Mother Teresa, also known as Saint Mother Teresa, was an Albanian-Indian Catholic nun who founded the Missionaries of Charity and is now a Catholic saint. She was born on August 26, 1910, and died on September 5, 1997. She grew up in a pious Catholic household after being born in Skopje, which was then a part of the Ottoman Empire. She joined the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland when she was eighteen, and then she went to India, where she spent the most of her life and continued her missionary work. The Catholic Church declared her to be Saint Teresa of Calcutta on September 4, 2016. Her feast day is now celebrated on September 5, the anniversary of her death.
She founded the Missionaries of Charity, a religious order, in 1950 with the intended goal of helping “the poorest of the poor” in Calcutta’s slums. Over the years, the order expanded to operate in more than 133 countries. As of 2012, more than 4,500 nuns were running soup kitchens, dispensaries, mobile clinics, orphanages, schools, and residences for those dying of TB, leprosy, and HIV/AIDS. In addition to the chastity, poverty, and obedience vows, members of the order additionally make a fourth vow: to provide “wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor.”
Among the many honors bestowed upon Mother Teresa were the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and the Ramon Magsaysay Peace Prize in 1962. Books, documentaries, and movies have been influenced by her life and work. Navin Chawla’s authorized biography of her was published in 1992. On September 6, 2017, she and St. Francis Xavier were designated co-patron of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Calcutta. She was criticized, meanwhile, for the subpar living circumstances and absence of pain management or medical attention in her homes for the terminally ill.
Mother Teresa
Anjezë Gonxhe (or Gonxha) was Mother Teresa’s given name. Bojaxhiu (Gonxhe means “flower bud” in Albanian; Anjezë is a cognate of Agnes). She was born in Skopje, the Ottoman Empire’s (now North Macedonia’s) capital, on August 26, 1910, into a Kosovar Albanian family. The day following her birth, she was baptized in Skopje. Later on, she thought of her baptism day, August 27, as her “real birthday.”
She was the youngest of Dranafile Bojaxhiu (Bernai) and Nikollë’s children. In 1919, when she was eight years old, her father, who was active in Albanian-community politics in Ottoman Macedonia, was likely poisoned, a crime attributed to Serbian spies. He had been to Belgrade for a political gathering. His family was from Mirdita (modern-day Albania), although he was born in Prizren (present-day Kosovo). Her children think her mother was from Bishtazhin, a village close to Gjakova.
In her early years, Anjezë was captivated by tales of missionaries’ lives and their work in Bengal, according to a biography by Joan Graff Clucas. By the time she was twelve, she was certain that she should enter a religious order. She frequently made pilgrimages to the shrine of the Black Madonna of Vitina-Letnice, and on August 15, 1928, she worshiped there, her resolve renewed. At the age of 18, Anjezë left home in 1928 to study English with the Sisters of Loreto at Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham, Ireland, in preparation for becoming a missionary. In India, the Sisters of Loreto taught English. She never again saw her sibling or mother.
Before relocating to Tirana in 1934, her family resided in Skopje. She was viewed as a dangerous Vatican spy under the communist leader Enver Hoxha. Mother Teresa was refused the chance to see her mother and sister, even though she made numerous requests and numerous countries made requests on her behalf. Anjezë herself could only travel to Albania five years after the fall of the communist regime, and both of them perished under Hoxha’s rule. In his book “Our Mother Teresa,” Dom Lush Gjergji recounts one of her visits to the embassy, where she sobbed as she left the structure, saying:
Dear God, I can understand and accept that I should suffer, but it is so hard to understand and accept why my mother has to suffer. In her old age she has no other wish than to see us one last time.
After traveling to India in 1929, she started her novitiate in Darjeeling, in the lower Himalayas, where she taught at St. Teresa’s School, which was close to her convent, and learnt Bengali. On May 24, 1931, Mother Teresa made her first religious vows. Because a nun in the monastery had already selected that name, she decided to use the Spanish spelling of Teresa in honor of Thérèse de Lisieux, the patroness of missionaries.
