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My Meeting with Blessed Teresa of Calcutta
By Dwight Longenecker
About twenty years ago, while I was still an Anglican curate, a friend invited me to take a holiday in India with him. He had been brought up in Calcutta and knew his way around, so it seemed an easy way to visit the subcontinent. On the flight out he told me that he had taken a collection for the work of Mother Teresa and would I mind visiting her convent? I was game, so on our visit to Calcutta we took a day off to visit the work of the Missionaries of Charity.
As we approached the front door of the mother house I noticed the little sign by the door said, ‘Mother is in’. When the door was opened, the nun at reception asked if we wanted to meet ‘mother.’ After waiting about fifteen minutes Mother Teresa came out from a meeting and greeted us warmly. She wasn’t bothered that we were Anglican priests. She wasn’t bothered that we were on holiday, and had dropped in as spiritual tourists. Instead she came straight to the point.
Looking me in the eye she said, ‘Have you come to give your life in service to God’s holy poor?’ I stammered something about having other commitments, but was impressed with her ability to talk straight with genuine affection. This is the mark of the true evangelist—first of all they practice what they preach. Secondly, because they practice what they preach they preach with clarity and charity. Like the Holy Father, whose life we also celebrate this week, Mother Teresa was able to speak the truth courageously because she lived the truth courageously.
After meeting Mother Teresa for a few moments we spent the rest of the day visiting her various outposts in Calcutta. We toured the motherhouse, visited the famous home for the dying and also stopped by an orphanage, a leper colony and an old people’s home. It is no exaggeration to say that the day’s visit in Calcutta changed my life. It was not a dramatic change, but a quiet awareness that a different dimension of the Christian life was possible. A meeting with Mother Teresa brought about a similar awareness that changed the life of Malcolm Muggeridge and countless others. I am convinced that day was one of the stepping stones that eventually brought me, some ten years later, into full communion with the Catholic Church.
Because of this, it was all the more disappointing to hear the BBC Today programme on the Saturday before the beatification give such weight to the journalist Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens is famous for his intemperate and ridiculous attacks on Mother Teresa. He wrote a book with the salacious title, Missionary Position which blames Mother Teresa for being a fraud, and the book was made into the notorious television documentary called Hell’s Angel. That the BBC gave Hitchens airtime the day before the beatification seems like a calculated insult. One does not expect the BBC to report the beatification with uncritical praise of a Catholic saint as EWTN might do. However, any criticism should be balanced, and the opposing point of view should be heard. The coverage of the beatification on the Sunday programme the next day was fair, but it was pre-empted by Saturday morning’s shallow report in which Christopher Hitchens was given the last word.
Let us put this into perspective. Mother Teresa is venerated by billions of Catholics worldwide. Catholics are now the largest and most active Christian Church in Britain. Mother Teresa is looked up to as a model and incarnation of Catholicism by virtually all Catholics in this country. On the day before a universal celebration of her life and ministry the BBC give prominent airtime to an avowed atheist whose attack on Mother Teresa is almost ludicrously biased and bizarre.
To see what this is really like let’s suppose that the English were about to celebrate the dedication of a new monument to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Everyone considers her to be a grand old lady who epitomises the English way of life. She is venerated by one and all as ‘the grandmother of England.’ On the day there will be celebrations all over the country as a monument to her is unveiled. The whole English nation are set to rejoice—especially those who were inspired by the courage of the Queen during the dark days of the second world war.
The day before, the BBC dig up a disgruntled Republican who has it in for the royal family. Let’s imagine that this fellow has written a book called Below the Belt that reveals the Queen Mother to be a gin swilling, self indulgent, intellectually feeble aristocrat with a gambling problem. This mythical republican points out that she was paid millions over the years from the public purse for doing no more than opening libraries and that she still managed to die with debts running into the millions. He says she was a wicked, selfish woman who dominated her family and bore a grudge against her sister in law for decades. Instead of being a wonderful English role model she is, in fact, the archetypal wicked queen.
Would it be considered good manners for the BBC to give such a critic two or three minutes of airtime the day before the celebration? Might the English license paying populace be justified in being offended? Would such an item be considered sane, sensible and balanced journalism, or might one suspect that there were secret republicans at the BBC who wanted to do everything possible to undermine the royal family and spoil the next days’ celebration?
Catholics are grateful for the amount of BBC coverage over the last weekend. The reports on the beatification of Mother Teresa and the Pope’s jubilee were, on the whole, balanced and celebratory. Pulling Christopher Hitchens out of mothballs however, was uncalled for. The BBC politburo protests that there is no anti-Catholic bias. This sounds too much like the person who says, ‘I’m not a racist. I like black folks. They’re such good dancers.’ In other words, the worst kind of bigot is the bigot who is not aware that he is a bigot. In a similar way perhaps the BBC intelligentsia really do not see their anti-Catholic bias. If so, they need to keep examining themselves. They should ask who decided to give Christopher Hitchens such prominent airtime on the Today programme. Was that decision an example of objective and incisive journalism or was it a malicious act of mischief designed to undermine their coverage of Sunday’s celebration?
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