Mother Who? How Rome's Newest Saint is a True "Daughter of Macedonia"
(by Christopher Deliso)
http://www.balkanalysis.com/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=169
Mother Who?
How Rome’s Newest Saint is a True Daughter of Macedonia
Date: Sunday, October 26 @ 02:00:00 EST
Topic: Macedonia Articles
It was too good to be true, but you just had to watch anyway. Months
before the sanctification of that Skopje-born champion of the poor,
Mother Teresa, a war of words was already raging between the
Macedonian and Albanian states, and between individuals on both sides
of the ethnic divide. Everyone, it seems, wanted to claim that toothy
appeaser of the sick and downtrodden for their own, and the world
media was there
[http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/reuters07-11-
115552.asp?reg=EUROPE] to take notes throughout.
When Macedonia planned to offer the Romans a statue of her, with the
name "Daughter of Macedonia" plastered on it, the Albanians protested.
They reminded that Mother Teresa was at least half-Albanian (though we
still don’t know for sure if her father was), and this is the half
she’s known for. Let’s hope it was her better half. For years, anyway,
she has been firmly seated between Skenderbeg
[http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-
8&q=Skenderbeg] and John Belushi [http://www.albanian.ca/belushi.htm%5d
on the long list of Albanian national heroes. Until now, no one had
tried to dislodge her. The Albanians indeed seem justified in their
protest.
Of course, in the Balkans (where historical personages become cheap
cultural commodities) such squabbles are not infrequent. Yet the
passage of time is duty-bound to diminish, or at least debase, the
symbolic value that the ownership of the personage might have for
either group. And so Mother Teresa, the perhaps Daughter of Macedonia
(DOM).
Why diminished, why debased? If we believe the wicked denunciation of
Vanity Fair’s Christopher Hitchens [http://slate.msn.com/id/2090083/%5d,
Mother Teresa was nothing more than a "fanatic, a fundamentalist and a
fraud."
Wait a minute! Do we have a real DOM on our hands, or what?
In his latest savaging, Teresa expert Hitchens
[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/185984054X/balkanalysisc-20%5d
begins with the most recent event- the sanctification itself. Hitchens
discloses that the strong-willed John Paul II defied centuries of
canonical custom and began the sanctification process one year after
Teresa’s death in 1997- though the rule says he should have waited
five years. And the throngs of credulous pilgrims massed in Rome on
Sunday were perhaps unaware that the requisite miracle in Teresa’s
case was fraudulent:
"…as for the "miracle" that had to be attested, what can one say?
Surely any respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the obviousness
of the fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam
of light emerged from a picture of MT, which she happened to have in
her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor. Her physician, Dr.
Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn't have a cancerous tumor in the
first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a
course of prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican's
investigators? No. (As it happens, I myself was interviewed by them
but only in the most perfunctory way. The procedure still does demand a
show of consultation with doubters, and a show of consultation was
what, in this case, it got.)"
As with Dubya’s obsession with waging war on Iraq, the Pope’s policy of
saint-creation seems to be driven fundamentally by his desire to write
his own place in history. The present pope has, after all, created
more saints than all of his predecessors combined for the past 400
years- many with equally sketchy claims to sanctity as Teresa:
"According to an uncontradicted report in the Italian paper L'Eco di
Bergamo, the Vatican's secretary of state sent a letter to senior
cardinals in June, asking on behalf of the pope whether they favored
making MT a saint right away. The pope's clear intention has been to
speed the process up in order to perform the ceremony in his own
lifetime. The response was in the negative, according to Father
Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who has acted as postulator
or advocate for the "canonization." But the damage, to such
integrity as the process possesses, has already been done."
But Vatican skullduggery alone cannot account for the nun’s true
DOM-ness. After all, she had no part in the posthumous whitewash. What
is salient, however, is Mother Teresa’s fundamentalism; upon winning
the Nobel Peace Prize [http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1979%5d, she
called abortion the greatest threats to world peace
[http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1979/teresa-lecture.html%5d. And by
founding convent after convent, she used other people’s money to
propel this fundamentalism- rather than improve clinical standards
where she herself was, says Hitchens. Like a preacher raining down
hellfire and brimstone, he charges:
"…MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She
said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing
the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women
and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory
reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking
misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti
(whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the
Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other
donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when
she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when
she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any
audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in
more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own
order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?"
