User:Ridiculus mus/sandbox/The Missionary Position

The slim paperback volume entitled The Missionary Position : Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice was first published in 1995 by Verso, the sole imprint of New Left Books launched in 1970 by the New Left Review, a British journal of left-wing theory. Verso claims to be "the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world" Its author was the journalist and writer Christopher Hitchens, a convinced atheist Marxist whose first best selling book was God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007).

The subject of the book is what the author considered were the shortcomings of Mother Teresa. He was not the first to censure her for her beliefs, for some of his themes had been anticipated by others. Nor was the book the first occasion on which Hitchens verbally attacked Mother Teresa. In 1992 he wrote a polemical piece for his regular column in The Nation; in 1993 he aired his views on her in the course of an interview on C-SPAN's Booknotes series; in 1994 there was broadcast on British television his 25 minute television essay; and in early 1995 he wrote a piece in Vanity Fair describing the making of the television essay. These are all noticed in the Foreword where he describes his work as part of "a battle".

Small in compass, the book was promoted as being 98 pages long, but authorial matter occupies no more than 72 pages. It has been widely likened to a pamphlet or extended essay. In 2012 it was re-issued in both paperback and ebook form with a foreword by Thomas Mallon. Although the publishers of the 2012 re-issue described it as "a meticulous study of the life and deeds of Mother Teresa" and "a measured critique", the general consensus is that it is polemical. Nor does the book itself make any pretence of being a biography, even in outline.

Structure
The book sets out to provoke a reassessment of Mother Teresa's reputation by advancing various arguments most of which had been previously ventilated by Hitchens in what he termed "early polemics" in magazine articles in the USA, and in a TV programme written and presented by him which was broadcast on British television in November 1994. Hitchens' own estimate is that the book represents an expansion of the TV script "by about a third". These arguments are not developed or pursued in the book in a scholarly way and, for the most part, lack cited sources. Vague and unsubstantiated imputations of personal impropriety, in particular, are diffused throughout the Introduction and throughout the three main sections entitled respectively "A Miracle" (treating of the 1969 BBC documentary Something Wonderful for God which brought her to the attention of the general public), "Good Works and Heroic Deeds", and "Ubiquity", leading one reviewer to object: "Much is insinuated but nothing quite alleged"

The second section of the book is divided into three untitled sub-sections addressing: (I) the finances of the religious order she founded (the Missionaries of Charity), and conditions at the famous Home for the Dying in Calcutta; (II) Catholic moral teaching and her espousal of it, focussed on abortion and contraception; and (III) the awards and donations Mother Teresa accepted in the last 20 years of her life. The third section, "Ubiquity", has two sub-sections: (I) a treatment of political events in the Balkans, presented as background to a one page account of her childhood, and (II) the claim, based on her extensive travels, that Mother Teresa was politically active and gave solace to what Hitchens perceived as reactionary and repressive governments. The book ends with a short Afterword.

Method
Such evidence as is presented in support of Hitchens' argument comprises: a handful of eye-witness accounts (all of them by Westerners); a few photographs of Mother Teresa with certain individuals; and some video footage of her in Haiti and Albania, and at Bhopal and Madrid. Mother Teresa's own words are reported, but, except in three instances, not extensively. In developing the arguments, Hitchens frequently relies on irony, hypothesis and speculation, insinuation, innuendo, guilt by association, use of prejudicial terms, and adverse conclusions drawn from Mother Teresa's silence on various topics.

Rhetorical devices, including hyperbole, litotes and bathos, are employed to disparage Mother Teresa further.

Associating with alleged sinners
In the Introduction, Hitchens claimed that Mother Teresa consorted with "frauds, crooks and exploiters", insinuating that she was herself a fraud and an impostor – a charge expressly reliant on guilt by association. In the Afterword he casually alluded to "her friendship with despots". Although much is made of a photograph of Mother Teresa receiving an official award in January 1981 from the then wife of Jean-Claude Duvalier (at that time the President of Haiti), no substantive allegations are made about Mother Teresa arising from her visit to Haiti, and the broad claim of friendship with despots is nowhere substantiated. Hitchens does not claim that Mother Teresa met President Duvalier, still less that she accepted money from him or his wife. In early 1981 Madame Duvalier enjoyed widespread approval for her concern for the poor in Haiti, visiting deprived communities and establishing health clinics. Hitchens omitted this from his book, but he had previously referred to it in an article in The Nation in 1992. In a 1993 interview with Brian Lamb broadcast by C-SPAN, Hitchens, in response to a hypothetical question, said: "The fact is, I don't know if she got any money from the Duvaliers". Even if she had accepted money from the Duvaliers, Lamb proposed, diverting money from despots to charity might be commendable. Hitchens did not demur.

