In London in 1988, Mother Teresa paid a visit ostensibly to discuss the growing problem of the city’s homeless, who had forced the phrase ‘Cardboard City’ into the language by dwelling in cardboard structures in parks and on the Embankment. Having spoken briefly on this topic, Mother Teresa was ushered into 10 Downing Street to meet in private with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher was famously unsentimental about the denizens of ‘Cardboard City’ and indeed about most other forms of human failure and defeat, and it was not in any case the plight of the homeless that Mother Teresa wanted to discuss. The two women went into conclave on the matter of abortion, which was then the subject of a private member’s bill in the House of Commons, sponsored by the liberal MP David Alton. Mr Alton, who had sought to limit the availability of abortion, was in no doubt of the value of Mother Teresa’s intervention. He told reporters that her meeting with Margaret Thatcher was an immense boost to his campaign, and he took credit for arranging the womanly summit. Whatever else may be said of this meeting, which occurred on the eve of a decisive parliamentary vote and was attended by a circus of cameras and scribes, the term ‘non-political’ does not apply to it very easily.
And now a photograph, or pair of photographs. Mother Teresa is seated in earnest conversation with Ronald Reagan and his chief of staff, Donald Regan. Both men wear expressions of the most determined sincerity. The photo opportunity occurs inside the White House in May 1985. Mother Teresa has been chosen to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her companions for the day are Frank Sinatra, James Stewart and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, among other recipients. At the moment when the shutter falls on this shot, Ronald Reagan has every reason to be careful of Catholic susceptibility. His policy in Central America, which has resulted in his Cabinet officers defending the murders of four American nuns and the Archbishop of San Salvador, is deeply unpopular with the voters. One of his more daring lies — the claim that he had received a personal message from the Pope supporting his policy in the isthmus — has had to be refracted after causing considerable embarrassment. In the basement of the very building where Mother Teresa sits, a Marine Colonel named Oliver North (who forespoke the Catholic Church for evangelical Pentecostalism after being vouchsafed a personal vision) is toiling away on an enterprise which will nearly succeed in destroying the Presidency that spawned it.
Stepping on to the portico of the White House, flanked by Ronald and Nancy, Mother Teresa knows just what to say:
I am most unworthy of this generous gift of our President, Mr Reagan, and his wife and you people of the United States. But I accept it for the greater glory of God and in the name of the millions of poor people that this gift, in spirit and in love, will penetrate the hearts of the people.
This kind of modesty — speaking for God and for the poor — is now so standard on her part that nobody even notices it. Then:
I’ve never realized that you loved the people so tenderly. I had the experience, I was last time here, a sister from Ethiopia found me and said ‘Our people are dying. Our children are dying. Mother, do something. And the only person that came in my mind while she was talking, it was the President. And immediately I wrote to him, and I said, ‘I don’t know, but this is what happened to me.’ And next day it was that immediately he arranged to bring food to our people…. Together, we are doing something beautiful for God.
Here was greater praise than Reagan could possibly have asked or hoped for. Not only was he told that he ‘loved the people so tenderly’ but he was congratulated for his policy in Ethiopia. That policy, as it happened, was to support the claim of the Ethiopian ruling junta — the Dergue — to the supposed ‘territorial integrity’ of the Ethiopian empire, which included (then) the insurgent people of Eritrea. General Mengistu Haile Mairam had deliberately used the weapon of starvation not just against Eritrea but also against domestic and regional dissent in other regions of the country. This had not prevented Mother Teresa from dancing attendance upon him and thereby shocking the human-rights community, which had sought to isolate his regime. That very isolation, however, had provided opportunities for ‘missionary work’ to those few prepared to compromise. To invest such temporal and temporizing politics with the faint odour of sanctity, let alone with Mother Teresa’s now-familiar suggestion of the operations of divine providence (‘And next day it was…’) is political in the extreme, but the White House press corps, deliberately ignorant of such considerations, duly gave the visit and the presentation its standard uncritical treatment.
During this same period, Mother Teresa visited Nicaragua and contrived to admonish the Sandinista revolutionary party. The Cardinal Archbishop of Managua, Miguel Obando y Bravo, was at that time the official patron and confessor of the contras, and was paid an admitted and regular stipend by the Central Intelligence Agency. Also at that time, the contras conceived it as their task to make a special target of clinics, schools, dairies and other ‘soft target’ elements of the Nicaraguan system. And the contras believed — almost predictably — that they had on their side a miraculous Virgin who had appeared in the remote northern regions of the country. What they assuredly did have on their side was the most powerful state on earth, which openly announced that it would bring Nicaragua to heel by increasing the poverty and destitution of its wavering citizens. A consistent case might be made for following such a policy and for employing the Church in support of it, but however reasonable that case might be it could by no stretch of the imagination be described as a non-political one, or one animated by a love of the poor.
More lives were taken on purpose in the war on Nicaraguan ‘subversion’ than have been saved by all the missionaries in Calcutta even by accident. Yet this brute utilitarian calculus is never employed against Mother Teresa, even by the sort of sophists who would deploy its moral and physical equivalent in her favour. So: silence on the death squads and on the Duvaliers and noisy complaint against the Sandinistas, and the whole act baptized as an apolitical intervention by someone whose kingdom is not of this world.
Visiting Guatemala during the same period, at a time when the killing fields were becoming too hideous even for the local oligarchy and its foreign patrons, and at a time when the planned extirpation of the Guatemalan Indians had finally become a global headline, Mother Teresa purred: ‘Everything was peaceful in the parts of the country we visited. I do not get involved in that sort of politics.’ At least, for once, she did not say that everything was ‘beautiful’.
Afterword
We believe that taking that kind of position, Charlie, is not a Democrat or Republican issue. We think it’s an issue of what’s moral; it’s about what’s compassionate; it’s the kind of values that Mother Teresa represents.
DEAR ANN LANDERS:
Often the simple things in life can make the most difference. For example, when someone asked Mother Teresa how people without money or power can make the world a better place, she replied, ‘They should smile more.’ — Prince George, B.C.
DEAR PRINCE:
What a splendid response. Thank you.
22 May 1995