You know how some cowardly muggers target little old ladies because they’re usually slow, frail and unlikely to fight back? Well, the exact same dynamic, though in intellectual rather than bag-grabbing terms, can be seen in the radical-atheist assaults on Mother Teresa.
Attacking the wrinkled, hunched-over sister of Calcutta, accusing her of being a goggle-eyed fanatic and a mad and disgusting celebrator of poverty, is the atheistic equivalent of mugging an old woman. And a dead one, to boot. These anti-Teresa tirades reveal far more about the bluster of contemporary atheism than they do anything surprising about the antics of old Catholic women.
I can’t decide whether author Brendan O’Neill is defending the legacy of Mother Teresa against real prejudice, or patching a few stray examples into a movement so he can bash his own ideological adversaries. This sentence–“Hating Mother Teresa has become a de rigueur dinner-party prejudice.”–argues for the latter. I am fairly certain that millions of people take their evening meal without ever giving her a thought.