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Home > News > Columnists > Rajeev Srinivasan
The saint business
October 17, 2003
It requires only a slight change in perspective to understand the
whole rationale behind the M Teresa sainthood circus, which will
culminate in a major song and dance on October 19th. That perspective
is: the Vatican is the world's oldest, largest and richest
multinational corporation. And perhaps the most rapacious. Microsoft,
eat your heart out!
As such, it runs on sound business principles: brand building,
competition, promotion, strategic alliances. The saint business is a
perfect example of promotion and brand building: it gets enormous free
publicity (that money cannot buy) for the overall Vatican brand, and
by positioning a particular individual forcefully, it allows for brand
extension/new product development, opening up new customer bases.
The current Pope understands this basic fact. His is clearly a keen
business brain. He also believes more is better, for he has
manufactured more saints in his tenure than all his many predecessors
put together! So much so that an 85-year-old Italian cardinal, Silvio
Oddi, was moved to criticize what he called the 'saint factory' in his
memoirs. (http://www.christusrex.org/www1/news-old/4-96/es4-14-96.html)
Between 1978 and 1999, the Pope created
(http://www.atheists.org/flash.line/vatican4.htm ) 283 saints plus 819
beatifications, a near-world record already. As of now, he has
improved this to 477 saints plus 1,318 beatifications, 'more indeed
than all previous Popes combined'! ('Pope turns Vatican into saint
factory,' Indian Express/Reuters, October 14, 2003). An astonishing
record!
Some of his most dubious choices: Friar Savanarola, who terrorized
people during the Inquisition, and who was hanged to death 'on account
of the enormous crimes of which [he] had been convicted'(
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13490a.htm ); and Josemaria de
Balaguer, founder of the shadowy Opus Dei group that leads the
Vatican's most reactionary culture war agendas, including opposing
birth control, and which reports directly to the Pope.
This Pope is much more than the average godman, obviously, for he has
also pulverized the opposition: he practically did a hostile takeover
of his main competition, Marxism, or at the very least decimated it,
some say partly by forming a tactical alliance with the CIA. Even
Rupert Murdoch would be impressed.
Speaking of media barons, the Pope handles the mass media brilliantly.
In India, many Catholic priests regularly join journalism school.
Result? News hurtful to the Catholic image, for example the widespread
sex and pedophilia scandals in the US or the indictment of Catholic
nuns for crimes against humanity in Rwanda are hardly mentioned in the
Indian media.
Terrific image management, really. Top ad agencies couldn't possibly
do any better.
I have for years thought of religion as equivalent to the marketing of
soap powder, but the Vatican is especially clever at it. I think it
has something to do with the so-called Enlightenment in Europe. After
the Vatican lost its brute-force hold on the people of Europe (and not
coincidentally, they began thereafter to make intellectual progress),
it was forced to market itself as a kinder and gentler version of what
it was before.
But the Vatican now faces savvy American competition: charismatic
evangelists like Mormons, Pentecostals and Baptists. They are making
inroads into Catholic strongholds such as Latin America. In a
statement pregnant with unintended irony, the Pope complained that
they were 'preying upon his flock like wolves' (Houston Chronicle,
October 13, 1992). This, when the godman himself traveled to India and
declared boldly that all of Asia was going to be colonized by his sect
in this millennium. Good for the goose, etc.?
The Vatican utilizes its vast infrastructure, money power, and network
of propaganda contacts in such subtle ways that its victims almost
never recognize they are being taken for a ride. Interestingly enough,
it was through a damning Malayalam short story that I read years ago
that I first understood the subtleties of the saint business.
That short story was Vazhthappetta Kochappi (The Beatified Kochappi),
written, if I am not mistaken, by lapsed Catholic Ponkunnam Varki, who
often got into trouble with the faithful for letting the cat out of
the bag, so to speak. The 'beatified' refers to the state just before
sainthood is conferred, the waiting period. It is the story of one
Kochappi who, based on certain alleged miracles, is beatified and on
the high road to sainthood.
Kochappi is one of those wild eyed religious madmen, who go around
shouting, "Repent, ye sinners! For the end is nigh!", and "Ye children
of serpents, ye shall fry in hell," or words to that effect, in this
case in Malayalam. The locals tolerate this eccentric.
Then one day, Kochappi dies; and thereafter, miracles take place
regularly at his grave. The blind begin to see; lepers are cured; the
lame start to walk; infertile couples return bearing gurgling babies.
The usual media limelight. Kochappi's case is referred to the Vatican,
and he is, like M Teresa, fast tracked. He gets beatified.
The pilgrim traffic is tremendous; tens of thousands come every week;
and hoteliers, restaurateurs and vendors of mementos in the vicinity
enjoy their windfall. Apparently the way to get the great man's
blessings is to consume daily a little soil from around his grave.
There is great demand for the soil at Rs 100 per scoop, and every
night many loads of earth are trucked in to replenish what is removed
during the day by the pious. Local landowners make a nice living out
of their value added soil. All's well with the world.