As accordance of Loreto tradition, Mother Teresa assumed the role of “Mother” when she professed her solemn vows on May 14, 1937, while teaching at the Loreto convent school in Entally, eastern Calcutta. After over two decades of service, she was named its headmistress in 1944.
Mother Teresa loved being a teacher at the school, but she grew more and more alarmed by the poverty in Calcutta. The Direct Action Day in August 1946 marked the start of a period of unrest between Muslims and Hindus, while the Bengal famine of 1943 brought suffering and death to the city.
She felt compelled to assist the impoverished people of India for Jesus in 1946 while traveling by rail to Darjeeling. She requested permission to leave the school, and was granted it. She chose a white sari with two blue borders as the order’s habit when she formed the Missionaries of Charity in 1950.
Missionaries of Charity
Mother Teresa subsequently referred to her experience as “the call within the call” as she took the train from Calcutta to the Loreto convent in Darjeeling on September 10, 1946, for her yearly retreat. “I was supposed to leave the convent and live among the impoverished, helping them. It was a directive. It would have been a breach of confidence to fail. “Though no one knew it at the time, Sister Teresa had just become Mother Teresa,” wrote Joseph Langford, MC, the founder of her priestly order, the Missionaries of Charity Fathers.
She adopted Indian citizenship, spent several months in Patna receiving basic medical training at Holy Family Hospital, and then ventured into the slums, establishing a school in Motijhil, Calcutta, before she started working with the poor and hungry. In 1948, she started her missionary work with the poor, replacing her traditional Loreto habit with a simple white cotton sari with a blue border.
The prime minister and other Indian authorities were soon impressed by her efforts. In her diary, Mother Teresa described her first year as challenging. Throughout these early months, she struggled with uncertainty, loneliness, and the desire to return to the comforts of convent life while begging for food and supplies because she had no money:
Our Lord wants me to be a free nun covered with the poverty of the cross. Today, I learned a good lesson. The poverty of the poor must be so hard for them. While looking for a home I walked and walked till my arms and legs ached. I thought how much they must ache in body and soul, looking for a home, food and health. Then, the comfort of Loreto [her former congregation] came to tempt me. “You have only to say the word and all that will be yours again”, the Tempter kept on saying. … Of free choice, my God, and out of love for you, I desire to remain and do whatever be your Holy will in my regard. I did not let a single tear come.
Mother Teresa obtained Vatican approval for the diocesan congregation—later known as the Missionaries of Charity—on October 7, 1950. According to her, it would take care of “the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone”.
With the assistance of Calcutta authorities, Mother Teresa established her first hospice in 1952. She renamed it Kalighat, the Home of the Pure Heart (Nirmal Hriday) and transformed an abandoned Hindu temple into the Kalighat Home for the Dying, which is free for the impoverished. Those who were taken to their homes were given access to medical care and the chance to pass away honorably in accordance with their religious beliefs: Muslims were to read the Quran, Hindus were to drink Ganges water, and Catholics were to undergo severe unction. “A beautiful death” , remarked Mother Teresa, “is for people who lived like animals to die like angels—loved and wanted.”
She established Shanti Nagar (City of Peace), a hospice for leprosy patients. In Calcutta, the Missionaries of Charity set up leprosy outreach clinics where they offered food, medicine, and bandages. Mother Teresa established Nirmala Shishu Bhavan, the Children’s Home of the Immaculate Heart, in 1955 as a shelter for orphans and homeless youth after the Missionaries of Charity took in an increasing number of these children.
By the 1960s, the community had established leprosy houses, hospices, and orphanages all over India as it started to draw members and funds. In 1965, Mother Teresa opened a home in Venezuela with five sisters, further growing the group overseas. In the 1970s, the congregation established homes and foundations in the United States as well as several nations in Asia, Africa, and Europe. In 1968, houses were established in Italy (Rome), Tanzania, and Austria.
In 1963, the Missionaries of Charity Brothers were established, and in 1976, the Sisters established a contemplative branch. Both lay Catholics and non-Catholics joined the Lay Missionaries of Charity, the Sick and Suffering Co-Workers, and the Co-Workers of Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa established the Corpus Christi Movement for Priests in 1981 in response to the pleas of numerous priests. In 1984, she and Joseph Langford launched the Missionaries of Charity Fathers to integrate the priesthood’s resources with the Missionaries of Charity’s vocational goals.