The core claim under this heading (as Hitchens himself conceded) is that she accepted very large donations from Charles H. Keating Jr. who, at the time the book was published, was indeed serving a 10-year sentence for multiple frauds arising from his control of a finance institution called Lincoln Savings & Loan. Hitchens mocks the content of a character reference for Keating which Mother Teresa wrote to the trial judge before sentencing, but the worst that is alleged is that there is no evidence she returned the donations, despite one of the prosecuting attorneys informing her by letter after the conviction that it was stolen money. The attorney did not assert in terms in his letter that the money had been improperly diverted from Lincoln Savings & Loan (a claim Hitchens makes in an aside and without any evidence); nor did he assert there that ". . [Mother Teresa] must have known or should have known that that money doesn't belong to Keating and doesn't belong to her". That was a claim Hitchens made to Brian Lamb in his 1993 television interview. There is no indication when the donations were made – the date would have been foundational for any legal claim that Mother Teresa was accountable for the money on the ground that she knew or had constructive knowledge of a fraud. No such claim was ever made, even though the attorney claimed to know who were "the rightful owners of the property now in your possession".

According to Hitchens: "This is by no means the only example of Mother Teresa's surreptitious attitude to money, nor of her hypocritical protestations about the beauty of poverty, whether self-imposed or otherwise. But it is the clearest and best-documented instance."

Since no other allegations are made in the book as to Mother Teresa's allegedly "surreptitious attitude to money", the imputation of financial impropriety depends exclusively upon the multiple fraud convictions received by Keating in 1992. Too late for the book, all these convictions were over-turned on a non-technicality in April 1996, nullifying Hitchens' censures against Mother Teresa under this head. Although he had numerous opportunities to do so on the occasions when he reprised in writing his hostility towards Mother Teresa (in 1996, 1997, 2003 and 2007) Hitchens omitted to mention that Keating's convictions had been reversed.

Religious beliefs
Hitchens objects in principle to the moral teaching of the Catholic Church, which Mother Teresa publicly promoted. This assertion is made in several places, each time being given a slightly different emphasis. In developing this theme, however, Hitchens made numerous basic errors of fact about the Church's teaching and about Christianity in general, disclosing, as one academic noted: "a remarkable number of howlers on elementary aspects of Christianity".

Mother Teresa's views on divorce, abortion and contraception adhered to the doctrine of the Catholic Church. As for the Church teaching on the course to be followed if difficulties arise in childbirth, the mother (contrary to what Hitchens asserts on page 52) is not expected to sacrifice her life for her child. The proposition asserted by Hitchens was explicitly denied by Pope Pius XII in 1951. Nor (contrary to what Hitchens asserts, also on page 52) is the Church's condemnation of abortion predicated on the mediaeval theory of ensoulment, for that teaching preceded the theory by more than a millennium, and has survived its tacit abandonment. The moral ground of the prohibition is not based on ensoulment but on respect for the sacredness of innocent human life. Nor (contrary to what Hitchens wrote on page 53) does the Church's ban on contraception "extend to all means and methods of avoiding conception". Nor is it the case (contrary to what Hitchens asserts on page 54) that the Catholic Church "has chosen entirely to ignore" the problem of an ever-increasing world population and its impact on food security, poverty and the quality of life. By the date of the book, the Church had been manifesting awareness of the problem for a generation. On 4 October 1964 Pope Paul VI delivered a speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations which included this:-"It is in your Assembly, even where the population problem is concerned, that respect for human life should find its strongest support and its most reasonable defence. Your task is so to act that there should be bread in abundance at the table of mankind and not to favour the artificial control of births, which would be contrary to right reason, with a view to lessening the number of guests at the table of life."

Pope Paul VI reverted to the topic in 1967 and again in 1974. As did Pope John Paul II in his Letter dated 18 March 1994 to Mrs Nafis Sadik, the then Secretary General of the International Conference on Population and Development and Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund. The Cairo Conference (as it was called – noted in passing by Hitchens in a footnote on page 56) decided against demographic targets and instead adopted a 20-year Programme of Action, which focused on individuals' needs and rights (the principle consistently proposed by the Catholic Church). Among its conclusions as laid out in the Final Report (dated 18 October 1994), the Conference specifically condemned the promotion of abortion as a means of family planning, echoing, in part, a similar condemnation by Pope Paul VI in his Encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968).

