[ticfarentibia]

The physician who wrote the critical article in The Lancet is an astute observer. After condemning the fact that there was no rational search for diagnosis and treatment in the Calcutta facility, he explains: "Such systematic approaches are alien to the ethos of the home. Mother Teresa prefers providence to planning: her rules are designed to prevent any drift toward materialism." Hitchens expounds on the same theme: "The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection."

Mother Teresa is thoroughly saturated with a primitive fundamentalist religious worldview that sees pain, hardship, and suffering as ennobling experiences and a beautiful expression of affiliation with Jesus Christ and his ordeal on the cross. Hitchens reports that in a filmed interview Mother Teresa herself tells of a patient suffering unbearable pain from terminal cancer: "With a smile, Mother Teresa told the camera what she told the patient: 'You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.'" Apparently unaware that the response of the sufferer was a put-down, she freely related it: "Then please tell him to stop kissing me."