---
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title: "The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice"
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# 4.4/5 from 2,816 reviews Ranked #3 in Catholic Saints Top 100 in Religious Biographies The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

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## Summary

> 📖 Dive into the untold story that everyone’s whispering about!

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- **What is this?** The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
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## Key Features

- • **Unmasking the Myth:** A fearless exposé challenging Mother Teresa’s iconic status.
- • **Critical Bestseller:** Ranked #3 in Catholic Saints category, a must-read for religious biography enthusiasts.
- • **Provocative Insight:** 4.4-star rating from over 2,800 readers craving truth beyond the saintly facade.
- • **Cult Status Deconstructed:** Reveals the uncomfortable realities behind one of the world’s most venerated figures.
- • **Thought-Provoking Analysis:** Explores the complex intersection of faith, charity, and power with razor-sharp wit.

## Overview

Christopher Hitchens’ 'The Missionary Position' is a bold, polemical critique of Mother Teresa’s legacy, dissecting the contradictions between her public saintly image and the controversial realities of her mission. Ranked among the top religious biographies, this book challenges readers to reconsider the narratives of charity, suffering, and sanctity with sharp insight and compelling evidence.

## Description

In this frank and damning exposé of the Teresa cult, Hitchens details the nature and limits of one woman's mission to help the world's poor. He probes the source of the heroic status bestowed upon an Albanian nun whose only declared wish was to serve God. He asks whether Mother Teresa's good works answered any higher purpose than the need of the world's privileged to see someone, somewhere, doing something for the Third World. He unmasks pseudo-miracles, questions Mother Teresa's fitness to adjudicate on matters of sex and reproduction, and reports on a version of saintly ubiquity which affords genial relations with dictators, corrupt tycoons and convicted frauds. Is Mother Teresa merely an essential salve to the conscience of the rich West, or an expert PR machine for the Catholic Church? In its caustic iconoclasm and unsparing wit, The Missionary Position showcases the devastating effect of Hitchens' writing at its polemical best.