Source and application of funds
The book makes several references to the quantity of money received by Mother Teresa, either as a accompanying awards made to her, or from well-wishers and those seeking to further her work. The value of some international prizes is given in one place with the comment that nobody has troubled to total the amount of prize money, that nobody has ever asked what became of the funds, and that if the prize money had been applied to a single project it would have sufficed "to give Calcutta the finest teaching hospital in the entire Third World." In another place the remark is made "that Mother Teresa's global income is more than enough to outfit several first-class clinics in Bengal." Large sums are mentioned, and it is reported that at one time (not identified) the Missionaries of Charity had US$50 million credited to a checking (or current) account in New York City. Hitchens concedes, however, that building major medical facilities formed no part of Mother Teresa's thinking. According to him, her preference was "for spreading the money thin and for devoting it to religious and missionary work" rather than for what he called "the sustained relief of deprivation." The book, indeed, opens by reporting Mother Teresa's claim that her order had "more than 500 convents in upwards of 106 countries" and he acknowledged there were 4,000 sisters and 40,000 lay workers operating in her world-wide organisation.

These admissions as to the application of donor funds in furtherance of the wider purposes of the order provide context for the objection raised earlier in the book that the existence of a large bank credit balance necessarily involved sisters at the local level in "deceit, pretence and hypocrisy" and resulted in their "manipulating generous, credulous people and enterprises into giving more goods, services and cash. Page 47 Hitchens' source asserts that the money in the bank was not available for the sisters in New York to relieve their ascetic lifestyle or for any local purpose, and that they they had no access to it. Hitchens omits from Shields' testimony passages in her then unpublished memoir which show a radical conflict between her and Mother Teresa's interpretation of their vow of poverty: "We lived a simple life, bare of all superfluities. We had three sets of clothes, which we mended until the material was too rotten to patch anymore. We washed our own clothes by hand. . . Dental and medical checkups were seen as an unnecessary luxury. Mother was very concerned that we preserve our spirit of poverty. Spending money would destroy that poverty. She seemed obsessed with using only the simplest of means for our work. Was this in the best interests of the people we were trying to help, or were we in fact using them as a tool to advance our own 'sanctity?'"

So far as concerns the origin of the donations given to Mother Teresa, Hitchens misinterpreted something she said, leading him to accuse her of a falsity. At the start of section III of the chapter "Good Deeds and Heroic Virtues" he quotes something Mother Teresa said to Muggeridge in the BBC film Something Beautiful for God relative to the special vow taken by members of her order: "that of giving wholehearted free service to the poor." As she explained it: "This vow means that we cannot work for the rich; neither can we accept any money for the work we do. Ours has to be a free service, and to the poor." Hitchens took this to mean that she does not accept money from the rich. At first Hitchens advanced his interpretation by way of hypothesis, but in the succeeding paragraph he openly claimed that she boasted of not accepting money "from the rich and powerful." That this is a misreading appears from passages elsewhere in Muggeridge's book, for example where he wrote: "The rich, when they come to her, are liable to leave a little less rich." Apart from the general reference to "the rich", receipt of a specific "big donation" is mentioned by Muggeridge. Hitchens himself records events showing that Mother Teresa was willing to accept donations from all kinds of private individuals – as the ill-omened fund-raising exercise promoted by The Daily Mirror and Shields' own testimony both demonstrate. As another reviewer pointed out, it would be absurd if the rich were the only people whose charity Mother Teresa rejected. The same reviewer considered that Hitchens' interpretation of what Mother Teresa had said was not carelessness but dishonesty on his part.

This constitutes the background against which the reader has to assess broad and unsubstantiated claims in the book of financial impropriety. There is the claim of false representation relative to donations from the rich; allusion to Mother Teresa's "surreptitious attitude to money;" the pointed reference to the lack of any public audit of the order's accounts; and the implication that donor funds were not being applied towards the purposes for which they were intended. Then there are the vague claims of deceit, hypocrisy and the earlier reference to her association with "frauds, crooks and exploiters". This cumulatively amounts to a strong but indefinite imputation of financial wrongdoing by Mother Teresa although not one precise allegation is made. It is notable that these vague imputations of financial impropriety are widely dispersed throughout the book.

