MOTHER TERESA loved the poor. She loved the poor so much that she never asked how they became poor nor challenged the causes of their poverty.
She received millions of pounds in their name to make their condition more bearable - not to seek to eradicate it.
Mother Teresa cared for the dying and destitute in her homes. She never asked whether they ought to have been in hospital instead. The curable and the incurable were all the same to her, and only the fortunate received painkillers.
Mother Teresa had great compassion. In 1984 in Bhopal, the leak of MIC gas at the Union Carbide plant caused two and a half thousand deaths, tens of thousands of blindings and left hundreds of thousands with breathing difficulties. The 'angel of mercy' was soon on the scene (she enjoyed free air and rail travel within India), her first words to the survivors and their families were "Forgive, Forgive, Forgive".
Mother Teresa was above politics. She was so apolitical that she never enquired where donations came from, or the character of those who gave. The Duvaliers in Haiti, Robert Maxwell in Britain, the Hoxha regime in Albania were all beneficiaries of her benedic. tions.
Why was this Christian missionary tolerated and even encouraged by the Indian government and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) led administration in West Bengal where her Order is based? The answer is simple.
She confirmed the perception that nothing could be done to remove the scourge of poverty, the epidemic of ill-health and malnutrition, the malady of hopelessness and helplessness - only the symptoms could be managed.
In fact it was the fault of the poor - their karma - actions in their past lives which contributed to their present fate. Her doctrine was one which induces fatalism and apathy among its adherents.
Her world view resonated with medieval notions exalting suffering and pain as redeeming past sins anddeading the tortuous path to Heaven.
Why was Mother Teresa propelled into superstardom in the West and her words and deeds placed beyond reproach even by the liberal-left?
In his excoriating polemic The Missionary Position, Christopher Hitchens argues that the rich world likes to believe that "someone, somewhere is doing something for the Third World. The great white hope meets the great black hole; the mission to the heathen blends with the comforting myth of Florence Nightingale".
If Rudyard Kipling's poem The White Man's Burden spoke about the 'civilising responsibility' of colonialism to its "new caught, sullen peoples/ Half-devil and Half-child" - then remember that the missionaries followed the flag and were intimately bound up in that enterprise.
The Vatican recognised the value of the publicity Mother Teresa generated ,and the present Pontiff, John Paul II, saw her as an apostle for his own fundamentalist views on reproductive rights and same-sex sexuality.
In 1979 when Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, she used that platform to announce that "abortion is the worst evil, and the greatest enemy of peace".
The tragedy of 250,000 women dying each year from 'back-street' abortions and the denial of the right of women to control their own bodies apparently pale in significance to the devil's work: contraception and abortion.
This was her message to the Bangladeshi women who became pregnant in consequence of the mass rapes perpetrated by the Pakistani army.
Meanwhile her San Francisco franchise for gay men with AIDS mirrors the spartan monastic regime of her outlets elsewhere; with Christian teaching substituting for painkillers.
•Mother Teresa herself has pronounced AIDS as "just retribution for improper sexual conduct" says Hitchens, which is not dissimilar to the Vatican's own view.
Her much-praised homes in India are run with nineteenth century ideas and instruments. Prayer and Christian comfort are available in generous doses when medication, hospitalisation and surgical intervention would save more lives.
A former lay worker at one of her Bombay homes told The Guardian that in his many years of experience, "there are cases where there are only two possible descriptions: criminal neglect and criminal assault".
Yet Mother Teresa herself died in a private hospital, with a personal physician and a team of specialists by her bed-side and round the clock care. Whenever she fell ill on one of her excursions abroad she was immediately booked into a private hospital. The best and most expensive care apparently did no harm to her soul but was off-limits to the poor.
She founded her own transnational, the Missionaries of Charity, operating more than 500 branches in over 100 countries and with a staff of 4,000 nuns and 40,000 lay workers.
As Christopher Hitchens notes, she was serving the "sponsor and the donor, and not the needs of the downtrodden. Helpless infants, abandoned derelicts, lepers and the terminally ill are the raw material for demonstrations of compassion"
Mother Teresa represented the odious belief that the poor are objects for charity and not subjects of their own liberation. She never sought to address the causes of poverty and oppression - because she believed it to be part of the natural order.
Socialist Outlool LETTERS IS