The Missionary Position (9 page)

How else are we to explain the following entry from the
Yearbook on International Communist Affairs 1990
, published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University and reviewing developments in all countries of the Communist world?

After numerous previous attempts to secure a visa had been denied, in August the government allowed Mother Teresa to visit Tirana.… Although the visit was called “private,” Mother Teresa was received by Mrs. Hoxha, Foreign Minister Reis Malile, Minister of Health Ahmet Kamberi, the Chairman of the People’s Assembly Petro Dode, and other state and party officials. Dutifully, the Albanian-born nun and Nobel peace prize laureate placed a wreath at the monument of “Mother Albania” and “paid homage and laid a bouquet of flowers on the grave of Comrade Enver Hoxha.” The world-renowned Catholic nun did not utter a word of criticism against the regime for its brutal suppression of religion.

The “Mother Albania” monument, it might be worth emphasizing, is not an abstract symbol of sentimental nationhood. It is the emblem of the cause of Greater Albania. A nearby museum displays the boundaries of this ambition in the form of a map. “Mother Albania” turns out to comprise—in addition to the martyred province of Kosovo—a large piece of Serbia and Montenegro, a substantial chunk of formerly Yugoslav Macedonia and most of that part of modern Greece now known as Epirus.

I possess a film of “Mother Teresa” making her homage to “Mother Albania”—as well as to its patron, the pitiless thug Enver Hoxha—and it invites the same question as does the infamous embrace in Haiti: What is a woman of unworldly innocence and charity doing
dans cette galère
? Apologists have said, of the Albanian case, that it was only natural for Mother Teresa to make a few obeisances in order to visit the graves of her ancestors and, of the second, that a few compromises were necessary so that her order would be allowed to work freely in Haiti. Interestingly enough, these are not excuses that have been tendered by Mother Teresa herself, who keeps her own counsel on both matters (and on many others besides).

It is at least worth considering whether Mother Teresa made both of these trips (and many others) in furtherance of the more flinty political stands taken by hard-liners in her own Church. The personal conduct and the questionable policy are at least congruent in each instance. In the case of Haiti, the Vatican had long taken a position in favor of the “Duvalierist” oligarchy. When the Reverend Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide began his campaign of charismatic populism against the regime, he encountered instant hostility from the Church hierarchy, which eventually suspended him from his order. By the time that Aristide had been triumphantly elected, ignominiously deposed by a military junta and finally restored to
power by international intervention, the Vatican was the only government in the world which still retained formal diplomatic relations with the usurping dictatorship. Mother Teresa’s activism, then, was representative of the most dogmatic line taken by her Church.

Similarly in the Balkans, the collapse and disintegration of Yugoslavia led to a recrudescence of essentially prewar rivalries. Croatia, with the support of the Vatican and Germany, declared itself an independent state and restored many of the signs and emblems of the wartime republic led by Ante Pavelic. Protected by the Vatican and the Third Reich, this government had massacred its Jews and embarked on a program of forced conversion of Orthodox Serbs; those who resisted the crusade had been put to death. This memory alone, and the evident lack of regret for it, contributed to the evolution of a nationalist-religious paranoia among the Serbs, who subsequently launched a war of territorial and sectarian aggrandizement, destroying the cities of Vukovar and Sarajevo in the process. The Croatian ruling party, led by Franjo Tudjman, responded by carving out its own slice of Bosnia and demolishing the city of Mostar.

Even more ominously there existed, and still exists, the possibility that a generalized war could destroy the boundaries of the former Yugoslavia and
once again pit Catholic against Orthodox as well as both, in various local combinations, against Islam. In Tetovo, the Albanian center of western Macedonia, and in Kosovo too, local zealots speak of Greater Albania as the response to Greater Serbia, and they flourish their pictures of Mother Teresa.

II

I
ntervention, whether moral or political, is always and everywhere a matter of the most exquisite timing. The choice of time and the selection of place can be most eloquent. So indeed may be the moments when nothing is said or done. Mother Teresa is fond of claiming to be not so much
above
politics as actually
beyond
them, operating in a manner that is transcendental. All claims by public persons to be apolitical deserve critical scrutiny, and all claims made by those who affect a merely “spiritual” influence deserve a doubly critical scrutiny. The naive and simple are seldom as naive and simple as they seem, and this suspicion is reinforced by those who proclaim their own naïveté and simplicity. There is no conceit equal to false modesty, and there is no politics like antipolitics, just as there is no worldliness to compare with ostentatious antimaterialism.

Mother Teresa’s timing shows every sign of
instinctive genius. She possesses an intuition about the need for her message and about the way in which this message should be delivered. To take a relatively small example: In 1984 the Indian town of Bhopal was the scene of an appalling industrial calamity. The Union Carbide plant, which had been located in the town to take advantage of low labor costs and government tax incentives, exploded and spilled toxic chemicals over a large swath of the citizenry. Two and a half thousand persons perished almost at once, and many thousands more were choked by lung-searing emissions and had their health permanently impaired. The subsequent investigation revealed a pattern of negligence and showed that previous safety warnings at the plant had been shelved or ignored. Here was no “Act of God,” as the insurance companies like to phrase it in the fine print of their contracts, but a shocking case of callousness on the part of a giant multinational corporation. Mother Teresa was on the next plane to Bhopal. At the airport, greeted by throngs of angry relatives of the victims, she was pressed to give her advice and counsel, and she did so unhesitatingly. I have a videotape of the moment. “Forgive,” she said. “Forgive, forgive.”

