Since reading this, I keep thinking about Mother Teresa’s orphanages and hospices as powerhouses devoted to harnessing and generating human misery like spiritual utility companies. If Christopher Hitchens’s portrait is correct, Teresa would not refute this analogy, but would, rather, explain how she’s harnessing pain for the glory of God and the betterment of his creation. The problem for her benefactors is the extent to which she masked her true mission—or the extent to which they allowed themselves to disregard it in favor of believing that her object was alleviating, rather than glorifying and concentrating, misery. The problem for the rest of us is that her mission was depraved.

Christianity begins with a tortured and dying god. This has given suffering a special place, and the Catholic church has long been suspicious of those who seek it. An acceptance—and veneration—of those who inflict it represents the very worst of the Roman church.