ROANOKE TIMES

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 16, 1995                   TAG: 9502170002
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: WALTER GOODMAN THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium


A DARE: IS MOTHER TERESA OFF-LIMITS

Christopher Hitchens tells in the February Vanity Fair of the furious reaction to a television program he wrote last year for Channel 4 in Britain as part of a series about ``inflated and bogus reputations.'' The program was called ``Hell's Angel.'' The article is titled ``Mother Teresa and Me.''

``Bogus?'' ``Inflated?'' Mother Teresa!

I had to see that show, and Hitchens kindly sent me a tape. It lived up to the billing. For a half-hour the little nun is portrayed as a creation of ``hyperbole and credulity.''

Hitchens, an Englishman of leftish leanings who resides in Washington, says her reputation was baptized by a 1969 BBC program, ``Something Beautiful for God,'' that portrayed her mission to Calcutta's newly born and dying in worshipful tones. (``A star is born,'' cracks Hitchens.) And 10 adulation-filled years later she received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Although reviewing programs that have little prospect of being shown in the United States does not ordinarily seem useful, ``Hell's Angel'' invites attention because there IS so little prospect.

In a season of complaints about the adversarial tendencies and the anti-religious slant of television, it is still difficult to imagine an American network or cable station going after a religious personage who shines even brighter in public esteem than Father Flanagan. If anybody is a television untouchable, it is Mother Teresa.

Acceptable religious targets in the United States are pretty much limited to child molesters and fundamentalists with outright political ambitions or inclinations toward mayhem. As for PBS, even the hint of its carrying such an attack in these parlous times would bring a bolt of congressional lightning.

Consider what Hitchens, who visited Mother Teresa's Calcutta orphanage in 1980, has to say about the woman. By his accounting, she is ``a demagogue, an obscurantist and a servant of earthly powers,'' whose central message to the wretched of India and elsewhere is a denunciation of abortion and contraception.

She is shown, wizened face piously bowed, not only accepting honors from respectable right-wing heads of state like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher but also consorting with disreputable figures like Jean-Claude Duvalier, the deposed Haitian dictator, and paying tribute to the late Enver Hoxha, the longtime proto-Stalinist boss of Albania, Teresa's birthplace.

Hoxha, of course, was an atheist, but he managed to keep his people under his boot for several decades. The implication is that Teresa gives more unto Caesar than is strictly required by Scripture.

In a somewhat self-complimenting summation, Hitchens, the on-camera prosecutor, says ``The profane marriage between tawdry media hype and medieval superstition gave birth to an icon which few have had the poor taste to question.''

Be assured that he does not allow taste to get in his way as he chops at the icon. He makes a point of noting Teresa's mutually rewarding relations with big givers like Robert Maxwell, the British press lord who disappeared from his yacht one night, leaving behind disorderly finances, and Charles Keating, the moralizing savings-and-loan crook who is now in jail.

``Hell's Angel'' ( Hitchens reveals that his preferred title was ``Sacred Cow'') would have benefited from more reporting on what exactly goes on in those acclaimed Calcutta orphanages and hospices.

It is possible, after all, that even an anti-abortionist might give tender care to her charges. All that is offered here is the testimony of a disaffected volunteer that unsanitary methods prevail, medical treatment and comfort are rudimentary and the main consolations for the dying are mats and prayer.

Yet there is enough in this half-hour to stir the juices of a television producer who is bored with exposing the usual suspects. Kicking Pat Robertson around is soft duty compared to a skeptical inspection of a universally admired Nobelist.

Hitchens' phrasings (``a roving ambassador of a highly politicized papacy'') may be a touch sharp for a mass audience, and he could be picking on Mother Teresa simply because he doesn't like her politics or her church.

All the more reason, now that such charges have been aired, for sending a crew to Calcutta to see whether he failed to give credit where it is due.

How good or bad is the care? Where does the Mother Teresa multinational obtain its money and on what is it spent? ( Hitchens indicates that more goes to expanding convents than to equipping hospices.)

Is Teresa a servant of the poor or an accomplice of the rich? It could turn out that despite Hitchens' animadversions, the lady is a saint.

Paying attention, ``60 Minutes?''



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