On the face of it, a strange injunction. How did she know there was anything to forgive? Had anybody asked for forgiveness? What are the duties of the poor to the rich in such a situation? And
who is authorized to recommend, or to dispense, forgiveness?
⁵
In the absence of any answer to these questions, Mother Teresa’s flying visit to Bhopal read like a hasty exercise in damage control, the expedient containment of righteous secular indignation.

Here is another film clip, this time of Mother Teresa at the airport in Madrid. She has flown in to lend her support to the clerical forces who are contesting the post-Franco legislation enabling divorce, abortion and birth control. The crowd at the terminal is composed of the highly traditional Spanish Right, with here and there a blue shirt, and a right arm flung skyward. This is one of the first political votes to decide whether or not Spain will evolve into a secular society. Mother Teresa has taken her stand in this debate, and she has taken it unequivocally on the conservative side—all the while claiming to remain above politics. Any exertion of this privilege is really an abuse, just as it was in Knock.

In London in 1988, Mother Teresa paid a visit ostensibly to discuss the growing problem of the
city’s homeless, who had forced the phrase “Cardboard City” into the language by dwelling in cardboard structures in parks and on the Embankment. Having spoken briefly on this topic, Mother Teresa was ushered into 10 Downing Street to meet in private with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Mrs. Thatcher was famously unsentimental about the denizens of “Cardboard City” and indeed about most other forms of human failure and defeat, and it was not in any case the plight of the homeless that Mother Teresa wished to discuss. The two women went into conclave on the matter of abortion, which was then the subject of a private member’s bill in the House of Commons, sponsored by the Liberal MP David Alton. Mr. Alton, who had sought to limit the availability of abortion, was in no doubt of the value of Mother Teresa’s intervention. He told reporters that her meeting with Margaret Thatcher was an immense boost to his campaign, and he took credit for arranging the womanly summit. Whatever else may be said of this meeting, which occurred on the eve of a decisive parliamentary vote and was attended by a circus of cameras and scribes, the term “nonpolitical” does not apply to it very easily.

And now a photograph, or pair of photographs. Mother Teresa is seated in earnest conversation with Ronald Reagan and his chief of staff, Donald Regan. Both men wear expressions of the most determined
sincerity. The photo opportunity occurs inside the White House in May 1985. Mother Teresa has been chosen to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her companions for the day are Frank Sinatra, James Stewart and Jeane Kirkpatrick, among other recipients. At the moment when the shutter falls on this shot, Ronald Reagan has every reason to be careful of Catholic susceptibility. His policy in Central America, which has resulted in his Cabinet officers defending the murders of four American nuns and the Archbishop of San Salvador, is deeply unpopular with the voters. One of his more daring lies—the claim that he had received a personal message from the Pope supporting his policy in the isthmus—has had to be retracted after causing considerable embarrassment. In the basement of the very building where Mother Teresa sits, a Marine Colonel named Oliver North (who forsook the Catholic Church for evangelical Pentecostalism after being vouchsafed a personal vision) is toiling away on an enterprise which will nearly succeed in destroying the Presidency that spawned it.

Stepping onto the portico of the White House, flanked by Ronald and Nancy, Mother Teresa knows just what to say:

I am most unworthy of this generous gift of our President, Mr. Reagan, and his wife and you people of the United States. But I accept it for the greater glory of God and in the name of the millions of poor people that this gift, in spirit and in love, will penetrate the hearts of the people.

This kind of modesty—speaking for God and for the poor—is now so standard on her part that nobody even notices it. Then:

I’ve never realized that you loved the people so tenderly. I had the experience, I was last time here, a sister from Ethiopia found me and said “Our people are dying. Our children are dying. Mother, do something.” And the only person that came in my mind while she was talking, it was the President. And immediately I wrote to him, and I said, “I don’t know, but this is what happened to me.” And next day it was that immediately he arranged to bring food to our people.… Together, we are doing something beautiful for God.

Here was greater praise than Reagan could possibly have asked or hoped for. Not only was he told that he “loved the people so tenderly” but he was congratulated for his policy in Ethiopia. That policy, as it happened, was to support the claim of the Ethiopian ruling junta—the Dergue—to the supposed “territorial integrity” of the Ethiopian empire, which
included (then) the insurgent people of Eritrea. General Mengistu Haile Mariam had deliberately used the weapon of starvation not just against Eritrea but also against domestic and regional dissent in other regions of the country. This had not prevented Mother Teresa from dancing attendance upon him and thereby shocking the human-rights community, which had sought to isolate his regime. That very isolation, however, had provided opportunities for “missionary work” to those few prepared to compromise. To invest such temporal and temporizing politics with the faint odor of sanctity, let alone with Mother Teresa’s now-familiar suggestion of the operations of divine providence (“And next day it was …”) is political in the extreme, but the White House press corps, deliberately ignorant of such considerations, duly gave the visit and the presentation its standard uncritical treatment.

During this same period, Mother Teresa visited Nicaragua and contrived to admonish the Sandinista revolutionary party. The Cardinal Archbishop of Managua, Miguel Obando y Bravo, was at that time the official patron and confessor of the
contras
, and was paid an admitted and regular stipend by the Central Intelligence Agency. Also at that time, the
contras
conceived it as their task to make a special target of clinics, schools, dairies and other “soft target” elements of the Nicaraguan system. And the
contras
believed—almost predictably—that they had on their side a miraculous Virgin who had appeared in the remote northern regions of the country. What they assuredly did have on their side was the most powerful state on earth, which openly announced that it would bring Nicaragua to heel by increasing the poverty and destitution of its wavering citizens. A consistent case might be made for following such a policy and for employing the Church in support of it, but however reasonable that case might be it could by no stretch of the imagination be described as a nonpolitical one, or one animated by a love of the poor.