The Beastly Beatification of Mother T

The Hitchens man is on surer ground when he slags off Mother Teresa and the whole grotesque specatacle of her impending sainthood.

He says:

Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries of Charity," but they had no audience for their story.

I can personally vouch for the truth of this. I volunteered for a year and was astonished at the gap between the popular view of the Sisters' unceaseless devotion to the poorest of the poor and the actuality. If you've ever wept a sentimental tear at images of a Sister cradling the head of a dying child, then you've been conned. If it happens it's the exception rather than the rule. The Sisters are more likely to be upstairs praying, leaving the poor souls to meet their maker alone. Their primary concern is their own relationship with God, with their self sacrifice and devotion to destitution. Not the destitute, the state of destitution. And as Hitchens says, since suffering is so Godly, they don't really care about its alleviation. More than one person said to me that they would rather die on the streets than live in the Sisters' house.

It's not all evil. There are some happy people living at Missionary of Charity homes all over India. There are people who are alive now with three meals a day and a roof over their head who would have died had not a sister picked them up off the street.

But when I hear of the soon to be sanctified Mother T, I think of a young boy at whose cremation I was the only onlooker, apart from the furnace man who unceremoniously tipped the shrouded body into the fire.

The boy died of hyper glycaemia, I think the technical term is. He was diabetic, and the sisters stopped giving him insulin because he kept eating glucose biscuits.