General complaints are also raised against charitable donors, with accusations of insincerity and imputations that the genuine spirit of charity was not motivating donors. One of Hitchens' eye-witnesses is a woman who had attended a gala lunch in Mother Teresa's honour in 1989. Hitchens repeats a comment she made which relies wholly upon guilt by association expressed by way of a rhetorical question: "Is it going too far to liken Mother Teresa to some of our infamous televangelists, turning their audiences on to what is in God's heart and mind while encouraging and accepting all donations?"

Notwithstanding the pervasive impression of something improper occurring relative to the source and destination of charitable funds, Hitchens frankly admits in one place that there is transparency on these matters "It is possible to say what the true purpose and nature of the order is, and to what end the donations are accepted in the first place. Susan Shields again:/ 'For Mother it was the spiritual well-being of the poor that mattered most. Material aid was a means of reaching their souls, of showing the poor that God loved them. . .'"

Conditions in the Home for the Dying
The first section of the second chapter opens with first-hand accounts of conditions at the famous Home for the Dying in Calcutta named by Mother Teresa Nirmal Hriday (pure heart). It comes from two Britons, one of them a thoracic specialist, the other with no medical qualifications.

The medical man, Dr. Robin Fox, was there in 1994 "on a short visit." He noted that doctors did attend at the Home from time to time, and that some of the volunteers had medical knowledge, but he expressed surprise that while medical treatment was administered, no systematic attempt was made, at the point of admission, to diagnose conditions or distinguish curable from incurable cases. He commented that lack of diagnosis and good analgesia (specifically the absence of "strong analgesics") differentiated Mother Teresa's approach from that of the hospice movement, and he expressed a preference for the latter. Since Fox was not destitute he was in a position to elect for hospice care, whereas those in the Home had a choice between the sisters' care and no care, a point Hitchens fails to make. Nor does Hitchens evince any interest in what the sisters offer at the Home. Fox refrained from making a judgement on "the power of [the sisters'] spiritual approach" since he admitted he was not there long enough to assess it, but he did give an account of the ethos of the Home, namely that Mother Teresa relied on divine providence in place of forward planning, and that her rules were designed to prevent a drift to materialism and to ensure that the sisters remained "on equal terms with the poor." Hitchens, by contrast, denounced the ethos of the Home (which, unlike Fox, he had never visited) as "a cult based on death and suffering and subjection."

It does not appear that Fox was aware of the local factors inhibiting and effectively precluding the use of opioids ("strong analgesics") to manage severe pain in West Bengal at that time. If he did mention them, they were omitted by Hitchens when making his selection from Fox's short note. Ten years after Mother Teresa's death, the use of opioids in India for managing cancer pain was still highly problematic for legal, regulatory, cultural and other reasons (including supply interruptions, harsh punishments imposed for even minor infractions of the rules, and the fear of addiction by health workers). As late as 2001, researchers could write that "pain relief is a new notion in [India]", and "palliative care training has been available only since 1997". It was only in 2012 that the government of West Bengal finally amended the applicable regulations simplifying "the process of possession, transport, purchase, sale and import of inter-state of morphine or any preparation containing morphine by 'Recognized Medical Institution'." Despite the lack of sophisticated analgesic regimes, volunteers (including those with western medical qualifications and experience) reported that the Home was a place of joy not sadness; Hitchens ignores all positive reports of the Home.

The other first-hand account comes from a woman who describes the initial impressions the Home made on her, together with an anecdote from her first day working there (with her boyfriend) as a volunteer. No indication is given of the length of time she spent at the Home. The first-day anecdote discloses a basic misconstrual of the nature and purpose of the Home, that is to say, a refuge for people who have no one to care for them, and who cannot get admittance to a hospital. The remainder of her complaint can be separated into three themes: the comparative absence of painkillers, the low level of medical care, and failure to sterilise needles before re-using them. The starting point of her account is that all the people in the Home are dying. Other sources indicate that was not true. In general, half the cases recovered sufficiently for them to be discharged.

