People today still venerate Mother Teresa as one of the most moral, loving and selfless people to have lived in recent memory, and she appears to be on the "fast track" for sainthood in the Catholic Church. Are all of these positive judgments justified, or is there more to her story than is usually reported in the news?

According to Christopher Hitchens, there is indeed quite a lot more - enough to totally undermine the traditional opinions about her. Hitchens paints a very dark picture of a self-righteous, hypocritical woman who was determined to impose upon others doctrines of Catholic morality which even most Catholics would not approve of.

Her world fame seems to stem from an incident when she was being interviewed and photographed as part of the work of Malcolm Muggeridge in 1969. She was photographed in the dark interior of a building and the photographer used a new film from Kodak. Muggeridge attributed the superior quality and clarity of the final pictures to a "divine light," never apparently considering that the film may have simply been very good. But because of this, the job of critics has been made more difficult:

You would think that, at the very least, people would take a critical look at the things she says - but they don't! Hitchens quotes a lot of her words, and most of them are religious inanities and vacuous assertions. When she received that Nobel Peace Prize, she announced in her acceptance speech that:

In some ways, this is the most coherent of the things she claimed. Other statements of hers include that AIDS is a just retribution for improper sexual conduct; the suffering in Calcutta is due to its distance from Jesus; and suffering is in fact a positive thing:

Perhaps it is improper to criticize someone for a few inappropriate remarks when they do so much important work to help the poor and destitute people in India. But then again, just what did she do for people in India? Everyone assumes that she did a lot of good and important work, but is that asumption based upon fact, or instead upon good marketing?

In fact, there does not appear to be one single bit of research by outside and independent scholars demonstrating any real benefit provided by Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity order. But there is some which demonstrates real harm: in an article for the British medical journal Lancet, in 1994, a physician who visited and inspected her Calcutta facility observed severe misdiagnoses, administration of improper dosages of medications, and a lack of strong analgesics to control terrible pain. Needles were reused without proper sterilization, systematic diagnostic methods were barred and those who could be helped at a real hospital were never sent there.

Why did these appalling conditions exist? It's not like her organization lacked the funding - it's unlikely that even she was aware of how much money she was able to collect over the years as homeless people died in poverty in Calcutta. She built no hospitals and trained no physicians, and she certainly did not criticize the repressive dictators who gave her honors and even more money, like the Duvaliers in Haiti.
If money isn't a reason why there was a lack of proper medical care, fundamentalist religion is. Hitchens reports that in a filmed interview Mother Teresa tells of a patient suffering unbearable pain from terminal cancer:

Her actions during the trial of Charles Keating, whcih resulted in a ten-year sentence for his fraud in the S&L debacle, are particularly illuminating. Mother Teresa wrote to the trial judge and appealed for leniency because Keating had donated a large sum to her projects. Oddly enough, it never occurred to her that the money really belonged to the people Keating swindled it from, and she never responded to a request from the judge that she return the stolen funds.

Both skeptics and freethinkers should be thankful that Hitchens was willing to go behind the scenes and find out some of the unpleasant truths about Mother Teresa. Lest anyone think that her ideas don't really matter, they should keep in mind the reason she is on the "fast track" for sainthood is because the current pope regards her as having been an exemplary Catholic, for he seems to have shared many of her views. If she is the model of Catholicism for the future, we should all be afraid.