.

Daniel: So when you put it all together, you have these three pillars of Hitchens's argument. First, the saintly image was a media creation, kickstarted by a "miracle" that was actually just new camera technology. Sophia: Right, the myth-making machine. Daniel: Second, the "good works" themselves were driven by a cult of suffering, where pain was glorified and modern medical care was often withheld in service of a fundamentalist dogma. Sophia: The ideology that valued suffering over relief. It's the most counterintuitive part of the whole story. Daniel: And third, far from being an apolitical, humble servant, she was a savvy political operator who befriended dictators, laundered the reputations of corporate criminals, and used her moral authority to advance a deeply conservative agenda. Sophia: When you lay it out like that, it's a complete and total dismantling of the icon. It feels less like a biography and more like a prosecution. Daniel: It is. And I think the deepest insight from Hitchens's book isn't just about one woman's failings. It's a profound cautionary tale about our own collective need for saints. We want to believe so badly in simple stories of pure good that we become willingly blind to the complicated, uncomfortable, and sometimes ugly truths right in front of us. Sophia: That's the real takeaway, isn't it? It forces you to look inward. We project this idea of perfection onto people, and then we get angry when they turn out to be human, or in this case, deeply flawed. It makes you question who we put on pedestals today, and what we're choosing not to see about them. Daniel: It's a question that's more relevant than ever in our age of celebrity philanthropists and influencer activists. Sophia: Absolutely. It’s a really challenging book, and it definitely leaves you with more questions than answers. We'd love to know what our listeners think. Does hearing this change your view of Mother Teresa? Is Hitchens's critique fair, or is it a cynical hit job? Let us know your thoughts and join the conversation on our platforms. Daniel: This is Aibrary, signing off.