The 13-member Calcutta congregation expanded to over 4,000 sisters by 1997, who oversaw AIDS hospices, orphanages, and charity centers across the globe, providing care for refugees, the elderly, the blind, the disabled, alcoholics, the impoverished and homeless, and those affected by famine, floods, and epidemics. About 450 brothers and 5,000 sisters were part of the Missionaries of Charity by 2007, and they ran 600 missions, schools, and shelters throughout 120 countries.
Mother Teresa Charity
“I am Albanian by blood,” Mother Teresa declared. An Indian by citizenship. I am a Catholic nun by faith. Regarding my vocation, I am a part of the world. Regarding my heart, I am wholly a part of Jesus’ heart.
Speaking Bengali, Albanian, Serbo-Croatian, English, and Hindi fluently, she occasionally traveled outside of India for humanitarian purposes. Among these was a trip to Belfast during the Troubles in 1971 with four of her sisters. Some discomfort resulted from her suggestion that the conditions she had discovered warranted an ongoing mission. Despite the support and welcome from the local community, Mary and her sisters reportedly left the city abruptly in 1973 due to pressure from senior clergy who felt that “the missionary traffic should be in other direction.”
Mother Teresa mediated a brief cease-fire between the Israeli army and Palestinian militants during the height of the Siege of Beirut in 1982, saving 37 children who were stranded in a front-line hospital. She traveled across the conflict area to the hospital with Red Cross personnel in order to remove the young patients.
She extended her work to Communist nations that had turned away the Missionaries of Charity as Eastern Europe became more accessible in the late 1980s. Unfazed by criticism of her anti-abortion and anti-divorce stance, she launched dozens of projects: “No matter who says what, you should accept it with a smile and do your own work.” Following the 1988 earthquake, she traveled to Armenia and met with Soviet Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov.
Mother Teresa traveled to Armenia to help earthquake victims, radiation victims at Chernobyl, and the needy in Ethiopia. She made her first trip back to Albania in 1991, when she opened a Missionaries of Charity Brothers house in Tirana.
The Missionaries of Charity ran 517 missions throughout more than 100 nations by 1996. Serving the “poorest of the poor” in 450 centers across the world, the Missionaries of Charity’s sisterhood grew from twelve to thousands. In the South Bronx neighborhood of New York City, the first Missionaries of Charity home was founded in the United States. By 1984, the congregation had 19 locations around the nation.
Volunteer India
Mother Teresa received a diplomatic passport from the Indian government under the name Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu. In 1962, she was awarded the Padma Shri, and in 1969, she was given the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding. She subsequently won other Indian honors, such as the Bharat Ratna in 1980, which is the country’s highest civilian honor. Navin Chawla’s official biography of Mother Teresa was released in 1992. Some Hindus in Calcutta venerate her as a goddess.
On August 28, 2010, the Indian government released a commemorative ₹5 coin, which represents the amount of money Mother Teresa possessed when she first arrived in India, to mark the 100th anniversary of her birth. President Pratibha Patil stated, “Clad in a white sari with a blue border, she and the sisters of Missionaries of Charity became a symbol of hope to many—namely, the aged, the destitute, the unemployed, the diseased, the terminally ill, and those abandoned by their families.”
Not all Indians have a positive opinion of Mother Teresa. Born and reared in Calcutta, physician Aroup Chatterjee spent years working as an activist in the city’s slums before relocating to the UK. He claimed that he “never even saw any nuns in those slums.” In a 2003 book critical of Mother Teresa, he detailed his study, which included over 100 interviews with nuns, volunteers, and other people acquainted with the Missionaries of Charity.
She was accused by Chatterjee of inflating the amount of work her mission accomplished, abusing the resources and advantages available to her, and fostering a “cult of suffering” and a skewed, unfavorable perception of Calcutta. He claims that following Mother Teresa’s passing in 1997, several of the hygienic issues he had criticized—like the reuse of needles—improved.
