Something Beautiful for God

Cover of 1971 edition

Something Beautiful for God is a 1971 book by Malcolm Muggeridge on Mother Teresa. 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 (ISBN 978-0002157698).

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 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.