Okay, fundamentalism does not reign in today’s Macedonia. Yet could it
be said that in the last respect, at least, we have a clear forerunner
to the current reality, to the world of unaccountable NGO’s and
mysteriously disappearing millions? As Hitchens asks, "where did that
money, and all the other donations, go?" We are asking the same thing
today in Skopje, hometown of the crafty nun. Could Mother Teresa
somehow have guided, through some gentle and ineffable grace, the
purposeful requisitioning of funds so characteristic of Macedonia ever
since- her very death? Now that would be something truly supernatural.
Through the whole sorry affair, the main point has been obscured. And
it’s not Mother Teresa herself, whoever that may be, that the divided
denizens of Skopje are concerned with. No, we have two ethnic groups
that want her for their own symbolic purposes, a pontiff concerned
with his place in history, and a media that would like to have its own
whimsical way with her too.
We may never know her "complete" ethnicity, or who what kind of
offspring "Mother" Teresa- herself a "Daughter" of Macedonia- begat.
(For Hitchens, her singular contribution is that "…many more people
are poor and sick because of the life of MT (and) even more will be
poor and sick if her example is followed.)"
The moral of this story may simply be that, when commodifying
historical characters, the bidders had better do their market research
first, so that they can be better prepared in the eventuality that
they end up buying the whole package.
Compare and contrast! Read the nun’s side of the story:
Mother Teresa: In My Own Words
[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0517201690/balkanalysisc-20%5d
Then read her get roasted by the above-cited author:
Christopher Hitchens: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory
and Practice"
[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/185984054X/balkanalysisc-20%5d
This article comes from Analyses and articles from the Balkans and
beyond
http://www.balkanalysis.com
The URL for this story is:
http://www.balkanalysis.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=169
(by Christopher Deliso)
http://www.balkanalysis.com/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=169
Mother Who?
How Rome’s Newest Saint is a True Daughter of Macedonia
Date: Sunday, October 26 @ 02:00:00 EST
Topic: Macedonia Articles
It was too good to be true, but you just had to watch anyway. Months
before the sanctification of that Skopje-born champion of the poor,
Mother Teresa, a war of words was already raging between the
Macedonian and Albanian states, and between individuals on both sides
of the ethnic divide. Everyone, it seems, wanted to claim that toothy
appeaser of the sick and downtrodden for their own, and the world
media was there
[http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/reuters07-11-
115552.asp?reg=EUROPE] to take notes throughout.
When Macedonia planned to offer the Romans a statue of her, with the
name "Daughter of Macedonia" plastered on it, the Albanians protested.
They reminded that Mother Teresa was at least half-Albanian (though we
still don’t know for sure if her father was), and this is the half
she’s known for. Let’s hope it was her better half. For years, anyway,
she has been firmly seated between Skenderbeg
[http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-
8&q=Skenderbeg] and John Belushi [http://www.albanian.ca/belushi.htm%5d
on the long list of Albanian national heroes. Until now, no one had
tried to dislodge her. The Albanians indeed seem justified in their
protest.
Of course, in the Balkans (where historical personages become cheap
cultural commodities) such squabbles are not infrequent. Yet the
passage of time is duty-bound to diminish, or at least debase, the
symbolic value that the ownership of the personage might have for
either group. And so Mother Teresa, the perhaps Daughter of Macedonia
(DOM).
Why diminished, why debased? If we believe the wicked denunciation of
Vanity Fair’s Christopher Hitchens [http://slate.msn.com/id/2090083/%5d,
Mother Teresa was nothing more than a "fanatic, a fundamentalist and a
fraud."
Wait a minute! Do we have a real DOM on our hands, or what?
