What?

So I was reading this at the Huffington Post about Hitchen's "exclusive" new article in Newsweek about Mother Theresa's religious struggles, and I came across this incongruous passage:

...really, just how exclusive could Hitch's latest reflections, in which he refers to Teresa as a "confused old lady," be? The man has already got a decade-old book (The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice) on the subject, which is itself cited in the very Time article to which Newsweek is exclusively responding. Heck, Hitch may have already scooped himself, for, as he notes: "Here might be the place to declare my interest, and to state that at the invitation of the Vatican, I testified against the beatification and canonization of Mother Teresa, as well as to confess that I tend to believe that the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence."

What? Why on Earth would the Vatican invite someone like Hitch to "testify" as to Mother Theresa's religious worthiness? And...why would he go? If that's the way things work now, you guys may just get to witness some live-blogging from the next Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, wherein I recount my argument against the doctrine of the infallibility of the word of God, citing the "absence of evidence" principle .