Jesus was spat upon — but not by journalists, as there were none in his time. It is now Mother Teresa’s privilege to experience this particular updating of her Master’s predicament.
Mr. Hitchens replied at great length to this letter. His rejoinder, which was published in the New York Review of Books of 19 December, made essentially the following points:
1. Mother Teresa contradicted herself, on the one hand, by declaring (to the Ladies Home Journal) that her friend Princess Diana would be “better off when free of her marriage,” while on the other hand she advised the Irish to vote against the right to remarry after divorce.
2. He re-emphasised once more the fact that Mother Teresa had visited the Duvaliers in Haiti and accepted money from the notorious financial swindler Charles Keating, who had been convicted of defrauding hundreds of “small and humble savers.”
3. He repeated his accusation that Mother Teresa attempts to proselytise the dying by surreptitiously baptising them. (How can you proselytise the comatose and the dying? He does not explain.)
4. He found no traces in the Gospels of Hitchenses being shocked by Jesus’ unconventional behaviour.
5. He asks in what way the title of his book can be read as an obscenity.
These various points will be dealt with in a moment: at the time, I merely wrote a brief reply, which was published by the New York Review of Books in its issue of 9 January 1997:
If Mr. Hitchens were to write an essay on His Holiness the Dalai Lama, being a competent journalist, he would no doubt first acquaint himself with Buddhism in general and with Tibetan Buddhism in particular. On the subject of Mother Teresa, however, he does not seem to have felt the need to acquire much information on her spiritual motivations — his book contains remarkable howlers on elementary aspects of Christianity (and even now, in the latest ammunition he drew from the Ladies Home Journal, he displayed a complete ignorance of the position of the Catholic Church on the issues of marriage, divorce and remarriage).
In this respect, his strong and vehement distaste for Mother Teresa reminds me of the indignation of the patron in a restaurant who, having been served caviar on toast, complained that the jam had a funny taste of fish. The point is essential, but it deserves a development which would require more space and more time than can be afforded me here and now. (However, I am working on a review of his book, which I shall gladly forward to him once it comes out in print.)
Finally, Mr. Hitchens asked me to explain what made me say that The Missionary Position is an obscene title. His question, without doubt, bears the same imprint of sincerity and good faith that characterised his entire book. Therefore, I owe him an equally sincere and straightforward answer: my knowledge of colloquial English being rather poor, I had to check the meaning of this enigmatic title in The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 1993, two volumes — the only definition of the expression can be found in Vol. I, p. 1, 794). But Mr. Hitchens, having no need for such a tool in the exercise of his trade, probably does not possess a copy of it. It will therefore be a relief for his readers to learn that his unfortunate choice of a title was totally innocent: when he chose these words, how could he possibly have guessed what they actually meant?
A few days after the publication of this rejoinder, I received a personal letter from Mr. Hitchens. In this private communication — which was naturally most amiable and good-humoured — Mr. Hitchens informed me of his address, so as to enable me to send him the book review, which I had rather recklessly committed myself to write (I say “recklessly,” considering my innate and invincible indolence). Besides, he was keen to learn which exactly were the howlers I had hinted at in my rejoinder. He also informed me that he possessed a copy of The Oxford English Dictionary: he furthermore suggested that, should I peruse it, I would learn that there is a world of difference between an obscenity (which I had so flippantly accused him of) and the normal use of witty double entendre, which, he suggested, normally characterises his subtle and tactful writing.
Finally, for my entertainment, he attached to his letter a rather funny newspaper clipping (from the Washington Times) regarding a miraculous event that had recently taken place in the Bongo Coffee Shop in Nashville, Tennessee: a customer had found a likeness of Mother Teresa appearing in his breakfast cinnamon bun, which the manager of the shop subsequently enshrined in purple velvet, to be displayed to the pious veneration of the large crowds that soon came flocking to the lucky café. To this intriguing piece of news, Mr. Hitchens appended the comment: “Whatever may be the problems of unbelief, one would not exchange them for the problems of faith.”
Courtesy naturally commanded a prompt acknowledgement of his letter. I immediately sent him the following reply:
Dear Mr. Hitchens,
Thank you for your letter. Now that I have your address, I shall certainly be able to send you the review, as promised — but it may still take a little while: I am a slow writer.
Regarding your insistence that the title of your book — when applied to an 86-year-old nun who serves the poor and made a vow of chastity nearly 70 years ago — cannot be read as an obscenity: if a schoolboy draws on the blackboard a cartoon of his teacher copulating with a goat, one may feel irritated by his immature prank, but at the same time, one must grudgingly acknowledge his spirited irreverence. If, however, this same schoolboy eventually insists tearfully that he did not do anything, that he did not mean to be cheeky, that he merely meant to draw an honest and plain zoology assignment, he simply cancels the only merit one could ever have credited him with. Forgive my frankness: in a way, your original offensiveness was more respectable than your present glosses and disclaimers.
Thank you for the newspaper clipping you sent me. I found it very amusing and will add it to my rich collection. But I would question the soundness of the distinction you make between “the problems of unbelief” and “the problems of faith.” I am afraid you did not draw the demarcation line in the right spot. People who share Mother Teresa’s faith are not likely to discover her face in cinnamon buns (or if they do, they would have a good laugh). When a man ceases to believe in God (as Chesterton said), the problem is not that he starts to believe in nothing, but that he will believe in anything. He may not believe that Christ is alive, but then he will believe that Elvis Presley is.
At one point in his little tract (page 66), Mr. Hitchens observes that Mother Teresa “must necessarily admit to being disqualified by inexperience” when she chooses “to speak on matters such as sexuality and reproduction.” Nowadays a similar criticism is also often made of the Pope — once I even came across an intriguing variation on that theme: according to one particularly inspired critic, the pontiff’s alleged incompetence in these matters was to be ascribed to his being merely “an old Polish bachelor.” I have still not grasped in what way the fact of hailing from Poland should constitute a specific disability for someone who has to adjudicate on the issues of sexual morality.