What the volunteer said about analgesics is that the dying were not being given painkillers "beyond aspirin aspirin and maybe if you're lucky Brufen or something, for the sort of pain that goes with terminal cancer and the things they were dying of . ." The unavailability of opioids has been noted above in connection with Fox's criticism. In the United Kingdom at that time, they were standard for the relief of severe terminal pain and also for the relief of moderate terminal pain because non-opioid drugs often had undesirable side-effects. As for mild terminal pain, many hospice doctors in the United Kingdom concurred in the view that "aspirin is still the most useful remedy for mild pain of all kinds in terminal illness." The volunteer has little to say about medical care, except that the dying were "not being given a great deal of it." Her criticism adds nothing to what Fox wrote. What remains are her strictures on the re-use of needles without sterilisation. This was also reported, but at second-hand, by Shields as a problem in Haiti (adding that needles were used until they became blunt). There is no suggestion that Mother Teresa knew or approved of this negligent practice, and there is evidence that Mother Teresa inculcated hygienic practices among children at the start of her work among the poor.

In 1980 Hitchens himself was taken by Mother Teresa to see one of her orphanages, and he reports that it was "very clean."

Politics
Exception is taken in the book to what Hitchens considers was improper political activity by Mother Teresa. He calls her a "political operative" and disputed her claim to be "apolitical". In two instances (Haiti and the Balkans) he speculated that such activity reflected a policy advanced by what he termed "hard-liners" within the Vatican curia. The first part of section II of the third chapter shows Mother Teresa supporting groups promoting Catholic moral teaching against abortion, divorce and contraception in democratic countries such as Ireland, the United Kingdom and Spain.

The remainder of that section is mainly devoted to events connected (thematically or chronologically) with her visit to the United States in May 1985 to accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Here, one set of objections is that Mother Teresa visited repressive one-party states which she ought not to have visited (Haiti, Albania, Ethiopia, and Guatemala), or, granted that she did visit them, that she ought to have taken the opportunity to condemn her hosts; the other set of objections is that she visited one country (USA) where she allegedly supported some of the government's policies (on Ethiopia) but failed to condemn others (on Central America), and visited another (Nicaragua) where she criticised the government and failed to condemn its political opponents. Hitchens concedes in two of the cases (Haiti and Ethiopia) that Mother Teresa's visits, and her refraining from attacking her hosts, was possibly connected with her desire to obtain permission to open convents in those countries. He does not mention that her declared aim was to establish a presence for her order in Albania, nor does he mention other countries (even one-party states such as Cuba and the Soviet Union) where her visits were expressly and successfully made for that very purpose.

Hitchens' exposition omits various details. Dates for the various visits are sparse and are presented out of chronological order: Haiti in January 1981 (page 5); Tirana in August 1990 (page 82); London in 1988 (page 88); Washington D.C. in May 1985 (page 89). No date is given for Spain (page 88) or Ethiopia (page 91); the trip to Nicaragua was "[d]uring this same period" (page 92, apparently a reference to the visit to Washington), as was the trip to Guatemala (page 93, "during the same period"). Excepts of what Mother Teresa is reported as saying in Washington are furnished (pages 90f.) and a very short except is given for Guatemala (page 93). By contrast, while he presents Mother Teresa as fawning on Colonel Mengistu, Hitchens reports nothing of what she said there; and although characterising comments made during her visit to Nicaragua as rebukes to the ruling party, he gives no quotes and no indication of the subject-matter or the persons involved (if any).

Conclusions unfavourable to Mother Teresa are drawn from acts susceptible of a favourable and non-political motive. Mother Teresa's wreath-laying at the grave of Enver Hoxha was taken by Hitchens to be an act of "homage" on the basis of hearsay. An alternative interpretation is that it was an act of forgiveness, a theme on which Hitchens expressed himself mystified. Hoxha's regime had denied appeals by Mother Teresa to allow her dying mother to leave the country in 1972. The sociologist Dr. Gëzim Alpion regarded the wreath-laying as an act of forgiveness: "a well-calculated and well-meaning public gesture" for the Albanians and for people in the Balkans generally at a particularly tense time. In a later piece (written in 2003) Hitchens even claimed that Mother Teresa had visited the country "to pay tribute to its grim Stalinist leader." In the same article he further asserted (without giving any details or offering any evidence, and repeating what he erroneously thought he had established in his book and in his 1994 TV programme) that Mother Teresa had received money from "the Duvaliers" and that he himself had visited Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying in Calcutta; no such claims were made in the book or in the TV programme.

