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funds. It is safe to say, however, that if all the money had been used on one project it would have been possible, say, to give Calcutta the finest teaching hospital in the entire Third World. That such is neither Mother Teresa’s intention nor her desire may be inferred from the Muggeridge incident. It may also be inferred from her preference for spreading the money thin and for devoting it to religious and missionary work rather than the sustained relief of deprivation. In any event, if she is claiming that the order does not solicit money from the rich and powerful, or accept it from them, this is easily shown to be false.
    The apologists generally claim that Mother Teresa is too innocent to count money or to take the measure of those who offer it, or to reckon that they obtain some benefit from their supposed generosity in the form of virtue-by-association. Forgetting for a moment her boast that she does not accept eye-of-the-needle subventions in the first place, we might agree that this argument had merit in the case of thelate Robert Maxwell. Mr. Maxwell inveigled a not-unwilling Mother Teresa into a fund-raising scheme run by his newspaper group, and then, it seems (having got her to join him in some remarkable publicity photographs), he made off with the money. But Maxwell did succeed in fooling some very experienced and unsentimental people in his day, and although it might be asked how Mother Teresa had time to spare for such a wicked and greedy man, it can still be argued with some degree of plausibility that she was a blameless party to his cynical manipulations.
    However, it is difficult, if not impossible, to assert this in the case of Mr. Charles Keating. Keating is now serving a ten-year sentence for his part in the Savings and Loan scandal—undoubtedly one of the greatest frauds in American history. In the early 1980s, during the booming, deregulated years of Reagan’s first term, Keating, among other operators, mounted a sustained and criminal assault on the deposits of America’s small investors. His methods were those of the false prospectus and the political bribe. (Washington vernacular still contains the expression “the Keating Five,” in honor of the five United States senators who did him favors while receiving vast campaign donations in the form of other people’s money.) Keating had political ambitions as well as financial ones, and as a conservative Catholic fundamentalist had served Richard Nixonas a member of a much-mocked commission to investigate the ill effects of pornography.
    At the height of his success as a thief, Keating made donations (not out of his own pocket, of course) to Mother Teresa in the sum of one and a quarter million dollars. He also granted her the use of his private jet. In return, Mother Teresa allowed Keating to make use of her prestige on several important occasions and gave him a personalized crucifix which he took everywhere with him.
    In 1992, after a series of political and financial crises and the most expensive bailout operation in the history of the American taxpayer, Keating was finally brought to trial. He appeared before the Superior Court in Los Angeles (his “Lincoln Savings and Loan” had been a largely Californian operation) where he was heard by the later-notorious Judge Lance Ito. The trial could have only one outcome: the maximum sentence allowable under California law.
    During the course of the trial, Mother Teresa wrote to the court seeking clemency for Mr. Keating. She gave no explanation of her original involvement with the defendant and offered no direct testimony mitigating his looting of the thrift industry. The letter, in its original form, appears opposite.
    One is struck immediately by two things. First, though the claim about “free service to the poorestof the poor” is made in almost the same words as it was made to Muggeridge, the related claim that the rich receive no quid pro quo seems to have disappeared. Then there is the