Mother Teresa

Albanian-Macedonian social reformer

• Born: August 26, 1910
• Birthplace: Shkup, Albania, Ottoman Empire (now Skopje, Macedonia)
• Died: September 5, 1997
• Place of death: Kolkata, India

Mother Teresa, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, spent most of her life caring for the “poorest of the poor.” Her Missionaries of Charity expanded their scope from the humblest beginnings on the streets of Kolkata to locations on every continent, including, in the United States, New York’s South Bronx. The International Association of Co-Workers of Mother Teresa numbers in the millions.

Early Life

Mother Teresa was the third child and second daughter of Nicholas and Rosa Bojaxhiu, wealthy parents of Albanian peasant stock. She was christened Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. In a town in what is now southern Yugoslavia, the Albanians were a minority, but the area, a historical meeting place of East and West, was one that successfully blended many cultures. The Muslim influence was strong, as was that of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Teresa’s parents were devout Roman Catholics and saw to it that the children were given a strong background in that faith. The family prayed together each night. Rosa was particularly devout. It was she who prepared all three children, who attended the public school, to receive the sacrament of First Holy Communion. Nicholas Bojaxhiu was well-educated and owned a construction business. Teresa’s parents were devoted to each other.

Teresa was later to recall that she and her brother and sister often teased their mother about her feelings for their father. Sadly, Nicholas died at age forty-two, a tragic blow to the family, who, in addition to the emotional loss, experienced a loss of income that drastically changed their circumstances but that brought them even closer.

As a young child, Mother Teresa has been described as joyful and playful. Her childhood home was for the most part a happy one. She was educated in Croatian at the state high school and was a soprano soloist in the parish choir. At a very early age, she felt the call of a religious vocation. She was twelve years old when she began seriously to meditate on her decision. Through her membership in the Sodality of Our Lady, she became aware of the missionary work being done in India by a group of Jesuit priests. After six years of soul-searching, she finally made her decision at eighteen while praying at the sanctuary of Our Lady of Letnice. She wanted to work with the Loretto Sisters in India.

Teresa’s mother was at first against her decision to enter the religious life but eventually gave her daughter her blessing with the admonition to remember to be true to God and Christ. Teresa applied to be admitted to the Loretto Order and left home on September 26, 1928, for Rathfarnam, Ireland, to learn English in preparation for her assignment to India. She spent six weeks as a postulant of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Teresa took her name for the “little Teresa,” St. Teresa of Lisieux, who had led a painful and brief but pious life in France in the late nineteenth century. Teresa arrived in India in January 1929, and was sent to a novitiate in Darjeeling. She took her vows two years later and spent the next twenty years teaching geography to the daughters of middle-class Indians at St. Mary’s High School, where she also became the principal.

Life’s Work

It was on a train to Darjeeling on September 10, 1946, that then-Sister Teresa received her second call from God. She called it a “call within a call,” and it asked her to serve only the poorest of God’s creatures, the destitute, the dying, the lonely, for the rest of her life. She accepted this summons without question, applying immediately for freedom from the Loretto Sisters to pursue her new duties. This was very difficult for her, as the convent and school had long been her home. She also loved teaching and was well loved by her students. With some difficulty, Teresa received permission to leave the order and work as a free nun in late 1948. She walked from the convent with only the clothes she wore. Her only real preparation was an elementary course in medicine with the American Medical Missionary sisters in Patna, India.

On December 21, 1948, Teresa opened her first slum school in Moti Jheel in Kolkata, India (formerly known as Calcutta). There, with absolutely no financial backing or supplies, she began to teach poor Bengali children to read and write. She wrote with a stick in the dust and begged a place to stay among another order of sisters. The following March, Subhasini Das, a nineteen-year-old former student from St. Mary’s, joined Teresa, taking the name Sister Agnes. Slowly Teresa’s group grew, living in the home of a wealthy Indian citizen, begging for food, and giving love and rudimentary medical care to Kolkata’s sick and dying poor.

The Missionaries of Charity was approved and formally instituted by the archdiocese of Kolkata on October 7, 1950, with a membership of twelve. Sister Teresa became Mother Teresa. She and her novices took vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, charity, and an additional, special vow to serve the truly destitute. This vow proscribes any member of the order from working for the rich or from accepting money for services. All material resources are donated. Mother Teresa insisted on only four preconditions to becoming a sister in her order. Applicants must be healthy of mind and body, be able to learn, have plenty of common sense, and have a cheerful disposition. A novice can be no younger than seventeen. Once accepted into the order, a woman spends six months as an aspirant, six months as a postulant, two years as a novice, and six years under temporary vows. One year before temporary vows expire, the sister is sent back to the novitiate for an additional year of contemplation before taking her final, lifelong vows.

