An atheist group at Dartmouth College is planning an event aimed at skewering the reputation of the late Mother Teresa.



The Atheists Humanists Agnostics (AHA) club sent out a campus-wide e-mail announcing the program on Tuesday and promising a “full-out romp against why one of the most beloved people of the century, Mother Teresa, is as Hitchens put it… ‘a lying, thieving Albanian dwarf.’”

The e-mail says the group plans to screen an anti-Mother Teresa film, discuss Hitchens’ book, Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, and question how the public has been “conned into thinking this woman [Teresa] was good.”



The e-mail states Teresa, who is on her way to sainthood in the Catholic church, “was not a friend of the poor,” but “was a friend of poverty.”



The email links to a now infamous article by the late Christopher Hitchens which attempts to debunk much of the lore that surrounds Teresa.



The event has ignited controversy on the Ivy League campus, with students telling Campus Reform they were upset AHA was hosting such an event.



“It’s easy for a group of privileged Ivy League students who have never experienced poverty to meet in a ‘super secret room’ and think themselves as intellectuals by bashing Mother Teresa,” Melanie Wilcox, Executive Editor of the conservative Dartmouth Review, told Campus Reform.



“I’d like to know what they have done, if anything, to help the needy,” she added.



AHA President Adam Hann, however, defended the event, but admitted he had intentionally used “provocative” language in the e-mail to excite interest among students.



“What I like to do is, when there are areas that people just get vitriol or angry even for bringing it up, I like to go and have that discussion,” said Hann.



Hann added that he estimates about five to ten people will participate in the event slated for this Saturday.



Mother Teresa is widely known for founding the Missionaries of Charities, a charity tasked with aiding the poor. She was beatified in 2003 by Pope John Paul II, a step toward possible sainthood.

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