St Teresa of Calcutta

Mother Teresa was born on 26 August 1910, in Skopje, the current capital of Macedonia. She was baptised the following day as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu.

      She received her first Communion at the age of five and, later, said she felt a love for souls that began that same day.

      At the age of eighteen, she joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India. There she received the name Sister Mary Teresa after St. Thérèse of Lisieux. After a few months’ training in Dublin she was sent to India, where, on 24 May 1931, she took her initial vows as a nun. Sister Teresa was assigned to the Loreto Entally Community in Calcutta and taught at St Mary’s School for girls.

  On 10 September 1946, during the train ride from Calcutta to Darjeeling for her annual retreat, Mother Teresa received her ‘inspiration’, her ‘call within a call’. In a way she would never explain, she somehow knew Jesus’ desire to love and care for human souls. A desire to satiate His thirst became the driving force of her life. Over the course of the next weeks and months, a series of interior voices and visions further revealed Jesus’ desire for ‘victims of love’ who would ‘radiate His love on souls.’

  The suffering and poverty that Teresa saw outside the convent walls had made such a deep impression on her that in 1948 she won permission from her superiors to leave the convent school and devote herself to working among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta. In August 1948, she dressed for the first time in a white, blue-bordered sari. Sister Teresa became Mother Teresa.

  The charter of her new Missionaries of Charity was to love and care for those persons nobody else was prepared to look after. It soon included a hospice; centres for the blind, aged and disabled; and a leper colony.

  Mother Teresa began to send her Sisters to other parts of India, then opened a new house in Venezuela, followed by foundations in Rome and Tanzania. Then, starting in 1980 and throughout the 1990s, Mother Teresa opened houses in most of the former communist countries, including the former Soviet Union, Albania and Cuba. By 1997, Mother Teresa’s Sisters numbered nearly 4,000 and comprised 610 foundations in 123 countries. Her co-workers now number over a million.

  In 1979 she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her humanitarian work. She received many other prizes, receiving each ‘For the glory of God and in the name of the poor’.

  In order to respond better to the spiritual needs of the poor, Mother Teresa founded different types of community, starting with the Charity Brothers and contemplative branches of first Sisters, then Brothers.

  After many years of deteriorating health, she died on 5 September 1997, aged 87. The Roman Catholic Church beatified her in October 2003 and proclaimed her a saint in September 2016.

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.
Mother Teresa