''Something Beautiful for God'' is a 1971 book by

Malcolm Muggeridge Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge (24 March 1903 – 14 November 1990) was an English journalist and satirist. His father, H. T. Muggeridge, was a socialist politician and one of the early Labour Party Members of Parliament (for Romford, in Essex). In ...

Mother Teresa Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu, MC (; 26 August 1910 – 5 September 1997), better known as Mother Teresa ( sq, Nënë Tereza), was an Indian-Albanian Catholic nun who, in 1950, founded the Missionaries of Charity. Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu () was ...

. The book was based on a 1969 BBC documentary on Mother Teresa (also entitled ''Something Beautiful for God'') that Muggeridge had undertaken. In his book Muggeridge was a former left-wing radical. He became disillusioned with communism when he was the Moscow correspondent for the Guardian newspaper. He ended up joining Gareth Jones of the Times of London as the only two Western journalists to expose Stalin's Forced famine in Ukraine. The Soviets killed four million people in the Holodomor genocide. When the former communist and continuing agnostic researched the work of Mother Teresa's order of nuns in Calcutta's House of the Dying, he experienced a religious conversion which eventually led him to enter the Catholic Church in 1982. The book was first published by

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News C ...

().

Criticism

In his book '' The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice'' and also in a 1994 documentary entitled ''Hell's Angel'' the journalist

Christopher Hitchens Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was a British-American author and journalist who wrote or edited over 30 books (including five essay collections) on culture, politics, and literature. Born and educated in England, ...

derided Muggeridge as "that old fraud and mountebank". Hitchens dismissed as risible the account of a "divine light" miracle which Muggeridge claimed to have witnessed in Calcutta's House of the Dying. On viewing footage of the film ''Something Beautiful for God'', Muggeridge attributed the clarity of the images to Teresa's "divine light". Although Muggeridge clearly explains in the book how he attempted the same feat in another documentary in the Middle East and it did not work, Hitchens still considers that Muggeridge's subjective interpretation of the events he witnessed in Calcutta and the consequent publicity surrounding those events contributed to Mother Teresa's seraphic reputation.Hell's Angel, BBC, 1994

References

1971 non-fiction books Mother Teresa Indian biographies {{RC-bio-book-stub