Mother Teresa (1910-1997)

Mother Teresa of Calcutta was born on August 27,1910, as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, in Uskup, Yugoslavia (now Skopje, capital of the Republic of Macedonia). She was of Albanian descent and the youngest of three children. At the age of 12, she felt the strong call of God and knew she would become a missionary. At 18, she joined the Order of the Sisters of Our Lady of Loreto, in Ireland, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India. There, she took the name of “Teresa,” after St. Teresa of Lisieux, patron saint of the missionaries. Six weeks later, she went to India as a teacher and taught at the order's St. Mary's High School in Calcutta for 17 years. She took her final vows as a nun in 1937.

In 1946, Mother Teresa believed she received a divine inspiration to serve the “poorest of the poor.” She left the order, convent, and teaching to, as she put it, “follow Christ into the slums.” Seeing Jesus particularly in the poor and suffering, she founded the Order of Missionaries of Charity in 1950, a Roman Catholic congregation of women dedicated to serving the destitute of India. The order provides food for the needy and operates hospitals, schools, orphanages youth centers, and shelters for lepers and the dying poor. In 1950, her order received canonical sanction from Pope Pius XII, and in 1965, it became a pontifical congregation subject only to the pope. At the time of her death, her order included hundreds of centers in more than 90 countries, with some 4,000 nuns and hundreds of thousands of lay workers.

Mother Teresa held deeply conservative views concerning divorce, abortion, and contraception but rallied particularly against the squalor and loneliness of the lepers and the last hours of the terminally ill. A person of great humility, her belief was that “in this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.”

Mother Teresa received several awards, both in India and internationally, for her humanitarian service. The most notable were the first Pope John XXIII Peace Prize (1972), the Albert Schweitzer International Prize (1975), and the Nobel Peace Prize (1979). Owing to a worsening heart condition, she retired in 1997 and died of cardiac arrest in India on September 5 of that year. She was 87 years old.

For her dedicated service to the poor in India, Mother Teresa was popularly called a “Living Saint” and the “Saint of the Gutters.”

After her death, the process to declare her a saint was begun in 1999. The late Pope John Paul II issued a special dispensation to expedite the process of her canonization. On October 19, 2003, Mother Teresa was beatified, earning the title “Blessed” in the shortest time after passing of any person so designated in the history of the Roman Catholic Church.