[In the following review of Hitchens's The Missionary Position and Mother Teresa's A Simple Path, Kee offers a mixed assessment of Hitchens's “brief and one-sided indictment” of Mother Teresa.]

A health warning seems required. The order in which these two books are read can seriously affect the way each is judged. The sequence above is recommended. Anyone starting with Christopher Hitchens's scalpel-job on the eighty-five-year-old Albanian nun Agnes Gouxha Bojaxhiu might well simply dismiss it as over-characteristic; and, if not particularly solicitous for the balm of Mother Teresa's “saintliness,” take no trouble to read the other book. This would be unfair to the author of The Missionary Position. Nothing could indicate more clearly what he is up against than the simple path here laid down under the copyrights of Lucinda Vardey and Mother Teresa.

A sense of unself-questioning, though hardly unselfconscious, purity of being pervades the pages of A Simple Path from the start. “I'm only a little wire; God is the power,” says Mother Teresa. “Her faith and her clarity of purpose give us powerful lessons in the ways of loving,” writes Lucinda Vardey. A sense of waffle sets in early.

Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Christ (there are now 4,000 of them) “practise their life of poverty with the absolute faith that this will bring them nearer to God.” This provokes an awkward-squad response. How genuinely altruistic are they? Is it for themselves that they are really doing these things? And if caring for the poorest of the poor is the “best,” the holiest, way of spending your life, this suggests that the poorest of the poor are indispensable. Isn't this rather hard on them? Christ said that we always had the poor with us, but he didn't say that it was necessarily a good thing.

Poverty, we hear, is “a wonderful gift because … it means we have fewer obstacles to God.” Missionaries are happy to partake of poverty as a benefit to themselves; they also apparently acquire the fat spiritual bonus of helping “redeem” the poor just as Christ did, though, of course, without anything like his suffering.

Mother Teresa claims that she and her missionaries are doing with the poor what St John and the Virgin Mary were doing with Christ at the foot of the Cross: sharing in his suffering. But St John and the Virgin Mary were lamenting what was happening to him. There is little sign in A Simple Path that Mother Teresa “laments” what is happening to the poor. Indeed, an Australian, Brother Geoff, distinguishes the Missionaries' work from attempts to “help the poor man beyond his station,” which he acknowledges can be “a worthwhile effort … but can become a political issue.” Was the early British Labour Party then wrong to be inspired by the New Testament?

The continuing combination of superficial meekness with something like gentle arrogance will be unattractive to many. Some passages are not just simple, but positively elementary. “If there is something that is worrying you, then you can go to Confession if you are a Catholic and become perfectly clean because Jesus forgives everything through the priest.” Elsewhere there is media evangelism. “We let Him take what He wants from us, so take whatever He gives and give whatever He takes with a big smile.” “If only we could see His concern for us, His awareness of our needs, the phone call we've waited for. …” “I think God is telling us something with Aids, giving us an opportunity to show our love. …” Once again, the unfortunate seem to be there primarily for the Missionaries, though there is acknowledgement for the victims in passing: “The Aids patients I worked with in New York and Washington,” says one Sister Dolores, “are the modern saints, the new saints of the Church.”

Charity, wrote one of the old saints, “vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up … seeketh not her own.” Christopher Hitchens, in modern terms, says that this is very much what Mother Teresa is doing. His general point is that, for all her cult's strange ecumenical claim that one God is almost as good as another, what she is really engaged in is an unsavoury form of proselytizing Catholicism.

There is some danger of Hitchens blurring the issue by suggesting that to proselytize Catholicism is by definition unsavoury. It is easy—perhaps too easy—to suggest that Catholic belief on birth-control and abortion is a vested interest for a charity that needs an excess of miserable population through which to work out its own salvation. It undoubtedly is, but that doesn't mean that there are not a great many good Catholics who believe that all human beings, and not just potential ones, should be given respect and the chance of a good life by society.

Hitchens pulls a number of moral skeletons out of Mother Teresa's cupboards. Can it really be right, just for the sake of the money you're collecting, to fawn on, or be fawned on by, people of such repute as “Baby Doc” Duvalier of Haiti, Mengistu of Ethiopia, the American convicted fraudster Charles Keating (whose sentence she tried to get reduced because he had given her so much of other people's money), or the government of the Guatemalan killing fields? (Leave out poor old Ronald Reagan, and even Hillary Clinton, though Hitchens characteristically doesn't.) Yes, possibly, just—if the enormous sums collected are spent on the best possible technical equipment and facilities for the charity's well-publicized clinics all over the world. But in some of the most telling evidence collected in this admittedly brief and one-sided indictment from people who have worked in the clinics, this is far from being the case.

Is Hitchens perhaps going over the top in concluding that it is high time Mother Teresa was “subjected to the rational critique she has evaded so arrogantly for so long”? Before coming to a decision, read A Simple Path again.