therefore claim the mandate of heaven, and those who suspect that the human race has nothing but the poor candle of reason by which to light its way.” Preferring “anti-theist” to “atheist,” Hitchens liked to draw comparisons between Christianity and North Korea, both mental kingdoms offering their inhabitants the chance to commit “thought crime” and to deliver “everlasting praise” of the leader.
This small book is part of a big career devoted to pulverizing cant, deflating oppression, and maximizing human liberty. Not a day went by that Hitch didn’t enter the lists against some iniquity. Nearly all his causes were noble; a few were quixotic and probably not worth his time. I remember one piece he wrote a half-dozen years ago in defense of free speech for David Irving, the Holocaust-denying historian. Writing against the clock, with his usual urgency, he made a slip of the keyboard in an attempted reference to one of Irving’s editors, putting down “Thomas Mallon” for “Thomas Dunne.” Oh, joy, I thought, seeing my name mistakenly next to Irving’s in the pages of The Wall Street Journal . I sent Hitch an e-mail that began, more or less: “I know that to the sons of British naval officers all of us Micks must seem the same, but.…” He responded late that night with “Oh, fuck,” or words to that effect—no apology,just an injunction to turn up, the next day, at a demonstration he was organizing to support the Danish cartoonists who’d recently had the temerity to draw the prophet Mohammed. I thought about going, knew that I should, and finally never made it. If you want one more epitaph to add to all the ones that already have been suggested for this dual man-of-letters/man-of-action, let it be: He Showed Up. Throughout his life and times, whenever and wherever something important was on the line, he presented himself.
The Missionary Position appeared in 1995, eight years before Mother Teresa’s beatification, an occurrence that Hitchens had seen rushing our way. He notes in his text how Pope John Paul II was readying so many candidates so quickly for this enhanced status (“the ante-room to sainthood”) that the process had begun to “[recall] the baptism by firehose with which Chinese generals Christianized their armies.”
In the event, Hitchens played a necessary, if negative, role in Mother Teresa’s elevation, testifying before an official church body as to her unworthiness. He explained the task, undertaken in 2001, in the magazine Free Inquiry : “The present pope … has abolished the traditional office of ‘Devil’s Advocate,’ so I drew the job of representing the Evil One, as it were, pro bono. Fine by me—I don’t believe in Sataneither.” The writer’s wife, Carol, can recall sending Hitch off to Father David O’Connor of the Washington, D.C., archdiocese to perform this strange and futile exercise in debunking, and then welcoming him home to lunch in their apartment on Columbia Road, as if he’d just come back from a radio interview.
Another, even more significant, development—this one, too, coming years after The Missionary Position —was the publication of Mother Teresa’s letters. The spiritual doubts they were discovered to contain created a sensation worthy of the cover of Time . Let me present just one extract: “Jesus has a very special love for you,” Mother Teresa wrote to the Reverend Michael Van Der Peet in 1979, the year she received her Nobel Peace Prize. “As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.” No, let’s quote one more passage, just in case this was some momentary slip: “I am told God loves me—and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”
You mean you’re not sure?
Had these letters been available to him in the 1990s, I can hear Hitchens asking Mother Teresa just that question, face-to-face, as she showed
This small book is part of a big career devoted to pulverizing cant, deflating oppression, and maximizing human liberty. Not a day went by that Hitch didn’t enter the lists against some iniquity. Nearly all his causes were noble; a few were quixotic and probably not worth his time. I remember one piece he wrote a half-dozen years ago in defense of free speech for David Irving, the Holocaust-denying historian. Writing against the clock, with his usual urgency, he made a slip of the keyboard in an attempted reference to one of Irving’s editors, putting down “Thomas Mallon” for “Thomas Dunne.” Oh, joy, I thought, seeing my name mistakenly next to Irving’s in the pages of The Wall Street Journal . I sent Hitch an e-mail that began, more or less: “I know that to the sons of British naval officers all of us Micks must seem the same, but.…” He responded late that night with “Oh, fuck,” or words to that effect—no apology,just an injunction to turn up, the next day, at a demonstration he was organizing to support the Danish cartoonists who’d recently had the temerity to draw the prophet Mohammed. I thought about going, knew that I should, and finally never made it. If you want one more epitaph to add to all the ones that already have been suggested for this dual man-of-letters/man-of-action, let it be: He Showed Up. Throughout his life and times, whenever and wherever something important was on the line, he presented himself.
The Missionary Position appeared in 1995, eight years before Mother Teresa’s beatification, an occurrence that Hitchens had seen rushing our way. He notes in his text how Pope John Paul II was readying so many candidates so quickly for this enhanced status (“the ante-room to sainthood”) that the process had begun to “[recall] the baptism by firehose with which Chinese generals Christianized their armies.”
In the event, Hitchens played a necessary, if negative, role in Mother Teresa’s elevation, testifying before an official church body as to her unworthiness. He explained the task, undertaken in 2001, in the magazine Free Inquiry : “The present pope … has abolished the traditional office of ‘Devil’s Advocate,’ so I drew the job of representing the Evil One, as it were, pro bono. Fine by me—I don’t believe in Sataneither.” The writer’s wife, Carol, can recall sending Hitch off to Father David O’Connor of the Washington, D.C., archdiocese to perform this strange and futile exercise in debunking, and then welcoming him home to lunch in their apartment on Columbia Road, as if he’d just come back from a radio interview.
Another, even more significant, development—this one, too, coming years after The Missionary Position —was the publication of Mother Teresa’s letters. The spiritual doubts they were discovered to contain created a sensation worthy of the cover of Time . Let me present just one extract: “Jesus has a very special love for you,” Mother Teresa wrote to the Reverend Michael Van Der Peet in 1979, the year she received her Nobel Peace Prize. “As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.” No, let’s quote one more passage, just in case this was some momentary slip: “I am told God loves me—and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”
You mean you’re not sure?
Had these letters been available to him in the 1990s, I can hear Hitchens asking Mother Teresa just that question, face-to-face, as she showed
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