Saint Teresa of Calcutta
The city was misrepresented by Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, who served as mayor of Calcutta from 2005 to 2010, who claimed that “she had no significant impact on the poor of this city,” glorified illness rather than treating it, and said that “Calcutta was never a city of lepers and beggars, as Mother Teresa presented it.” Despite their disagreement with Mother Teresa over the Christian Dalits, the Hindu right’s Bharatiya Janata Party honored her in her final days and sent an envoy to her funeral. However, the government’s decision to give her a state funeral was contested by Vishwa Hindu Parishad.
Secretary Giriraj Kishore accused her of favoring Christians and performing “secret baptisms” of the dead, claiming that “her first duty was to the Church and social service was incidental.” The Indian biweekly Frontline referred to the accusations as “patently false” and said that they had “made no impact on the public perception of her work, especially in Calcutta” in a front-page homage. While praising her “selfless caring,” boldness, and enthusiasm, the tribute’s author criticized Teresa’s public anti-abortion effort and her assertion that she was not political.
Mother Teresa’s goal, according to Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the Hindu right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, was “to convert the person, who was being served, into a Christian” in February 2015. The RSS criticized the media for “distorting facts about Bhagwat’s remarks” and backed Bhagwat’s judgment with former spokesperson M. G. Vaidhya. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, CPI leader Atul Anjan, and Trinamool Congress MP Derek O’Brien all objected to Bhagwat’s remarks. During D. S. Satyaranjan’s registrarship, the Senate of Serampore College (University), the nation’s first modern university, granted him an honorary doctorate in 1991.
Mother Teresa Charity Controversy
Mother Teresa’s clinics received millions of dollars in donations, but they lacked medical care, systematic diagnosis, enough nutrition, and enough analgesics for people in agony, according to a report written by Canadian scholars Serge Larivée, Geneviève Chénard, and Carole Sénéchal.
The three academics agreed that “Mother Teresa believed the sick must suffer like Christ on the cross” It was claimed that by building state-of-the-art palliative care facilities, the extra funds might have improved the health of the city’s impoverished.
English columnist Christopher Hitchens was one of Mother Teresa’s most vocal detractors, writing in a 2003 piece:
This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.
When she decided to get cutting-edge therapy for her heart problem, Hitchens accused her of being hypocritical. According to Hitchens, “her intention was not to help people” and she misled donors about the use of their money. “I learned from our conversation that she wasn’t trying to reduce poverty, and she reassured me of this. She was trying to increase the Catholic population. ‘I’m not a social worker,’ she pursued. This is not the reason I do it. For Christ, I do it. For the church, I do it.
Mother Teresa Canonization
Pope Francis acknowledged a second miracle credited to Mother Teresa on December 17, 2015, according to the Vatican Press Office. This miracle was the 2008 recovery of a Brazilian man who had many brain tumors. When the pope was in Brazil in July of 2013, the miracle was initially brought to the notice of the postulation (the officials in charge of the cause) during World Youth Day celebrations. From June 19–26, 2015, a follow-up inquiry was conducted in Brazil. It was then turned over to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, which issued a decree acknowledging the investigation’s completion.
On September 4, 2016, she was canonized by Pope Francis in a ceremony held in Vatican City’s St. Peter’s Square. The ceremony was attended by tens of thousands of people, including 1,500 homeless persons from all over Italy and 15 government delegations. Mother Teresa’s hometown of Skopje scheduled a week-long celebration of her canonization, which was broadcast live on the Vatican channel and streamed online. The Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, India, held a special Mass.
Spiritual Life
“Where did Mother Teresa find the strength and perseverance to place herself completely at the service of others?” asked Pope John Paul II in his analysis of her actions and accomplishments. She discovered it in prayer and in the quiet reflection on the Sacred Heart and Holy Face of Jesus Christ. In private, Mother Teresa struggled with her religious convictions and had questions about them for about 50 years, until the end of her life. Mother Teresa was distressed by her lack of faith and voiced serious questions about God’s existence:
Where is my faith? Even deep down[…] there is nothing but emptiness and darkness.[…] If there be God – please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul.