In his latest savaging, Teresa expert Hitchens
[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/185984054X/balkanalysisc-20%5d
begins with the most recent event- the sanctification itself. Hitchens
discloses that the strong-willed John Paul II defied centuries of
canonical custom and began the sanctification process one year after
Teresa’s death in 1997- though the rule says he should have waited
five years. And the throngs of credulous pilgrims massed in Rome on
Sunday were perhaps unaware that the requisite miracle in Teresa’s
case was fraudulent:
"…as for the "miracle" that had to be attested, what can one say?
Surely any respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the obviousness
of the fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam
of light emerged from a picture of MT, which she happened to have in
her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor. Her physician, Dr.
Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn't have a cancerous tumor in the
first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a
course of prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican's
investigators? No. (As it happens, I myself was interviewed by them
but only in the most perfunctory way. The procedure still does demand a
show of consultation with doubters, and a show of consultation was
what, in this case, it got.)"
As with Dubya’s obsession with waging war on Iraq, the Pope’s policy of
saint-creation seems to be driven fundamentally by his desire to write
his own place in history. The present pope has, after all, created
more saints than all of his predecessors combined for the past 400
years- many with equally sketchy claims to sanctity as Teresa:
"According to an uncontradicted report in the Italian paper L'Eco di
Bergamo, the Vatican's secretary of state sent a letter to senior
cardinals in June, asking on behalf of the pope whether they favored
making MT a saint right away. The pope's clear intention has been to
speed the process up in order to perform the ceremony in his own
lifetime. The response was in the negative, according to Father
Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who has acted as postulator
or advocate for the "canonization." But the damage, to such
integrity as the process possesses, has already been done."
But Vatican skullduggery alone cannot account for the nun’s true
DOM-ness. After all, she had no part in the posthumous whitewash. What
is salient, however, is Mother Teresa’s fundamentalism; upon winning
the Nobel Peace Prize [http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1979%5d, she
called abortion the greatest threats to world peace
[http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1979/teresa-lecture.html%5d. And by
founding convent after convent, she used other people’s money to
propel this fundamentalism- rather than improve clinical standards
where she herself was, says Hitchens. Like a preacher raining down
hellfire and brimstone, he charges:
"…MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She
said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing
the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women
and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory
reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking
misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti
(whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the
Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other
donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when
she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when
she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any
audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in
more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own
order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?"
Okay, fundamentalism does not reign in today’s Macedonia. Yet could it
be said that in the last respect, at least, we have a clear forerunner
to the current reality, to the world of unaccountable NGO’s and
mysteriously disappearing millions? As Hitchens asks, "where did that
money, and all the other donations, go?" We are asking the same thing
today in Skopje, hometown of the crafty nun. Could Mother Teresa
somehow have guided, through some gentle and ineffable grace, the
purposeful requisitioning of funds so characteristic of Macedonia ever
since- her very death? Now that would be something truly supernatural.
Through the whole sorry affair, the main point has been obscured. And
it’s not Mother Teresa herself, whoever that may be, that the divided
denizens of Skopje are concerned with. No, we have two ethnic groups
that want her for their own symbolic purposes, a pontiff concerned
with his place in history, and a media that would like to have its own
whimsical way with her too.
We may never know her "complete" ethnicity, or who what kind of
offspring "Mother" Teresa- herself a "Daughter" of Macedonia- begat.
(For Hitchens, her singular contribution is that "…many more people
are poor and sick because of the life of MT (and) even more will be
poor and sick if her example is followed.)"
The moral of this story may simply be that, when commodifying
historical characters, the bidders had better do their market research
first, so that they can be better prepared in the eventuality that
they end up buying the whole package.
Compare and contrast! Read the nun’s side of the story:
Mother Teresa: In My Own Words
[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0517201690/balkanalysisc-20%5d
Then read her get roasted by the above-cited author:
Christopher Hitchens: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory
and Practice"
[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/185984054X/balkanalysisc-20%5d
This article comes from Analyses and articles from the Balkans and
beyond
http://www.balkanalysis.com
The URL for this story is:
http://www.balkanalysis.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=169