Mother Teresa

Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, later known as Mother Teresa, was born on 26 August 1910 in Skopje, then a city in the Kosovo Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire and today the capital of North Macedonia. She was the youngest child of Albanian Catholic parents, Nikollë Bojaxhiu, a merchant and local civic figure, and Dranafile Bojaxhiu. Her father died in 1919, after which the family lived in reduced circumstances under her mother’s care. The household was devout: parish life, a Marian sodality, and practical help for poorer neighbors formed her early years. Accounts of Jesuit missions in Bengal, together with her mother’s example, shaped her wish to enter missionary religious life. In 1928 she left home for Loreto Abbey, Rathfarnham, in Ireland, where she learned English for the congregation’s Indian schools, took the name Sister Mary Teresa after Thérèse of Lisieux, and was soon sent to India.

She reached India in 1929, entered the Loreto novitiate in Darjeeling, made first vows in 1931 and solemn vows in 1937, and for nearly two decades taught geography and later served as headmistress at St. Mary’s High School for Girls in Calcutta, living the enclosed Loreto life at Entally. In September 1946, traveling by train to the annual retreat in Darjeeling, she experienced what she later called a call within a call: an interior conviction that she must leave the enclosure and serve the poorest people in the city’s slums. After permissions from her superiors and from Rome, she left Loreto in 1948, received brief medical training with the Medical Mission Sisters in Patna, and began work in the Motijhil slum, wearing the white sari with a blue border that became her congregation’s habit. On 7 October 1950 Archbishop Ferdinand Périer of Calcutta erected the Missionaries of Charity as a diocesan congregation. Its members added to poverty, chastity, and obedience a fourth vow of wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor.

Early Calcutta foundations included Nirmal Hriday, a home for the dying opened in 1952 in a former pilgrims’ hostel at Kalighat; Shishu Bhavan for abandoned children; and later centres for people with leprosy. From the 1960s the work spread beyond India. Pope Paul VI granted the congregation pontifical status in 1965. Active and contemplative branches for sisters, a related brotherhood, and lay coworkers followed, with houses on several continents. Mother Teresa became an internationally known public figure, addressing the United Nations and receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, India’s Bharat Ratna, and other honours. She remained superior general until 1997, traveling widely despite heart disease and other illness in her last decades. Letters published after her death showed that for much of her later life she endured a prolonged sense of spiritual darkness even while the public work continued. She became an Indian citizen and identified her vocation with Calcutta and with people dying without family or resources.

Mother Teresa died in Calcutta on 5 September 1997. Her funeral was conducted with state honours in India, and she was buried at the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity on A.J.C. Bose Road. Pope John Paul II beatified her in 2003 after acceptance of a miracle attributed to her intercession; Pope Francis canonized her as Saint Teresa of Calcutta on 4 September 2016. The Roman Catholic Church keeps her feast on 5 September. She is associated in particular with World Youth Day. Historical writing records both the global scale of the charitable network she founded and debate among physicians, journalists, and scholars about medical standards in some homes, as well as her public opposition to abortion and contraception. She remains one of the most widely recognized religious figures of the twentieth century, identified above all with organized care for people living and dying in extreme poverty in Calcutta and with the congregation established for that purpose.