Review: A boy's best friend is his Mother... - Elizabeth Bennet, upon learning the true natures of Darcy and Wickham, muses: "one has got all the goodness, the other all the appearance of it." It is a moment of clarity. A moment when one of literature's more famous "bubble reputations" is burst asunder and the young miss Bennet sees the bounder Wickham for what he truly is. And if it is satisfying, in fiction, to have a bubble burst and the stench of true character to come wafting off the page, then when the book in question deals with a real person, it is even better than that. When Diana Spencer was killed the media were so obsessed with her cult of personality (or, perhaps, just her cult if you want to look at it that way) that Agnes Bojaxhiu, when she checked-out a few days later, received the briefest of mentions in the press. I complained to anyone who would listen. That Diana gets fawned over whilst the "blessed Teresa of Calcutta" - an old gal who, if nothing else, knew what a day's work was, gets a miserly couple of inches on page six was thought a disgrace by your humble servant. I did not bother to detail Mother Teresa's good work and use it in my argument that she was more worthy than Diana because the whole planet knows what good work this woman did. She needs no introduction. Her name is enough: Mother Teresa. Oh, yes, she gave her life to caring for the suffering and the poor. That Mother Teresa. Interesting, then, to read the following: "The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives and practices of anyone who fulfils, however vicariously, this mandate." One can almost smell the coming expulsion of puss from the pricked bubble. Hers, it seems, was a cult of personality that would have embarrassed Stalin. Mother Teresa told a man riddled with cancer and racked with pain that he was suffering as Christ suffered on the cross, so Jesus must be kissing him. (An offer of cancer drugs or pain-killers was not forthcoming from the wrinkled one, and the terminal patient was left with nothing to ask for other than for Jesus to stop kissing him.) This was the Mother Teresa approach. Suffering is good; pain is good; poverty is good. Her missions across the globe may have been sat on millions of dollars of donation money, but this was never reason enough to pay for a resident doctor or buy carpets. The way to salvation (which was the same for elderly, cancer-stricken men and women and hungry, orphaned babies) was through suffering in all its forms. Many things are taken for granted, which doesn't mean just that we assume they will always be around or be true, but taken for granted in that we don't bother to question them in the first place. Who questions that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west? That the sun does no such thing doesn't matter - we all know it's "true". We read declarations on our packaged food which tell us the products contain genuine colours, flavours and chemical preservatives; so, if the establishment can swindle us into eating chemicals - and make us think we are doing the exact opposite - why not have a look at the reputation of the most venerated female the planet has known and see if there is any justification for the gushing and fawning? The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in theory and practice, does just that. The diminutive walnut-with-legs was a fanatic; a religious zealot who would happily advance the misery of those unlucky enough to fall into her clutches in the name of organised superstition. It was never the poor she loved, it was poverty she adored. Of this we can be sure, her words confirm it. "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." Is this the mind of a kindly, generous old lady, motivated by, and dedicated to, easing suffering among the wretched of the earth? I think not. The enforced misery for the powerless, the money from the worst dictators - Duvalier and Hoxha, to name but two - the private jets and expensive clinics when she was ill, all show that there were two Mother Teresas: The pathetic humble and hunched nun, and the vicious, nasty money-grabber, playing the world stage and offering the touch of one of her talons to a slobbering politician eager for an image boost. If you are the conservative type, the type whose thinking is restricted by pride and predjudice, who trembles at the idea of challenging a long and firmly held belief lest you may actually learn something, I would suggest you avoid this book.
Review: Illusion v Reality - It is a brave man who takes on the job of examining Mother Teresa's reputation with a critical eye. As Hitchens himself acknowledges in his foreword: "Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shrivelled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute?" I was brought up Catholic and sometime during my teenage years in the 1970's, Mother Teresa visited my convent school. Not unnaturally, given the environment, she was revered. Hitchens' argument in this brief, polemical book, is that there is a distance between the image of Mother Teresa and the realities. I think at times he goes too far, and makes points which cannot be sustained on the basis of the available evidence. For example, he mentions that Mother Teresa had said she could not work for the rich "which might lead the unwary to conclude that no contributions are solicited from them". The rich would be my first port of call for the purposes of fund-raising and I don't see the acceptance of donations from the wealthy as equivalent to 'working' for them. Nonetheless, Mother Teresa did become involved at some level or another with some despicable people; writing to the judge requesting clemency for an American fraudster yet failing to reply to the prosecutor's letter requesting the return of over $1m in donations derived from embezzled funds; appearing alongside Baby Doc Duvalier's wife, and with Mengistu in Ethiopia at a time when he was using starvation as an instrument to suppress dissent. It is hard to know whether these actions were the result of political naiveté or something more sinister and there is insufficient evidence in the book to decide one way or the other. The more serious point relates more to the dichotomy between her aims of caring for the destitute and ill, and the practice of that mission. Hitchens provides accounts of volunteers, nuns and doctors who were deeply concerned by the medical care provided by the 'Homes for the Dying' in various countries. A volunteer medic describes how a 15 year old boy with a relatively simple ailment was not sent for treatment, sadly, it seems not a 'one-off'. Even worse, is the failure to provide adequate palliative medication even though the funds were clearly there to pay for it. Mother Teresa tells a man in agony with end stage cancer that he is "suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you." The unfortunate patient can only respond 'Then please tell him to stop kissing me'. Hitchens quotes one sister who left the order after nine years "for the same reason that she joined it - a love of her fellow humans". The acceptance of extreme suffering in others is contrasted with Mother Teresa's use of expensive medical facilities for her own healthcare needs. Hitchens is particularly exercised by Mother Teresa's strict attitude to abortion and contraception. I share his view that having seen abandoned children and grinding poverty in the daily work of her order, the hardline refusal to even contemplate that contraception might improve the position of the poorest is hard to reconcile. That said, I am not sure what he expected from a Catholic nun. Although I don't agree with everything Hitchens has to say, it wouldn't be fair to characterise the book as a 'hatchet job'. He blames the media for creating the idea of the 'living saint'. In particular, he provides an analysis of Malcolm Muggeridge's involvement in developing Mother Teresa's saintly reputation with his film 'Something Beautiful for God' in 1969. Muggeridge comes across as a fool, seeking a miracle ('divine light' courtesy of a new type of film from Kodak!), and unable to see through the contradictions, for example, emphasising her work with the destitute yet failing to question properly why she thought it appropriate to spend money he gave her on a chalice for a new noviciate. Hitchens notes that Mother Teresa never asserted that donations were directed in their entirety to alleviating poverty but he does question what donors thought. That is a fair point - I know my old school believed it was raising funds to be used for the benefit of the poor. We were told that Mother Teresa and her sisters lived lives of extreme poverty so as not to divert resources away from looking after the most unfortunate. I am sure we were not alone. And I am left wondering where all the money went and whether it really did any good.

## Features

- New Store Stock

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | 49,146 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) 3 in Catholic Saints 46 in Religious Biographies 96 in Religious History of Christianity |
| Customer Reviews | 4.4 out of 5 stars 2,816 Reviews |

## Images

![The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71HUjxiGf1L.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A boy's best friend is his Mother...
*by J***L on 25 September 2010*

