Hell's Angel Pulled Out Of Film Festival
Agence France Presse
04 August, 2003
A controversial film on Mother Teresa, Hell's Angel, has been dropped
from a film festival planned here to mark her beatification later
this year, an organiser said on Sunday."Hell's Angel would be withdrawn as Missionaries of Charity and
Bishop Lobo who was in the Diocesan team probing the life, virtue and
reputation of Mother Teresa's sanctity for the cause of her
sainthood, opposed its screening," said Father C.M. Paul, a member of
the organising committee.Italian Channel 4 has produced the film and Christopher Hitchens has
directed it."Father Brian Kolodie-jchuk, postulator of the cause of Mother
Teresa's sainthood and Missionaries of Charity priest, now in Rome,
also faxed a letter to the organising committee of the film festival
to drop Hell's Angel," he added.Hell's Angel is based on the 1997 book The Missionary Position:
Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice" by US-based British author and
columnist Christopher Hitchens, who breaks with orthodoxy by
questioning the work of the Missionaries of Charity.Hitchens faulted Mother Teresa for using her political clout on
behalf of conservative causes and accepting money from dodgy sources.
He contended that her work was focused on the dying and made little
effort to improve the bad circumstances behind Kolkata's public
health woes.The film had stirred up a hornet's nest as Missionaries of Charity,
the order of nuns founded by Mother Teresa, and Bishop Salvador Lobo,
a member of the Diocesan team shepherding her candidacy for
sainthood, said the film distorted the work she did.They had written a letter to ask the Archbishop of Calcutta Lucas
Sircar to exclude the film from the festival planned in November.
For an interview with Christopher Hitchens visit
http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/featpostel_56_p.htm