Similar feelings of spiritual apathy were experienced by other saints, such as Teresa’s namesake Thérèse of Lisieux, who described it as a “night of nothingness”. These skepticisms, according to James Langford, were normal and would not prevent canonization.
Mother Teresa recounted a brief moment of restored faith following a decade of skepticism. She was praying for Pope Pius XII at a requiem Mass following his death in 1958 when she felt relieved of “the long darkness: that strange suffering.” Her spiritual dryness reappeared after five weeks.
Over the course of 66 years, Mother Teresa addressed numerous letters to her superiors and confessors, most notably to Jesuit priest Celeste van Exem, who has been her spiritual advisor since the Missionaries of Charity were founded, and Archbishop Ferdinand Perier of Calcutta. She asked that her correspondence be deleted because she was worried that “people will think more of me – less of Jesus.”
Nevertheless, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light collected the letters. “Jesus has a very special love for you,” Mother Teresa wrote to Michael van der Peet, a spiritual confidant. For me, however, the emptiness and quiet are so overwhelming that I gaze but fail to see; I listen but fail to hear; and my mouth moves [during prayer] but fails to speak. Please pray for me, asking that I give Him complete control.
“In the example of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta we have a clear illustration of the fact that time devoted to God in prayer not only does not detract from effective and loving service to our neighbor but is in fact the inexhaustible source of that service,” Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his first encyclical, Deus caritas est, citing Mother Teresa three times and using her life to illustrate one of the encyclical’s main points. She stated, “It is only by mental prayer and spiritual reading that we can cultivate the gift of prayer.”
Mother Teresa was affected by Franciscan spirituality and revered Francis of Assisi, despite the fact that her organization had nothing to do with the Franciscan orders. Many of the Sisters of Charity’s vows and their emphasis on ministry are similar, and they recite the prayer of Saint Francis every morning at Mass during the thanksgiving after Communion. Francis placed a strong emphasis on chastity, poverty, obedience, and submission to Christ. He spent a large portion of his life helping the underprivileged, especially lepers.
Co-Patron of Calcutta Archdiocese
Mother Teresa will be named co-patron of the Calcutta Archdiocese on September 6, 2017, at a Mass in the Cathedral of the Most Holy Rosary, Sister Mary Prema Pierick, Superior-General of the Missionaries of Charity, announced on September 4, 2017, during a celebration marking the first anniversary of her canonization. The head of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Calcutta, Archbishop Thomas D’Souza, announced on September 5, 2017, that Mother Teresa and Francis Xavier would be designated co-patron of the Calcutta Diocese. The order establishing Mary as the second patron saint of the archdiocese was read by Dominique Gomes, the local Vicar General, at a cathedral Mass attended by roughly 500 people on September 6, 2017.
D’Souza and Giambattista Diquattro, the Vatican’s envoy to India, also presided over the event. They led the Mass and unveiled a bronze monument of Mother Teresa holding a child in the church.
In 1986, St. Francis Xavier was named Calcutta’s first patron saint by the Catholic Church.
Mother Teresa Books and Biography Purchase
- Malcolm Muggeridge, an agnostic who became a Christian, wrote the 1971 book Something Beautiful for God and the 1969 BBC documentary about Mother Teresa. The movie is credited for bringing Mother Teresa to the notice of the Western world.
- According to Christopher Hitchens’ 1994 documentary Hell’s Angel, Mother Teresa encouraged the impoverished to accept their lot in life, while the wealthy are depicted as God’s chosen ones. Hitchens’ essay, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, was based on it.
- Amar Kumar Bhattacharya is the director of the short documentaries Mother of the Century (2001) and Mother Teresa (2002), which tell the story of Mother Teresa’s life and work among India’s impoverished. The Government of India’s Films Division produced them.
- The documentary Mother Teresa: No Greater Love (2022) shows how the Missionaries of Charity are carrying out Mother Teresa’s vision to serve Christ among the impoverished and offers unique access to institutional archives.