Elizabeth Bennet, upon learning the true natures of Darcy and Wickham, muses: "one has got all the goodness, the other all the appearance of it." It is a moment of clarity. A moment when one of literature's more famous "bubble reputations" is burst asunder and the young miss Bennet sees the bounder Wickham for what he truly is. And if it is satisfying, in fiction, to have a bubble burst and the stench of true character to come wafting off the page, then when the book in question deals with a real person, it is even better than that. When Diana Spencer was killed the media were so obsessed with her cult of personality (or, perhaps, just her cult if you want to look at it that way) that Agnes Bojaxhiu, when she checked-out a few days later, received the briefest of mentions in the press. I complained to anyone who would listen. That Diana gets fawned over whilst the "blessed Teresa of Calcutta" - an old gal who, if nothing else, knew what a day's work was, gets a miserly couple of inches on page six was thought a disgrace by your humble servant. I did not bother to detail Mother Teresa's good work and use it in my argument that she was more worthy than Diana because the whole planet knows what good work this woman did. She needs no introduction. Her name is enough: Mother Teresa. Oh, yes, she gave her life to caring for the suffering and the poor. That Mother Teresa. Interesting, then, to read the following: "The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives and practices of anyone who fulfils, however vicariously, this mandate." One can almost smell the coming expulsion of puss from the pricked bubble. Hers, it seems, was a cult of personality that would have embarrassed Stalin. Mother Teresa told a man riddled with cancer and racked with pain that he was suffering as Christ suffered on the cross, so Jesus must be kissing him. (An offer of cancer drugs or pain-killers was not forthcoming from the wrinkled one, and the terminal patient was left with nothing to ask for other than for Jesus to stop kissing him.) This was the Mother Teresa approach. Suffering is good; pain is good; poverty is good. Her missions across the globe may have been sat on millions of dollars of donation money, but this was never reason enough to pay for a resident doctor or buy carpets. The way to salvation (which was the same for elderly, cancer-stricken men and women and hungry, orphaned babies) was through suffering in all its forms. Many things are taken for granted, which doesn't mean just that we assume they will always be around or be true, but taken for granted in that we don't bother to question them in the first place. Who questions that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west? That the sun does no such thing doesn't matter - we all know it's "true". We read declarations on our packaged food which tell us the products contain genuine colours, flavours and chemical preservatives; so, if the establishment can swindle us into eating chemicals - and make us think we are doing the exact opposite - why not have a look at the reputation of the most venerated female the planet has known and see if there is any justification for the gushing and fawning? The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in theory and practice, does just that. The diminutive walnut-with-legs was a fanatic; a religious zealot who would happily advance the misery of those unlucky enough to fall into her clutches in the name of organised superstition. It was never the poor she loved, it was poverty she adored. Of this we can be sure, her words confirm it. "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." Is this the mind of a kindly, generous old lady, motivated by, and dedicated to, easing suffering among the wretched of the earth? I think not. The enforced misery for the powerless, the money from the worst dictators - Duvalier and Hoxha, to name but two - the private jets and expensive clinics when she was ill, all show that there were two Mother Teresas: The pathetic humble and hunched nun, and the vicious, nasty money-grabber, playing the world stage and offering the touch of one of her talons to a slobbering politician eager for an image boost. If you are the conservative type, the type whose thinking is restricted by pride and predjudice, who trembles at the idea of challenging a long and firmly held belief lest you may actually learn something, I would suggest you avoid this book.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Illusion v Reality
*by M***D on 24 July 2011*

It is a brave man who takes on the job of examining Mother Teresa's reputation with a critical eye. As Hitchens himself acknowledges in his foreword: "Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shrivelled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute?" I was brought up Catholic and sometime during my teenage years in the 1970's, Mother Teresa visited my convent school. Not unnaturally, given the environment, she was revered. Hitchens' argument in this brief, polemical book, is that there is a distance between the image of Mother Teresa and the realities. I think at times he goes too far, and makes points which cannot be sustained on the basis of the available evidence. For example, he mentions that Mother Teresa had said she could not work for the rich "which might lead the unwary to conclude that no contributions are solicited from them". The rich would be my first port of call for the purposes of fund-raising and I don't see the acceptance of donations from the wealthy as equivalent to 'working' for them. Nonetheless, Mother Teresa did become involved at some level or another with some despicable people; writing to the judge requesting clemency for an American fraudster yet failing to reply to the prosecutor's letter requesting the return of over $1m in donations derived from embezzled funds; appearing alongside Baby Doc Duvalier's wife, and with Mengistu in Ethiopia at a time when he was using starvation as an instrument to suppress dissent. It is hard to know whether these actions were the result of political naiveté or something more sinister and there is insufficient evidence in the book to decide one way or the other. The more serious point relates more to the dichotomy between her aims of caring for the destitute and ill, and the practice of that mission. Hitchens provides accounts of volunteers, nuns and doctors who were deeply concerned by the medical care provided by the 'Homes for the Dying' in various countries. A volunteer medic describes how a 15 year old boy with a relatively simple ailment was not sent for treatment, sadly, it seems not a 'one-off'. Even worse, is the failure to provide adequate palliative medication even though the funds were clearly there to pay for it. Mother Teresa tells a man in agony with end stage cancer that he is "suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you." The unfortunate patient can only respond 'Then please tell him to stop kissing me'. Hitchens quotes one sister who left the order after nine years "for the same reason that she joined it - a love of her fellow humans". The acceptance of extreme suffering in others is contrasted with Mother Teresa's use of expensive medical facilities for her own healthcare needs. Hitchens is particularly exercised by Mother Teresa's strict attitude to abortion and contraception. I share his view that having seen abandoned children and grinding poverty in the daily work of her order, the hardline refusal to even contemplate that contraception might improve the position of the poorest is hard to reconcile. That said, I am not sure what he expected from a Catholic nun. Although I don't agree with everything Hitchens has to say, it wouldn't be fair to characterise the book as a 'hatchet job'. He blames the media for creating the idea of the 'living saint'. In particular, he provides an analysis of Malcolm Muggeridge's involvement in developing Mother Teresa's saintly reputation with his film 'Something Beautiful for God' in 1969. Muggeridge comes across as a fool, seeking a miracle ('divine light' courtesy of a new type of film from Kodak!), and unable to see through the contradictions, for example, emphasising her work with the destitute yet failing to question properly why she thought it appropriate to spend money he gave her on a chalice for a new noviciate. Hitchens notes that Mother Teresa never asserted that donations were directed in their entirety to alleviating poverty but he does question what donors thought. That is a fair point - I know my old school believed it was raising funds to be used for the benefit of the poor. We were told that Mother Teresa and her sisters lived lives of extreme poverty so as not to divert resources away from looking after the most unfortunate. I am sure we were not alone. And I am left wondering where all the money went and whether it really did any good.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A fantastic expose.
*by B***E on 24 October 2016*

