What would you do if someone called your mother “a confused old lady” and a “troubled and miserable” hypocrite?

If you are like me, your first reaction would be to want to respond in kind and strike back. How dare someone insult your mother! Even if we are comfortable criticizing our own mothers, we are extremely defensive of our mothers when an outsider decides to weigh in with an opinion. After all, our mothers gave us life. Even if they had their faults and failings, they still never ceased being our mothers. In our culture where it seems nothing is sacred or off-limits and where everything and everyone are subjected to criticism and ridicule – political leaders, religious leaders, entertainers (poor Britney – yikes!) - there remains one place most people dare not go and that is to attack another’s mother. Such a provocation can incite a fight. That is the kind of visceral reaction one feels when Mom is criticized.

Recently I felt my blood begin to boil when I read a column by Christopher Hitchens in the September 10th edition of Newsweek where he said Mother Teresa of Calcutta was a “confused old lady” and a “troubled and miserable lady” and much more. He didn’t know Mother but he read some of her letters in a newly-released book and concluded that she didn’t believe in God and died a fraud.

As you may know by now, I have a deep love for Mother Teresa, and an even deeper debt to her. I was a soul with no direction when I met her in 1985 and God redirected my life through her. She became my spiritual mother and I followed her like a puppy dog all over America whenever she visited. I am not alone in thinking of Mother Teresa as my mother – countless people throughout the world, felt the warmth of her maternal love and legendary compassion, particularly the poor.

When Mother Teresa died in 1997, you students were somewhere between 3rd and 7th grade in life. You probably don’t know a lot about her, even though she was featured recently on the cover of Time magazine. Hers is a life worth studying, and the new book about her and her private letters is exceptional and worth reading.

So why would Christopher Hitchens take on Nobel Peace Prize winner Mother Teresa?

I recall hearing about his first attack on her, in a book provocatively entitled, “The Missionary Position,” when it was released in the late 1980’s, I think. I knew Hitchens was an atheist and figured he probably was trying to build his own celebrity by attacking hers. I was with Mother Teresa at the time of the book’s publication and I knew that she knew about it. I went up to her and said, “Mother, I am sorry this fellow wrote such terrible things about you when none of it is true.” Mother didn’t hesitate in her response. She said, “We must pray for him.”

At Mass this morning, the Church directed our attention to the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 6, where it quotes Jesus in his Sermon on the Plains: “I say, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you and pray for those who maltreat you…since he (our heavenly Father) is good to the ungrateful and the wicked.” Those words of Christ are among the most difficult of his to follow. Our natural instinct is to dislike our enemies, if not hate them. And when a man like Christopher Hitchens brews a clever mixture of truths and half-truths and attacks someone you know and love, you want to fire back with an angry rejoinder. But the Lord asks us to allow our natural inclination to be transformed by grace into a supernatural response that seeks to love and forgive instead of condemn and hate.

You may have heard that Saint Vincent College is hosting an international conference on Mother Teresa on our campus the first weekend of October and that the people who knew her best – her niece, her nuns from the beginning, including her successor, and those lay persons who traveled the world with her – will be here to tell their stories.

Well guess what? I think it would be good to invite Christopher Hitchens to attend. I think he could benefit from hearing first-hand accounts of who Mother Teresa actually was. He might draw different conclusions about her life if he heard so many people from so many countries telling eyewitness accounts of Mother. I hope he comes.

And because we are a College interested in the pursuit of the truth, I have invited him to address the attendees in the afternoon. Let him come and speak. The truth about Mother Teresa can hold up under strict scrutiny – even from a gentleman who appears to have an axe to grind.

Maybe if I meet him I’ll find a way to love him. Right now I’ll need a lot of grace to do that. I continue to struggle with feelings of anger toward him and what he wrote because it potentially can lead those who don’t know Mother Teresa astray. I’ve received letters and email from people who are confused by all of this.

I’ll keep you posted on whether he is coming or not.

And I hope you come. Email Julie.Gulling@email.stvincent.edu if you want to attend – there are some student seats that have been reserved for Saint Vincent students because we want you to have the opportunity to know more about the beauty of Mother Teresa. Go to our web site and click on Mother Teresa’s photo and it will lead you to more information on our Conference.

I’ll close this long blog (sorry) with a bit of nostalgia.

Ten years ago today I attended Mother Teresa’s funeral in Calcutta on a grey morning where millions lined the streets to see Mother Teresa’s coffin process on a carriage that once held the body of Gandhi in a similar state funeral procession. The fact that I was even there owed to the kind invitation of then First Lady Hillary Clinton who invited me to accompany the United States delegation. The funeral was unforgettable – Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Christian leaders processed to pay tribute to Mother Teresa. Queens, princes, prime ministers, and presidents, too.

Who was this little Albanian woman from Macedonia who could inspire such love and emotion and devotion from such a diverse group? Come join me – and maybe Christopher Hitchens – and find out.