Malcolm Muggeridge Encounters “Something Beautiful for God”

In these September days — as we celebrate the holy life and incredibly profound vocation of Saint Teresa of Calcutta — it is good to recall the remarkable story of her good friend Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990), a well-known British writer and radio and television journalist whose life was deeply involved with some of the most dramatic events of the twentieth century.

He was baptized Anglican as an infant, but his childhood was shaped by the optimistic socialism of his father. Malcolm grew up thinking that an earthly “utopia” might be built by social engineering, but this idea never satisfied entirely the vast and seemingly contradictory longings of his heart. From an early age, Jesus attracted him with the promise of Eternity. From Scripture, literature, and friendship with some devout Anglicans, he learned the ways of prayer, and would never entirely forget them. At the same time, his heart was pulled by pride, worldly ambitions, and selfish desires. His vivid consciousness of his own inner incoherence frustrated and afflicted him for many years.

As a young adult, Malcolm was an ardent admirer of the Bolshevik Revolution and the international Communist movement as it emerged in the 1920s. He became a journalist and, in 1931, a Moscow correspondent for a British newspaper. There, Malcolm’s socialist dream shattered against the hard reality of Stalin’s brutal reign of terror. Without authorization, he traveled to Ukraine and saw the horror and devastation of a politically engineered famine that killed millions of Ukrainians. He also came to a crowded Ukrainian church in Kyiv on a Sunday — crowded with hungry desperate people singing the Liturgy, begging for the mercy of a God who had suffered on the Cross. In this church, Malcolm began to realize that suffering (only made horribly worse by Communism, and in one way or another tragically unavoidable for all of us) didn’t have to be the ultimate frustration of human existence. Malcolm caught a glimpse of the God he had not entirely stopped seeking: the God who had come to dwell with us and to take our sufferings upon Himself. In that Ukrainian church, he sensed the closeness of Christ and His love to these suffering people who were beyond all earthly hopes.

Still, Malcolm wrestled for decades with his fickle, divided heart. He also became famous in postwar Britain as an editor and writer, television personality, and pioneering international documentary maker. This work would bring him to Calcutta, India, in 1966, to make a documentary about a Catholic nun who had founded a religious order dedicated to serving “the poorest of the poor.” In some ways, Malcolm Muggeridge “introduced” Mother Teresa to the affluent Western world through this landmark documentary, Something Beautiful for God.

He also came to know Mother Teresa as a concrete witness to Christ and a friend who cared about him. She amazed him as someone who was eminently practical, who lived “in the world,” but who did not depend on human powers or human success. Instead, she saw and loved Christ in everyone, especially the poorest people, the street-dwellers of Calcutta, the abandoned sick and dying, those she found who had no other hope. Malcolm recognized in Mother Teresa a sign of the love of God that alone could give meaning to the whole of human existence, the love that transforms even suffering and death. He knew that human projects and political powers were too small (and too tainted) to produce a joy that was eternal. But in Mother Teresa’s witness Malcolm saw living faith in the Incarnation, in the God who chose to humble Himself out of love.

Around this time, Malcolm publicly professed adherence for Christianity, and worked more openly with Christian themes in the remaining years of his life. He still felt intellectually alienated from the Catholic Church by some negative aspects of the Church’s historical profile and often flawed leaders. But through the encouragement and prayers of Mother Teresa and many others, he was slowly falling in love with the Church. This love finally prevailed, and he was received into the Catholic Church in 1982.