Other questions arise as well, all of them touching on matters of saintliness, modesty, humility and devotion to the poor. Apart from anything else, what was Mother Teresa doing in Port-au-Prince attending photo opportunities and award ceremonies with the local oligarchy? What, indeed, was she doing in Haiti at all? The world has a need to picture her in a pose of agonized yet willing subjection, washing the feet of Calcutta’s poor. Politics is not her proper métier, and certainly not politics half a world away, in a sweltering Caribbean dictatorship. Haiti has been renowned for many years, and justly so, as the place where the wretched of the earth receive the cruellest and most capricious treatment. It is well and clearly understood, furthermore, that this is not the result of either natural disaster or unalterable misfortune. The island has been the property of an especially callous and greedy predatory class, which has employed pitiless force in order to keep the poor and the dispossessed in their place.
Let us look again at the photograph of the two smiling ladies. In terms of received ideas about Mother Teresa, it does not ‘fit’. It does not, as people say nowadays, ‘compute’. Image and perception are everything, and those who possess them have the ability to determine their own myth, to be taken at their own valuation. Actions and words are judged by reputations, and not the other way around. So hold the picture to the light for an instant, and try to take an impression of the ‘negative’. Is it possible that the reverse black-and-white tells not a grey tale but a truer one?
Also before me as I write is a photograph of Mother Teresa standing, eyes modestly downcast, in friendly propinquity with a man known as ‘John-Roger’. At first glance, it would seem to the casual viewer that they are standing in a Calcutta slum. A closer look makes it plain that the destitute figures in the background have been added in as a backdrop. The picture is a fake. So, for that matter, is John-Roger. As leader of the cult known sometimes as ‘Insight’ but more accurately as MSIA (the ‘Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness’, pronounced ‘Messiah’), he is a fraud of Chaucerian proportions. Probably best known to the public for his lucrative connection to Arianna Stassinopoulos-Huffington — whose husband, Michael Huffington, spent $42 million of his own inherited money on an unsuccessful bid for a Senate seat in California — John-Roger has repeatedly claimed to be, and to have, a ‘spiritual consciousness’ that is superior to that of Jesus Christ. Such a claim is hard to adjudicate. (One might think, all the same, that it would be blasphemous to the simple outlook of Mother Teresa. Yet there she is, keeping him company and lending him the lustre of her name and image. MSIA, it should be noted, has repeatedly been exposed in print as corrupt and fanatical, and the Cult Awareness Network lists the organization as highly dangerous’.
It turns out that the faked photograph records the momentous occasion of Mother Teresa’s acceptance of a cheque for $10,000. It came in the form of an ‘Integrity Award’ bestowed by John-Roger himself — a man who realized his own divinity in the aftermath of a visionary kidney operation. No doubt Mother Teresa’s apologists will have their defence close at hand. Their heroine is too innocent to detect dishonesty in others. And $10,000 is $10,000 and, as Lenin was fond of saying (citing Juvenal), pecunia non olet ‘money has no smell’. So what is more natural than that she should quit Calcutta once more, journey to Tinseltown and share her aura with a guru claiming to outrank the Redeemer himself? We will discover Mother Teresa keeping company with several other frauds, crooks and exploiters as this little tale unfolds. At what point — her apologists might want to permit themselves this little tincture of scepticism — does such association cease to be coincidental?
One last set of photographs closes this portfolio. Behold Mother Teresa in prayerful attitude, flanked by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Marion Barry, as she opens an eight-bed adoption facility in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. It is a great day for Marion Barry, who has led the capital city into beggary and corruption, and who covers his nakedness by calling for mandatory prayer in schools. It is a great day as well for Hillary Rodham Clinton, who almost single-handedly destroyed a coalition on national health care that had taken a quarter of a century to build and mature.
The seeds of this multiple photo opportunity, which occurred on 19 June 1995, were sown the preceding March, as the First Lady toured the Indian subcontinent. Molly Moore, the fine Washington Post reporter on the trip, made it clear in her despatches that the visit was of a Potemkin nature:
When the Clinton motorcade whisked through the Pakistani countryside yesterday, a long fence of brightly colored fabric shielded it from a sprawling, smoldering garbage dump where children combed through trash and several poor families had built huts from scraps of cardboard, rags and plastic…. In another instance, Pakistani officials, having heard rumors that the First Lady might take a hike into the scenic Margalla Hills overlooking the capital of Islamabad, rushed out and paved a 10-mile stretch of road to a village in the hills. She never took the hike (the Secret Service vetoed the proposal) but villagers got a paved road they’d been requesting for decades.
In such ways do Western leaders impress themselves momentarily upon the poor of the world, before flying home much purified and sobered by the experience. A stop at a Mother Teresa institution is absolutely de rigueur for all celebrities visiting the region, and Mrs Clinton was not going to be the breaker of precedent. Having ‘raced past intersections where cars, buses, rickshaws and pedestrians were backed up as far as the eye could see’, she arrived at Mother Teresa’s New Delhi orphanage, where, again to quote from the reporter on the spot, ‘babies who normally wear nothing but thin cotton diapers that do little but promote rashes and exacerbate the reek of urine had been outfitted for the morning in American Pampers and newly-stitched floral pinafores’. One good turn deserves another, and so Mother Teresa’s subsequent visit to Washington gave both Mrs Clinton and Mayor Barry the occasion for some safe, free publicity. The new twelve-bed adoption centre is in the rather leafy and decorous Chevy Chase suburb, and nobody was churlish enough to mention Mother Teresa’s earlier trip to the city in October 1981, when she had turned the light of her countenance on the blighted ghetto of Anacostia. Situated in near segregation on the other side of the Potomac, Anacostia is the capital of black Washington, and there was suspicion at the time about the idea of a Missionaries of Charity operation there, because the inhabitants were known to resent the suggestion that they were helpless and abject Third Worlders. Indeed, just before her press conference, Mother Teresa found her office rudely invaded by a group of black men. Her assistant Rathy Sreedhar takes up the story:
They were very upset…. They told Mother that Anacostia needed decent jobs, housing and services — not charity. Mother didn’t argue with them; she just listened. Finally, one of them asked her what she was going to do here. Mother said: ‘First we must learn to love one another.’ They didn’t know what to say to that.