Mother Teresa

Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born on August 26, 1910, in Skopje, a market town then under Ottoman rule and now the capital of North Macedonia ^[1]. Her parents, Nikollë and Dranafile Bojaxhiu, were Albanian Catholics, a small minority in a region dominated by Orthodox Christians and Muslims. Her father worked as a merchant and building contractor and was active in Albanian political circles. He died suddenly in 1919, when Anjezë was eight, leaving the family in reduced circumstances ^[2].

Dranafile raised her three children on the income from an embroidery and cloth business, and the household became known locally for feeding strangers at its table. The parish of the Sacred Heart in Skopje anchored the family's life. Anjezë sang in the choir, joined a sodality devoted to the Virgin Mary, and read accounts of Jesuit missionaries working in Bengal ^[1]. By her own later recollection, she first felt drawn to religious life around the age of twelve.

At eighteen she left home for good. In September 1928 she traveled to Ireland to join the Sisters of Loreto, an institute chosen largely because its missions included schools in India ^[2]. At Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham, near Dublin, she learned English and took the religious name Teresa, after Thérèse of Lisieux, the French Carmelite honored as patron of missionaries. She never saw her mother or sister again.

Sister Teresa arrived in India in January 1929 and began her novitiate in Darjeeling, in the Himalayan foothills ^[1]. From 1931 she taught at St. Mary's School, a Loreto institution for girls in the Entally district of Calcutta, where she took her final vows in 1937 and eventually served as headmistress ^[3]. For anyone asking who was Mother Teresa before her fame, the answer is a schoolteacher: for nearly two decades she taught geography and catechism behind convent walls while famine and communal violence convulsed Bengal outside them.

The turning point came on September 10, 1946, during a train journey from Calcutta to Darjeeling for a retreat. She later described receiving what she called a call within a call, a conviction that God wanted her to leave the convent and serve the poor while living among them ^[3]. She spent two years seeking permission from her superiors and from Rome. In 1948 the Vatican allowed her to live outside the Loreto community while remaining a nun.

That year she exchanged the Loreto habit for a cheap white cotton sari bordered in blue, took a short course in basic medical care with the Medical Mission Sisters in Patna, and walked into the slums of Motijhil with no funding and no institution behind her ^[2]. She started an open-air school for children, teaching the alphabet by scratching letters in the dirt. Former students from St. Mary's began joining her, and in October 1950 the Vatican formally approved her new congregation, the Missionaries of Charity ^[4]. She also became an Indian citizen, a status she held for the rest of her life.

Any account of Mother Teresa achievements begins with Nirmal Hriday, the Home for the Dying that she opened in 1952 in a former pilgrim hostel beside the Kalighat temple in Calcutta ^[4]. City authorities gave her the building after she began taking in destitute people found dying on the streets. The home offered no advanced medicine, only food, cleaning, and company, and it became the emblem of her work: care for people whom the surrounding society had given up. She followed it with Shishu Bhavan, a home for orphaned and abandoned children, and in 1957 the congregation began outreach to people with leprosy, later establishing the Shanti Nagar settlement where patients could live and work ^[3].

The congregation expanded with unusual speed. In 1965 Pope Paul VI granted it pontifical status, permitting foundations outside India, and the first overseas house opened in Venezuela that year ^[4]. Houses followed in Rome, Tanzania, and eventually across every inhabited continent, including hospices for AIDS patients in New York and San Francisco during the 1980s. By the time of her death the Missionaries of Charity counted more than 4,000 sisters operating hundreds of centers in over 120 countries ^[5]. Members took the standard vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience plus a fourth vow of wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor.

Recognition accumulated steadily. India awarded her the Padma Shri in 1962 and the Bharat Ratna, its highest civilian honor, in 1980. She received the first Pope John XXIII Peace Prize in 1971 and the Templeton Prize in 1973. The Nobel Peace Prize followed in 1979, awarded for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress, which the committee described as a threat to peace ^[5]. She accepted it in the name of the poor and asked that the customary Nobel banquet be cancelled so its cost could go to people in need.