In another place Hitchens states that Mother Teresa "congratulated [ President Reagan ] for his policy in Ethiopia." He goes on to describe that policy, namely to support the territorial integrity of Ethiopia against the separatists in the then province of Eritrea. To this, Hitchens adds the claim that the Ethiopian leader, Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam had "deliberately used the weapon of starvation not just against Eritrea but against domestic and regional dissent in other parts of the country". By this means Hitchens creates a direct link connecting Mother Teresa with US policy in Ethiopia and Mengistu's alleged use of famine as a weapon against his own people. What Mother Teresa said ("Together, we are doing something beautiful for God" - quoted by Hitchens) related to Reagan's response to her urgent appeal to him to send food to relieve the famine in Ethiopia: she was commending him on his humanitarian response to an immediate crisis, not congratulating him for supporting the territorial integrity of Ethiopia.

Hitchens' argument that Mother Teresa had dubious political sympathies which connected her with fascist excesses in the Balkans in the 1920's, 1930's, 1940's and 1990's, has been contested by Alpion on the ground that it is flawed. The treaty signed by King Zog with Benito Mussolini in 1927, the links that Hitchens asserts existed in the 1930's between "the ideas of fascism, Catholicism, Albanianism and Albano-Italian unity," and events in the Balkans during the Second World War are mentioned (occupying the whole of pages 80 and 81) as background for speculation as to what might have been "the impact on the fervent Bojaxhiu family of the second Balkan war and the two world wars." The terminus of these speculations appears on page 82:"An Albanian Catholic nationalist, in other words, might, on 'patriotic' questions still feel loyal to an ostensibly materialist Communist regime. How else are we to explain the following entry [etc]"

What follows is the report in the Yearbook on International Communist Affairs of the wreath-laying by Mother Teresa referred to above. The implication, contested by Alpion, is that Mother Teresa was an "Albanian Catholic nationalist" who "on 'patriotic' questions still [felt] loyal to an ostensibly Communist materialist regime." Two pages later there is a review of discreditable events in Croatia during the Second World War and a reference to mutual atrocities perpetrated by Christians and Muslims in Vukovar, Sarajevo and Mostar during the Bosnian war in 1993 and 1994. The link Hitchens makes to Mother Teresa is that ". . local zealots speak of Greater Albania as the response to Greater Serbia, and . . flourish their pictures of [her]."

Reception
In The London Review of Books Amit Chaudhuri praised the book: "Hitchens’s investigations have been a solitary and courageous endeavour. The book is extremely well-written, with a sanity and sympathy that tempers its irony." However, he commented that the portrait "is in danger of assuming the one-dimensionality of the Mother Teresa of her admirers", and that he finished the book without much more of an idea of the character and motivations of Mother Teresa.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian says: "Anyone with ambivalent feelings about the influence of Catholic dogma (especially concerning sex and procreation); about the media's manufacture of images; or about what one can, should or shouldn't do for someone less fortunate, should read this book."

In 1996, The New York Times published a favourable review by Bruno Maddox in which he characterised the book as "zealously overwritten" and "[railing] wildly" in support of a case which, for him, is "rather convincing" and argued "with consummate style".

The Sunday Times says: "A dirty job but someone had to do it. By the end of this elegantly written, brilliantly argued piece of polemic, it is not looking good for Mother Teresa." Also in 1996, a critical review of the book was penned by William A. Donohue, president of The Catholic League, who comments: "If this sounds like nonsense, well, it is."

Replying to a positive review of Hitchens' book in the New York Review of Books by Murray Kempton, Jesuit author James Martin offered a defense of Mother Teresa against the criticisms brought against her. Noting the difficulties involved with offering aid to the destitute in the developing world, he concluded by writing, "[R]egarding the 'poorest of the poor,' those who today die neglected, there would seem to be two choices. First, to cluck one’s tongue that such a group of people should even exist. Second, to act: to provide comfort and solace to these individuals as they face death. Mr. Kempton chooses the former. Mother Teresa, for all of her faults, chooses the latter." In another letter in the same issue, literary critic and sinologist Simon Leys criticised Hitchens' portrayal of Mother Teresa, stating, "Bashing an elderly nun under an obscene label does not seem to be a particularly brave or stylish thing to do. Besides, it appears that the attacks which are being directed at Mother Teresa all boil down to one single crime: she endeavors to be a Christian, in the most literal sense of the word—which is (and always was, and will always remain) a most improper and unacceptable undertaking in this world." Hitchens replied to Leys' letter in a subsequent issue," and Leys in turn defended his original stance, writing that Hitchens' book "contain[ed] a remarkable number of howlers on elementary aspects of Christianity" and accusing Hitchens of "a complete ignorance of the position of the Catholic Church on the issues of marriage, divorce, and remarriage" and a "strong and vehement distaste for Mother Teresa."