Current Affairs Essay

But she herself lived lavishly well, enjoying luxurious accommodations in her travels abroad. It seems to have gone unnoticed that as a world celebrity she spent most of her time away from Calcutta, with protracted stays at opulent residences in Europe and the United States, jetting from Rome to London to New York in private planes.[9]

Mother Teresa is a paramount example of the kind of acceptably conservative icon propagated by an elite-dominated culture, a "saint" who uttered not a critical word against social injustice, and maintained cozy relations with the rich, corrupt, and powerful.

She claimed to be above politics when in fact she was pronouncedly hostile toward any kind of progressive reform. Teresa was a friend of Ronald Reagan, and an admiring guest of the Haitian dictator "Baby Doc" Duvalier. She also had the support and admiration of a number of Central and South American dictators.

Teresa was Pope John Paul II's kind of saint. After her death in 1997, he waived the five-year waiting period usually observed before beginning the beatification process that leads to sainthood. In 2003, in record time Mother Teresa was beatified, the final step before canonization.

But in 2007 her canonization confronted a bump in the road, it having been disclosed that along with her various other contradictions Teresa was not a citadel of spiritual joy and unswerving faith. Her diaries, investigated by Catholic authorities in Calcutta, revealed that she had been racked with doubts: "I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God and that he does not really exist." People think "my faith, my hope and my love are overflowing and that my intimacy with God and union with his will fill my heart. If only they knew," she wrote, "Heaven means nothing."

Through many tormented sleepless nights she shed thoughts like this: "I am told God loves me-and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul." Il Messeggero, Rome's popular daily newspaper, commented: "The real Mother Teresa was one who for one year had visions and who for the next 50 had doubts---up until her death."[10]

Another example of fast-track sainthood, pushed by Pope John Paul II, occurred in 1992 when he swiftly beatified the reactionary Msgr. José María Escrivá de Balaguer, supporter of fascist regimes in Spain and elsewhere, and founder of Opus Dei, a powerful secretive ultra-conservative movement "feared by many as a sinister sect within the Catholic Church."[11] Escrivá's beatification came only seventeen years after his death, a record run until Mother Teresa came along.

In accordance with his own political agenda, John Paul used a church institution, sainthood, to bestow special sanctity upon ultra-conservatives such as Escrivá and Teresa---and implicitly on all that they represented. Another of the ultra-conservatives whom John Paul put up for sainthood, bizarrely enough, was the last of the Hapsburg rulers of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Emperor Karl, who reigned during World War I. Still another of the reactionaries whom John Paul set up for sainthood was Pius IX, who reigned as pontiff from 1846 to 1878, and who referred to Jews as "dogs."

John Paul also beatified Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, the leading Croatian cleric who welcomed the Nazi and fascist Ustashi takeover of Croatia during World War II. Stepinac sat in the Ustashi parliament, appeared at numerous public events with top ranking Nazis and Ustashi, and openly supported the Croatian fascist regime that exterminated hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma ("gypsies").[12]

In John Paul's celestial pantheon, reactionaries had a better chance at canonization than reformers. Consider his treatment of Archbishop Oscar Romero who spoke against the injustices and oppressions suffered by the impoverished populace of El Salvador and for this was assassinated by a right-wing death squad. John Paul never denounced the killing or its perpetrators, calling it only "tragic." In fact, just weeks before Romero was murdered, high-ranking officials of the Arena party, the legal arm of the death squads, sent a well-received delegation to the Vatican to complain of Romero's public statements on behalf of the poor.[13]

Romero was thought by many poor Salvadorans to be something of a saint, but John Paul attempted to ban any discussion of his beatification for fifty years. Popular pressure from El Salvador caused the Vatican to cut the delay to twenty-five years.[14] In either case, Romero was consigned to the slow track.

John Paul's successor, Benedict XVI, waved the five-year waiting period in order to put John Paul II himself instantly on a super-fast track to canonization, running neck and neck with Teresa. As of 2005 there already were reports of possible miracles attributed to the recently departed Polish pontiff.

One such account was offered by Cardinal Francesco Marchisano. When lunching with John Paul, the cardinal indicated that because of an ailment he could not use his voice. The pope "caressed my throat, like a brother, like the father that he was. After that I did seven months of therapy, and I was able to speak again." Marchisano thinks that the pontiff might have had a hand in his cure: "It could be," he said.[15] Un miracolo! Viva il papa!

1. Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Verso, 1995), 64-71.
2. Aroup Chatterjee, Mother Teresa, The Final Verdict (Meteor Books, 2003), 196-197.
3. Chatterjee, Mother Teresa, 188-189.
4. Mother Teresa, Nobel Lecture, 11 December 1979:
5. Chatterjee, Mother Teresa, 32, 179-180.
6. Chatterjee, Mother Teresa, 19-23, 106-107, 157, and passim
7. Chatterjee, Mother Teresa, 332-333.
8. Hitchens, The Missionary Position, 11 and 95.
9. Chatterjee, Mother Teresa, 2-14.
10. Bruce Johnston, "Mother Teresa's diary reveals her crisis of faith," and Curtis Bill Pepper, "Opus Dei, Advocatus Papae," Nation 3-10 August 1992.
11. Edmond Paris, Genocide in Satellite Croatia, 1941-1945 (American Institute for Balkan Affairs, 1961), 201-205 and passim; also How the Catholic Church United with Local Nazis to Run Croatia during World War II: The Case of Archbishop Stepinac (Embassy of the Federal Peoples Republic of Yugoslavia, Washington, DC, 1947); posted 2 August 2004,
12. Barry Healy, "Pope John Paul II, A Reactionary in Shepherd's Clothing," Green Left Weekly, 6 April 2005.
13. Healy, "Pope John Paul II, A Reactionary in Shepherd's Clothing."
14. New York Times, 14 May 2005.

Michael Parenti's recent publications include: Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (City Lights, 2007); Democracy for the Few, 8th ed. (Wadsworth, 2007); The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories, 2006). For further information visit his website: www.MichaelParenti.org.