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Hitchens on Mother Teresa’s Atheism

by
August 29, 2007

A modest proposal for the object of Jewcy's next protest: Whatever New York City firehouse or pub long that ago shut its doors to an attention-starved Bill Donohue and thus fertilized the embryo of his megalomania. Getting the South Park treatment did little to diminish the one-man Catholic League's passion for louche stupidity. Even via satellite, he still threatens his antagonist to "take it outside." Yeah, meet you right the corner in five.

Mother Teresa's closet atheism is difficult for Christians of all sects to swallow. (Ross Douthat's eloquent defense of his church's beatific bottom-dweller must be some kind of Dan Brown cipher for admitting insecurity.)

Rightly so are the heaven-bound sensing turbulence on the journey. Not only are Mother T's confessions of an absolute loss of faith chilling for their honesty and bravery, but they nicely pass, as even Douthat concedes, the Recovering Totalitarian Test. The rule for Christian rock is: If you replace the words "Jesus," "Lord," and "God" with "baby," the lyrics still make sense. With the Recovering Totalitarian Test, swap those terms with "Stalin" and you find that you're working with the same boilerplate of agonized apostasy. Here's Mother T:

Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love — and now become as the most hated one — the one — You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want — and there is no One to answer — no One on Whom I can cling — no, No One. — Alone … Where is my Faith — even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness — My God — how painful is this unknown pain — I have no Faith — I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart — & make me suffer untold agony.

Make the necessary changes and that could be Rubashov in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, or Kiril Rublev in Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev, or the actual Old Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin in his prison diaries.

What money on whether or not Bill Donohue has never even heard of these books, let alone read them?

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Michael is an editor of Nextbook and a contributing editor of Jewcy. His work has appeared in Slate, Gawker, New York, Democratiya, Reason, The New Criterion, The Weekly Standard, City Journal and Standpoint. His blog is Snarksmith.

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