And then one night, horror of horrors, Kochappi reappears, with his
trademark, "Ye children of serpents!" Apparently, he,
the-about-to-be-sainted one, had not died, but just wandered off
somewhere.
Now ask yourself, what's a businessman to do? Faced with the wholly
unwelcome prospect of losing considerable revenue, not to mention
prestige, the good folks there (including, if I remember right, the
padres and other godmen) do what every self respecting capitalist
would do: they beat Kochappi to death and bury him without further
ado!
This cutting story, in my opinion, exposes the humbug of the religion
business better than anything else I have ever read. I have looked at
saints with skepticism ever since.
That skepticism has been bolstered by the facts around three of the
saints manufactured in India (for some reason, they are all white
people, and not mere brown locals):
o St Thomas the Apostle
o St Francis Xavier of Goa
o St M Teresa (nee Agnes Bojaxhiou) of Calcutta
There is considerable mystery surrounding the Apostle St Thomas. The
conventional story that the faithful believe is that he arrived in
Kerala in 52 CE, converted seven Namboothiri Brahmins, and set up a
number of churches. Then he went to Madras, where he is said to have
been killed with a spear by Brahmins near St Thomas Mount. His
skeleton was 'discovered' in 1523 CE in a tomb on the premises of the
Kapaleeshwar temple, along with the spearhead that had allegedly
killed him.
There are only a few things wrong this story:
o There is absolutely no evidence that St Thomas went to India, as
in the Indian Union of today. The word 'India' in those days meant
anything from Ethiopia to Persia, indeed anything east of
Palestine
o Most scholars believe the Thomas fable is a later
Portuguese/missionary fabrication, deliberately confusing the
apostle with a relatively verifiable historical figure, one Thomas
of Cana, a Syrian merchant who went to Kerala to escape religious
persecution in 345 CE. For details, see The Myth of Saint Thomas
and the Mylapore Shiva Temple at hamsa.org
o There were no Namboothiri Brahmins in Kerala at the time, when it
was entirely Buddhist and Jain. Namboothiris arrived in Kerala
some 500 or 600 years later and this is on authority of E M S
Namboothiripad, veteran Marxist leader, himself
o Certified by the Vatican itself, St Thomas' skeleton has been
preserved at Ortona in Spain since 1258 CE; now it would be truly
miraculous if Thomas possessed two skeletons
The plain truth appears to be that the St Thomas tale was concocted in
order to give Christianity in India the impression of being very old
and practically native. This would have been a tactic in conversion
attempts, another tactic being the demolition of Hindu temples and the
building of churches over them. The ancient Kapaleeshwar temple itself
was demolished circa 1550 CE and converted to the San Thome Basilica
(yes, dedicated to the same St Thomas) by the Portuguese.
Now, on to the good deeds of St Francis Xavier. Here is an extract
from The Empire of the Soul by Paul William Roberts (Harper Collins,
1999):
'Xavier embodies and exemplifies the bewildering contradictions of
[the Jesuits]. The Goans of the time saw the best side of Xavier in
what little of him they saw. They knew nothing of the part he had
played in Portugal's Inquisition, nor did they know he had pleaded
with his monarch, Dom Joao, to 'order the establishment of the
Inquisition in Goa.' Most of Xavier's mass conversions -- during which
he Christianized entire villages in a stroke -- were performed in
Kerala."
'Set up as a kind of tribunal, the Inquisition was headed up by a
judge dispatched from Portugal* The palace in which these holy
terrorists ensconced themselves was known locally as Vodlem Gor -- the
Big House. It became a symbol of fear. Children were flogged and
slowly dismembered in front of their parents, whose eyelids had been
sliced off to make sure they missed nothing. Extremities were
amputated carefully, so that a person could remain conscious even when
all that remained was a torso and head. Male genitals were removed and
burned in front of wives, breasts hacked off and vaginas penetrated by
swords while husbands were forced to watch.'
'So notorious was the Inquisition in Portuguese India that word of its
horrors even reached home. The archbishop of Evora, in Portugal,
eventually wrote, "If everywhere the Inquisition was an infamous
court, the infamy, however base, however vile, however corrupt and
determined by worldly interests, it was never more so than in Goa."
And it went on for two hundred years.'
In Xavier's 'defense', Roberts says, 'Xavier was undoubtedly not the
only one to request the Inquisition -- and he didn't live long enough
to help supervise the fun himself.' Small mercies, indeed.
And finally, to our heroine M Teresa. Now MT, it appears, was an
ordinary, garden variety missionary godwoman prone to uttering pious
homilies. The good citizens of Calcutta welcomed her when she showed
up there and announced her intention to do 'good works,' whatever that
meant.
MT toiled in well-deserved obscurity for years until she got a huge
lucky break. Malcolm Muggeridge, a British newspaperman who got
religion in his old age, stumbled upon her and induced the BBC to do a
feature on her. The rest, as they say, is history. Christopher
Hitchens recounts her rise and rise in his savagely witty The Ghoul of
Calcutta (http://are.berkeley.edu/~atanu/Teresa/hitchens_nov1992.html
), quoting Dante, that 'The Pope is still fornicating with the
Emperor,' that is, ostentatious religiosity flirting with secular
power.
