Free The Missionary Position by Christopher Hitchens

In the course of a profitable partnership with slavery, colonialism and forced labor, the Christian “civilizing mission” often came up against strongly entrenched local religions. Where it did not adapt to these, or eliminate their believers, it made little headway. In India, which was disputed as a prize between four principal European powers before passing under British suzerainty, the effect of Christianity has been relatively slight. The Indian authorities, who are suspicious to this day of the link between proselytization and foreign interference, have generally discouragedmissionary activity. They have left Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity largely alone, however, in deference to the worldwide reputation of their founder. The Mother Teresa establishment in Calcutta, therefore, possesses elements of pathos and nostalgia: it is the chief and lonely relic of what was once a vast enterprise of conquest and crusading.
    When the girl Agnes Bojaxhiu was born on 27 August 1910 in Skopje, to an Albanian Catholic family, the idea of the “mission” as a vocation was still very much alive. And in that region, yesterday as today, allegiance to the Church was more than a merely confessional matter. It was, and is, imbricated with a series of loyalties to nation, region and even party. We know little enough of Agnes’s early life, and the devotional tracts written about her are not very illuminating, but it seems that her father Nikola, a prosperous shopkeeper, died in a nationalist squabble when the girl was only eight. The family was strongly religious and adhered to the Parish of the Sacred Heart, which in Skopje was synonymous with Albanian identity. Through the influence of a Jesuit priest she became interested in missionary work and at the age of twelve, on her own account, she first received the idea that her life should be dedicated to spreading the word among the poor. But she told Malcolm Muggeridge that “at the beginning, between twelve and eighteen, I didn’t want tobecome a nun. We were a very happy family. But when I was eighteen, I decided to leave my home and become a nun.” Having entered a convent—the Congregation of the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Loreto—she left Skopje for Zagreb, and from there traveled to Dublin, where the Loreto Sisters have their headquarters to this day. Shortly after Christmas Day 1928, her ship made landfall in Colombo, en route to the Loreto mission in Bengal.
    The account of Agnes’s early life given by Dr. Gjergji is intriguing for its fragmentary character. We learn, for example, that the future Mother Teresa’s brother, Lazzaro, “went to Italy in 1939, remained there during and after the war, and finally died there.” We learn also that “when, in the fall of 1910, the Serbians reached Skopje, the missionaries had to limit their pastoral action to the city itself. Things got worse at the outbreak of war in 1914.” From this terse account we can only guess at the impact on the fervent Bojaxhiu family of the second Balkan war and the two world wars. However, a certain amount of background can be inferred.
    Albanians divide between members of the Tosk and Gheg peoples, separated south and north, respectively, by the Shkumbini river. Most are Muslim, with an Orthodox Christian minority among the Tosks and a Roman Catholic one among the Ghegs. The Ghegs, who include the Bojaxhiu family, populatethe much-disputed region of Kosovo. Now an “autonomous region” of Serbia, Kosovo has an Albanian majority, but it is also home to the Orthodox Serbs’ holiest battlefield—the site of a fourteenth-century rout by the Turks.
    In 1927 King Zog of Albania signed a treaty with Benito Mussolini which made Albania into an effective protectorate of Italian fascism. The treaty provided for the training of the Albanian military by Italian officers and the relocation of the Bank of Albania to Rome. Even before the subsequent Concordat signed between Mussolini and