Mother Teresa (1910–1997)

Mother Teresa was a Roman Catholic nun who founded the order of the Missionaries of Charity and became renowned for her work with the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, India. She earned public acclamation and numerous international awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award for national service, in 1980, and honorary U.S. citizenship in 1996. In 2003, she was beatified by Pope John Paul II.

Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Macedonia, Mother Teresa was the third and youngest [Page 979]child of a Catholic Albanian family. She left Skopje at the age of 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns, who did missionary work in India. She did her novitiate in Darjeeling and professed her initial vows as nun in 1931, when she took the name Mary Teresa after Thérèse of Lisieux, the 19th-century French Carmelite nun.

From 1931 to 1948, Mother Teresa taught geography and catechism at St. Mary's High School for girls in Calcutta, becoming the school's principal in 1944. During this time, she was semicloistered, in that the Loreto nuns were not allowed to leave the convent except for an emergency. That emergency was the war and famine that swept Calcutta in the 1940s. By 1946, she even had to venture outside the convent to beg for food to feed her students. Her encounters with the poverty and squalor of Calcutta, however, left a huge impression on her, and she felt compelled to leave the Loreto sisters in order to work with the poorest of the poor.

In 1948, she was granted permission to start her labor in the slums of Calcutta, when, without any funds, she started an open-air school for slum children. The school soon attracted many volunteers, especially young women from St. Mary's High School. They became her first novices when in 1950 Mother Teresa received permission from the Vatican to start her own religious order, the Missionaries of Charity. Their primary mission and fourth vow was the wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor.

The mission born in Calcutta through the Kalighat home for the dying, the Shanti Nagar home for lepers, and an orphanage, spread by the 1960s all over India. Today the work of the more than 4,000 nuns is shared by the Missionaries of Charity Brothers, the Lay Missionaries of Charity, the Corpus Christi Movement for Priests, and the Movement of the Co-Workers of Mother Teresa. The work continues through orphanages, AIDS hospices, and charity centers worldwide, where the Missionaries of Charity care for the homeless, alcoholics, shut-ins, ex-prostitutes, the aged and disabled, the poor and refugees, and victims of natural disasters, famines, and epidemics all over the world.