Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

Christopher Hitchens, in what is really a distilled version of his book, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (which I've read and can recommend), writes: “ it's really none of my business who is beatified or canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. I am not a Catholic. Its rituals and observances are less than nothing to me. I object only when the mass media report a propaganda event as if it were to be taken at its own face value. Reading the papers or glancing at the television, one could have got the impression that His Holiness the Pope was the accepted moral tutor for the entire world, instead of the leader of a traditionalist sect that calls its ostensibly celibate and virginal officials by parental names like "Father" and "Mother" and opposes almost every kind of sexual expression while making allowances and excuses for adult-infant penetration.”

Christopher Hitchens on Mother Teresa, a woman he calls “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud”:

The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. 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. George Orwell's admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.

Hitchens has written a book on the subject, which I've read and can recommend, so the article is almost a complete rehash of it. I don't sanction Hitchens' view, but, importantly, I don't condemn it either. She's gotten a free pass, even more so after she died. Funny how people get free passes when they die.

Finished reading The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice by Christopher Hitchens.