Her daily existence was deliberately austere. She lived in the congregation's motherhouse on Lower Circular Road in Calcutta, owned almost nothing beyond her saris and a bucket, and rose before dawn for prayer ^[2]. Visitors described a short, stooped woman, barely five feet tall, with a manner that mixed warmth toward individuals with an unbending will in matters of policy. She answered enormous volumes of correspondence by hand and traveled constantly to visit the congregation's houses.

The most striking fact about her inner life emerged only after her death. Letters to her confessors and superiors, published in 2007 in the collection Come Be My Light, revealed that for roughly the last half century of her life she experienced a persistent sense of God's absence, describing interior darkness, dryness, and even doubt ^[6]. She had asked that the letters be destroyed. Theologians have generally read this long dark night not as hypocrisy but as a documented case of a believer continuing her work without the consolation of felt faith, and the letters have become central to serious study of her character.

Her public positions tracked Catholic orthodoxy without softening. In her Nobel lecture she called abortion the greatest destroyer of peace, a statement that drew criticism as well as applause ^[5]. She cultivated relationships with popes, presidents, and Princess Diana, and critics noted that she also accepted donations and hospitality from disreputable figures, including the Haitian ruling Duvalier family and the fraudster Charles Keating ^[7].

Health problems shadowed her final decade. She suffered a heart attack while visiting Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1983 and a second in 1989, after which a pacemaker was fitted ^[3]. Bouts of pneumonia, malaria, and a broken collarbone followed in the 1990s, yet she resisted stepping down. When the congregation held elections in 1990 she offered to resign as superior general, and the sisters voted her back in.

Scrutiny intensified in the same years. The journalist Christopher Hitchens and others charged that her homes provided poor medical care, reused needles, and prioritized religious purpose over treatment, and that donations were not transparently accounted for ^[7]. A 1994 article in the medical journal The Lancet by Robin Fox described haphazard clinical standards at the Kalighat home ^[8]. Defenders answered that the homes never claimed to be hospitals and served people no institution else would take. The debate remains a fixed part of Mother Teresa facts and historiography, and biographers now routinely weigh both the scale of her charity and the substance of these criticisms.

In March 1997, gravely weakened, she finally stood down, and Sister Nirmala Joshi was elected to lead the Missionaries of Charity. Mother Teresa died of cardiac arrest at the motherhouse in Calcutta on September 5, 1997, at the age of 87, days after the death of Princess Diana had already filled the world's front pages ^[5]. The Indian government granted her a state funeral, an honor previously reserved mainly for national leaders, and her body was carried through the city on the same gun carriage that had borne Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru ^[4].

The Catholic Church moved toward sainthood at exceptional speed. Pope John Paul II waived the customary five-year waiting period to open her cause in 1999, and she was beatified in 2003 after the Vatican accepted the cure of an Indian woman, Monica Besra, as a miracle attributed to her intercession ^[4]. A second recognized miracle, involving a Brazilian man with brain abscesses, cleared the way for canonization. On September 4, 2016, Pope Francis declared her Saint Teresa of Calcutta before a crowd of tens of thousands in St. Peter's Square ^[9]. Her feast day is September 5, and in 2017 she was named co-patron of the Archdiocese of Calcutta.

The congregation she founded outlived her without collapsing, a fate that eludes many charismatic founders. The Missionaries of Charity, together with associated brothers, fathers, and lay co-workers, continue to run hospices, soup kitchens, orphanages, and leprosy clinics on every continent ^[5]. Skopje preserves a memorial house on the site of her baptismal church, and streets, hospitals, and Albania's main airport carry her name.

Her reputation remains genuinely contested, which is itself part of the legacy. To admirers she demonstrated that one person with no resources could build a global institution of mercy; to critics she embodied a theology that valorized suffering and a charity that resisted accountability ^[7]. Scholars of religion, meanwhile, return to her private letters as one of the most candid records of spiritual desolation in modern Christian history ^[6]. Few figures of the twentieth century have been examined so closely from such opposite directions, and few have mattered so much to both sides of the argument.