Kevin Williamson of National Review Online examines Christopher Hitchens’ long-running attack on Mother Teresa’s record.
For those Mother Teresa served, that which did not kill them kept right on trying — until it did. Her organization, the Missionaries of Charity, did (and does) its best to make them comfortable, to care for them in their final agony — to love them. But they do die, often in pain. They do not die alone.
Hitchens, a cultured and cultivated man who nonetheless was as unthinking a partisan of the man-as-meat school of philosophy as anyone of his time, objected to that. Human beings, in his view, were livestock requiring husbandry, and Mother Teresa, as a Catholic, was in his view morally responsible for the very suffering she sought to alleviate by encouraging human fecundity in line with the teaching of her Church. From The Missionary Position: “Given how much this Church allows the fanatical Mother Teresa preach, . . . the call to go forth and multiply, and to take no thought for the morrow, sounds grotesque when uttered by an elderly virgin whose chief claim to reverence is that she ministers to the inevitable losers in this very lottery.”
Hitchens never quite seems to have understood it was he, and not those who encouraged and/or assumed the normal course of human reproduction, who was the one advocating “a livestock version” of reproduction, as he put it. (Compulsory reproduction, in his overegged wording.) Hitchens was very much a product of the 1960s counterculture and its saccharine delusions about the connection between sex and reproduction, a philosophy of foot-stamping that thrives still.