There's a lot of fascinating stuff out there that is ignored amidst
the unrelenting hagiography. For instance, an interview with Hitchens
after MT's death
(http://are.berkeley.edu/~atanu/Teresa/hitchens_interview.html ), and
a review of Hitchens' The Missionary Position
(http://www.ffrf.org/fttoday/august96/hakeem.html ). Hitchens
summarizes the real MT as 'a religious fundamentalist, a political
operative, a primitive sermonizer and an accomplice of worldly secular
powers.' By the miracle of propaganda, this scheming godwoman has now
been elevated to the rarefied realms of sainthood.
Lest you think Hitchens is on a monomaniacal trip to besmirch a poor
old woman, here is an article by Sunanda K Datta Ray
(http://are.berkeley.edu/~atanu/Teresa/sunanda_dattaray.html ) and
finally, a review of Aroup Chatterjee's 'Mother Teresa: the Final
Verdict,' a rather comprehensive report
(http://are.berkeley.edu/~atanu/Jarts/teresa.html ).
The picture that emerges is a little less than flattering. MT makes
great copy, though, for the Vatican's brand-building. Indian taxpayers
paid for a grand state funeral for her, unaware that she
single-handedly set back India's own brand image by ten years by
projecting a picture of a prone, impoverished and criminally negligent
country that needed a white missionary to help its destitute. Since
both the Marxists of Calcutta and MT needed to perpetuate poverty for
their own agendas, was there a little tactical alliance between the
Vatican and the Marxists on this front?
There is also the question of the large amounts of money -- untold
millions of dollars -- that were donated by the credulous, and which
disappeared into the coffers of MT's organization, never to reappear.
Or perhaps, to reappear discreetly as part of the Vatican's conversion
efforts?
And then there is the small matter of the unseemly hurry to fast-track
the godwoman to sainthood. It appears that the Vatican broke all its
guidelines about 'miracle' verification and waiting periods in its
haste to get the deed done. It took Joan of Arc 500 years to be
sainted, but MT made it in six. Clearly, we are living in 'Internet
time.'
Apparently the guidelines call for two genuine 'miracles.' In MT's case,
here are the 'miracles:'
o A woman named Monica Besra (a non Catholic at that!) who had a
tumor in her stomach, prayed to MT. Lo and behold, the cancer
disappeared. Only one slight problem: Monica's husband, and the
doctors who attended to her, say the tumor was treated. Said the
doctor: 'It is not a miracle when there is definitive clinical
evidence of her taking tubercular drugs for nine months and the
tumor disappearing.' But who cares about these minor technical
details?
o A film cameraman shot footage of MT, and lo! she was well lit,
obviously with her divine light, even though there was little
ambient light. Only one slight problem: the cameraman acknowledged
that he was using unfamiliar film for the first time, and he
probably overexposed it.
So if these are the Vatican's 'saints,' we must really hope we are
spared the Vatican's 'sinners.' And now we understand the reason for the
unseemly haste: they had better get the deed done, sealed and delivered,
before further questions crop up about the 'miracles.'
After all, the Vatican is very unhappy that the Pope did not get the
Nobel Prize this year. They made their complaint public, much the same
way a businessman took out full page ads in American newspapers
complaining that his role in the invention of the MRI had been
overlooked. This must be another marketing tactic, intended to make the
Nobel Committee think twice next year about awarding the prize to the
Pope, thus adding a final marketing triumph to his resume before he goes
on to the Great White Cathedral in the Sky.
The saint business is absolutely brilliant, whoever invented it was a
marketing genius: you get enormous publicity, the gullible pay gigantic
amounts of money, and you can attribute it all to selfless service. The
Beatified Kochappi's friends would approve.
Rajeev Srinivasan
Share your comments
What do you think about the story? [IMG]
Read what others have to say:
Number of User Comments: 99
Sub: an eye opener
Very much thought provoking article by Rajeev! Keep it up Rajeev, good
work done. I am sure you will meet a lot of critisim but ...
[IMG]
Posted by Prasad Joshi
Sub: Businesses - Fair and Foul
Even if it is granted that what Mr. Shrinivasan is saying is true, how
does it prove it to be a greater evil than the ...
[IMG]
Posted by Avi
Sub: Saint Business
Well written artcile, Rajeev. Yes, this Saint Business is just another
big business. I have always been skeptical of people who get enormous
media coverage ...
[IMG]
Posted by Padma Krishnan
Sub: The Saint Business
Simply great. Who will be our "Marketing Guru" and When,if it is not
too late?
[IMG]
Posted by Jagadish Akella
Sub: Re: The saint business
Hey Rajeev Srini, You a bitter RSS / VHP worshipper, will definitely
feel happy if someone makes Savarkar a saint and you will definitely
write ...
[IMG]
Posted by A.S.Rajan
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