Free The Missionary Position by Christopher Hitchens Page B

visit the graves of her ancestors and, of the second, that a few compromises were necessary so that her order would be allowed to work freely in Haiti. Interestingly enough, these are not excuses that have been tendered by Mother Teresa herself, who keeps her own counsel on both matters (and on many others besides).
    It is at least worth considering whether Mother Teresa made both of these trips (and many others) in furtherance of the more flinty political stands taken by hard-liners in her own Church. The personal conduct and the questionable policy are at least congruent in each instance. In the case of Haiti, the Vatican had long taken a position in favor of the “Duvalierist” oligarchy. When the Reverend Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide began his campaign of charismatic populism against the regime, he encountered instant hostility from the Church hierarchy, which eventually suspended him from his order. By the time that Aristide had been triumphantly elected, ignominiously deposed by a military junta and finally restored topower by international intervention, the Vatican was the only government in the world which still retained formal diplomatic relations with the usurping dictatorship. Mother Teresa’s activism, then, was representative of the most dogmatic line taken by her Church.
    Similarly in the Balkans, the collapse and disintegration of Yugoslavia led to a recrudescence of essentially prewar rivalries. Croatia, with the support of the Vatican and Germany, declared itself an independent state and restored many of the signs and emblems of the wartime republic led by Ante Pavelic. Protected by the Vatican and the Third Reich, this government had massacred its Jews and embarked on a program of forced conversion of Orthodox Serbs; those who resisted the crusade had been put to death. This memory alone, and the evident lack of regret for it, contributed to the evolution of a nationalist-religious paranoia among the Serbs, who subsequently launched a war of territorial and sectarian aggrandizement, destroying the cities of Vukovar and Sarajevo in the process. The Croatian ruling party, led by Franjo Tudjman, responded by carving out its own slice of Bosnia and demolishing the city of Mostar.
    Even more ominously there existed, and still exists, the possibility that a generalized war could destroy the boundaries of the former Yugoslavia andonce again pit Catholic against Orthodox as well as both, in various local combinations, against Islam. In Tetovo, the Albanian center of western Macedonia, and in Kosovo too, local zealots speak of Greater Albania as the response to Greater Serbia, and they flourish their pictures of Mother Teresa.

II
    I ntervention, whether moral or political, is always and everywhere a matter of the most exquisite timing. The choice of time and the selection of place can be most eloquent. So indeed may be the moments when nothing is said or done. Mother Teresa is fond of claiming to be not so much above politics as actually beyond them, operating in a manner that is transcendental. All claims by public persons to be apolitical deserve critical scrutiny, and all claims made by those who affect a merely “spiritual” influence deserve a doubly critical scrutiny. The naive and simple are seldom as naive and simple as they seem, and this suspicion is reinforced by those who proclaim their own naïveté and simplicity. There is no conceit equal to false modesty, and there is no politics like antipolitics, just as there is no worldliness to compare with ostentatious antimaterialism.
    Mother Teresa’s timing shows every sign ofinstinctive genius. She possesses an intuition about the need for her message and about the way in which this message should be delivered. To take a relatively small example: In 1984 the Indian town of Bhopal was the scene of an appalling industrial calamity. The Union Carbide plant, which had been located in the town to take advantage of low labor costs and government tax