SOURCE: Hitchens, Christopher, and Matt Cherry. “An Interview with Christopher Hitchens on Mother Teresa.” Free Inquiry 16, no. 4 (fall 1996): 53–58.

In the following interview, Hitchens discusses his controversial criticism of Mother Theresa in The Missionary Position, his documentary film Hell's Angel, and his contempt for Christianity and American religious sentiment.

Below, Matt Cherry, executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, interviews Christopher Hitchens about his book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice and his television program, which strongly criticized Mother Teresa. The interview recapitulates the most devastating critiques of Mother Teresa ever made. It also gives a very telling account by a leading journalist into the U.S. media's great reluctance to criticize religion and religious leaders.

As Free Inquiry was going to press, we heard that Mother Teresa was suffering from heart trouble and malaria and there was concern about her chances of survival. It...