The Beatification of Paris

Far too many people seemed shocked, horrified, that Paris Hilton is being pursued by Indian director, T. Rajeevnath, for the role of Mother Teresa. The horror apparently stems from the notion that a callow, rich but otherwise worthless twit will be called upon to portray "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud," to use Christopher Hitchens words describing Mother Teresa. I'm not sure why this should be so shocking. What is shocking is how many people have bought the Vatican propaganda about MT, although, apart from Hitchens, there has been very little in the media that would dissaude the public from the Catholic trope that MT is anything but the saint the Vatican would have the world believe her to be.

Hitchens expose of Mother Teresa revealed some scandalous behaviour and none of it was ever much acknowledged by, well, almost everyone. But Hitchens offers us some harsh words for the medieval-minded Albanian nun:

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.

A friend to the worst of the rich. Sounds like a perfect match for Paris and I say to Rajeevnath, good call!