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interview by Danny Postel
09.15.98
What exactly inspired you to write a book about Mother Teresa?
I went to Calcutta—for a different reason—a few years ago. There was a general election in India, and I was actually making a documentary about a fraudulent cult movement there. I didn't go specifically to Calcutta, in other words, to see Mother Teresa. But when I was there I thought: here is probably not only the greatest name recognition in the second part of the 20th century for an ordinary human being—someone who isn't in power, so to speak— but also the most fragrant name recognition.
Apparently the only name about whom no one had anything but good to say. Now I will have to admit—no I won't have to admit, I'm proud to admit— that this was enough to make me skeptical to start off with. Call me old-fashioned if you will; say I have a nasty mind if you like. I won't say I'm a practicing Catholic or even a sympathizer with the Holy Mother Church, because I'm not. And I have my reservations in any case about the whole idea of the Christian missionary project in India and its historic links to British imperialism and the rest of it.
Okay. I went with an open mind, with the constraints I've just identified; it was as open as I could get it. And there she was. And you felt when you saw that grizzled face: I've known this face all my life. She gave me a tour; we went around a small orphanage—drop-in-the-bucket size, but quite nice.
So it began as an amicable encounter?
Indeed. I was even sort of thinking, hmmm. . . maybe I should fumble for some money. And with a gesture of the arm that took in the whole scene of the orphanage, she said: you see this is how we fight abortion and contraception in Calcutta. And I thought: Oh I see—so you actually say that do you? Because it had crossed my mind that part of her work was to bear witness for the Catholic creed regarding the population question, to propagandize for the Church’s line. But I hadn’t realized it was so unmediated. I mean, that she would want to draw my attention to the fact that this was the point.
I don’t know Calcutta terrifically well, but I know it quite well. And I would say that low on the list of the things that it needs is a Christian campaign against population control. And I speak as someone who’s personally very squeamish on the abortion question. People who campaign vigorously against contraception, I think, are in a very weak position to lay down the moral law on abortion.
So I thought, okay, that’s interesting. And then I noticed something else which I guess I’d noticed already without realizing it. Calcutta has the reputation as being a complete hell hole thanks to Mother Teresa. You get the impression from her that it's a place where people are just about able to brush the flies from their children’s eyes, the begging bowl is fully out, that people are on their knees and crawling.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Calcutta is one of the most vibrant and interesting cities in the world. It’s full of film schools, universities, bookstores and cafés. It has a tremendously vibrant political life. It’s the place that produced the films of Satyajit Ray. It’s a wonderful city. It's architecturally beautiful. And the people do not beg. They’re not abject. They’re very poor; some sleep on the street, but they’re usually working and hustling at something. They don’t grovel, as in some parts of India I must say they do.
It’s hugely overpopulated partly because of the refugees, mainly from the successive wars of religion—stupid wars about God that have been fought in the neighborhood. That’s not its fault. It’s basically a secular town. So I thought: What a pity that Mother Teresa should have given this great city such a bad name and made us feel condescending toward it.
So partly for the honor of Calcutta, and partly out of my feeling that her actions are being judged by her reputation rather than her reputation by her actions (a common postmodern problem in the image business of course, but amazing in this case), I sort of opened a file on her, kept a brief. And then I noticed her turning up supporting the Duvalier family in Haiti, for example, and saying how wonderful they were and how great they were for the poor and how the poor loved them.
What a coincidence. . .
Yes. And then I noticed her taking money from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan and saying what a great friend of the poor this great fraud and thief was. Then I noticed her get the Nobel Prize for Peace though she had never done anything for peace. And say in her acceptance speech in Stockholm that the greatest threat to world peace is abortion.
Then I noticed another thing. That no matter what she said or did at this time nobody would point it out because she had some kind of hammer lock on my profession. It had been agreed she was a saint and there was to be no argument about it. So I thought, okay, that does it, and I wrote a column for The Nation. That was all I did at first. And then I got approached from some comrades in Britain to make a documentary based on the column, and we found that an amazing number of her crimes against humanity were actually on film.
There is film of her going to Albania and laying a wreath at the tomb of the dictator Enver Hoxha, vile bastard who oppressed Albania for years. She was Albanian by nationality, incidentally. Born in Macedonia. There was film of her groveling to the Duvaliers and flattering and fawning on Michele Duvalier in particular. There was film of her jetting around on Charles Keating’s plane which he used to lend her as well as giving her a lot of money that belonged to other people.
How how did she explain things like this?
She was never asked to.