The first time I became aware of the existence of Mother Theresa was as a child when I was watching a children’s magazine television programme called ‘Blue Peter’. They were reporting on her work and I remember my own mother telling me what an amazing person she was, how she gave up all her time to look after orphans in one of the poorest countries and cities in the world and that she was the ‘kindest’ woman who had ever lived. As a child, of course, I believed every word and I think that even today, years after her death, and a few months after she was made a saint by Pope Francis, I would predict that most people would still feel the same. Unless they had read this fascinating book, which is a result of investigations made by Hitchens into the works and words of Mother Theresa rather than her works and words by reputation. Written in the mid-nineties just a couple of years before her death, Christopher Hitchens provides compelling evidence that shows that this woman was no saint, either by definition or by description. This notion of sainthood come from a television documentary made several years earlier by Malcolm Muggeridge whose sycophantic and lavish toadying did much to define the way in which most people in the world would come to see her. He described a miracle he witnessed (performing a miracle is a key feature of being made a saint) where his cameraman was filming in a very dark room of the orphanage and they believed that it would be wasted film. When the film came to be processed, the picture was bathed in ‘soft light’. Another reason why so many in the world worships this woman is because Calcutta was generally thought to be ‘hell on earth’, a place of darkness, illness, death and misery and this was a perception espoused by Muggeridge. Yet as Hitchens shows, this was definitely not the case. As this slim volume progresses, Hitchens shows just how unsaintly this woman was. This was a woman who was happy to be photographed with some unscrupulous characters. Obviously, the Catholic doctrine was central to her life and yet she was happy to accept money from and be photographed with dictators, fraudsters and blasphemers. An example was John Roger, leader of a cult named ‘The Movement of Spiritual Awareness’ who often described himself of being ‘higher than Jesus Christ’. She was also very happy to accept a donation of over a million dollars from Charles Keating, who was later indicted on some of the most serious fraud charges in American history. During his trial, she wrote to the court pleading for clemency and when the assistant district attorney wrote back listing Keating’s crimes and suggesting that the Christian thing to do would be to return the donated money back to its rightful owners, he received no reply. The money was also never returned. Hitchens goes on to cast doubt even on the opinions that there is still, despite all this, something morally impressive about someone who devotes their life to charity. He argues that Mother Theresa’s work was never done for its own sake but rather to 'propagandize one highly subjective view of human nature and need so that she might one day be counted as the beatific founder of a new order and discipline within the Church itself'. He argues that her work was never designed to relieve suffering but instead was aimed at the 'promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection'. In other words, Catholicism. Yet, whilst depriving hospital care to her most sick residents, she herself received care in some of the best hospitals in the world when she suffered from heart problems. So, while, this book is now over twenty years old, the recent entry into Sainthood of Mother Theresa makes it extremely relevant and one that people should read if they haven’t already. It will leave you asking questions for sure but for me one is left believing the words of Hitchens when he asserts that she was, 'a religious fundamentalist, a political operative, a primitive sermonizer and an accomplice of worldly, secular powers. Her mission has always been of this kind. The irony is that she has never been able to induce anyone to believe her. It is past that time that she was duly honoured and taken at her word.'

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