It should go without saying in a magazine such as Chronicles, but apparently it does not: Contrary to Srdja Trifkovic’s “Europe and America” (Views, May), Mother Teresa deserves better than to be grouped alongside murderers and charlatans such as Mao, Che, Ho, and Mandela; and, if Dr. Trifkovic believes service in the Third World renders one a fool of the same order as pop Princess Di, then it is hard to see why he spends so much time lamenting the loss of the Christian Faith, of which Mother Teresa was an exemplar.

I am often in agreement with Dr. Trifkovic, but here his Balkan prejudices, however usually well founded, have gotten the better of him.

        —Fred Kelly
Monroe, NY

Dr. Trifkovic Replies:

I do not pretend that my “Balkan prejudices,” or any other of which I may be accused (philo-Hellenic, pre-New-Deal-American, Christian, anti-E.U.-European) are absent from my Weltanschauung, but I endeavor to be aware of them.

That they are an integral part of who and what I am goes without saying.  Those who claim to be free from prejudice would have you believe that they love your children as passionately as their own.  They are lying, or they are mad, or both.

I am sorry that Mr. Kelly sees my somewhat unkind reference to Mother Teresa as an expression of those “prejudices.”  I wish that he had see it as a Rockfordesquely “insensitive”—that is, honest—expression of my considered opinion that she was a manipulative and therefore corrupt woman of uncertain motives who enjoyed grandstanding in the global media circus in a manner unworthy of a would-be saint.  The incident of her birth and ethnicity is irrelevant to this assessment, which I would prefer to elaborate elsewhere if necessary, and for which I am certain to be judged when the time comes.