On March 25, 1963, the archbishop of Kolkata formally blessed the new order of the Missionary Brothers of Charity. Six years and one day later, the International Association of Co-Workers of Mother Teresa, a secular group of volunteers active since 1954, received the blessing of Pope Paul VI. The Co-Workers were started by a wealthy Englishwoman named Ann Blaikie, who had begun helping Mother Teresa by gathering donated goods for Mother Teresa’s poor. Many years after its formation, the Co-Workers included a staggering three million people in seventy countries.

The Missionaries of Charity was the only religious order of its time that actually grew in membership. By 1987, the group numbered three thousand sisters and four hundred brothers. These selfless people treated tens of thousands of destitute sick and gave the hopelessly dying the opportunity to die with dignity. In 1952, the Nirmal Hriday (“Place of the Pure Heart”) Home for Dying Destitutes was opened at 1 Magazine Road in what was formerly a Kali temple, donated by the city of Kolkata. Nirmal Hriday was a last refuge for the dying. In 1957, the missionaries began treating India’s large population of contagious lepers, first establishing a colony for lepers in West Bengal. As the order grew, they were also able to open an orphanage for abandoned children. Most of the children were adopted out to homes in Europe. In 1959, the first house of the Missionaries of Charity outside Kolkata was opened in Delhi. Since then, twenty-two other cities in India have become recipients of Mother Teresa’s special brand of aid.

The decision to open houses outside India was a difficult one for Mother Teresa, who had become an Indian citizen in 1948. The first foreign country to welcome her help was Venezuela. Soon after, a house was established in Rome; Ceylon, Tanzania, and Australia followed. Perhaps most surprisingly, the missionaries found it necessary to establish the Queen of Peace Home in an area popularly known as Fort Apache in the South Bronx of New York. According to Mother Teresa, the spiritual poverty in the United States was greater than anywhere else on Earth. Later the sisters expanded their efforts to Harlem. On December 24, 1985, a few short months after Mayor Ed Koch gave her his wholehearted permission, Mother Teresa opened a hospice called Gift of Love for those living with the effects of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in Greenwich Village. By 1987, the houses of the Missionaries of Charity numbered twenty-one in the United States alone. Other modern cities were not forgotten. Houses of the Missionaries of Charity were opened in London as well as Amman, Jordan. In Dacca, India, a home was opened to care for women from Bangladesh who had been raped by Pakistani soldiers.

All the houses followed the same rigid schedule. The sisters or brothers rise at 4:40 a.m. and have prayers from 5:00 until 6:00, when Mass is celebrated. At 6:45, the religious inmates are fed a light breakfast of unleavened bread and banana. The sisters are true to their vow of poverty. Each sister owns only two or three cotton saris, underclothes, bedding, a tin bucket (for laundry), prayer books, a pen, a pencil, and paper.

Mother Teresa was the recipient of many humanitarian prizes and honors. She was awarded the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize and the Joseph Kennedy Jr. Foundation Award in 1971 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She also received awards from her own government, notably the Jawaharlal Nehru Award in 1969 for International Understanding and the Shiromani Award, which was presented to her personally by Indian President Giani Zail Singh. In April 1990, Mother Teresa stepped down from the leadership of her order because of severe illness. In 1997, three months before her death, Mother Teresa received from the United States the Congressional Gold Medal.

Following her death, there was a call from her order and the communities she helped for the Catholic church to have her canonized, or made a saint. There is an official process within the church that requires that two miracles, verified by the church, be attributed to that person before canonization. In 2003, one miracle was associated with Mother Theresa. An Indian woman was cured of a brain tumor after the Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity prayed to Mother Teresa to help the ailing woman. As a result, she was beatified and declared Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. (Beatification is the first step to sainthood.) Hers was the shortest beatification process in the modern history of the Catholic church.

In December 2015, Pope Francis signed an official document attributing a second miracle to Mother Teresa, the healing of a Brazilian man who had been in a coma because of a viral brain infection in 2008. She then qualified for sainthood and was officially canonized on September 4, 2016, one day before her feast day. The ceremony was performed at the Vatican by Pope Francis in front of a large crowd, including sisters of the Missionaries of Charity as well as more than one thousand homeless Italian citizens.

Significance

Attempts to write Mother Teresa’s personal biography have been thwarted or replaced by the story of the Missionaries of Charity and their works. What her workers, sisters and brothers alike, give to the poor is much more than medical care. They give unconditional love to those who are shunned by the rest of the world. Mother Teresa taught that one may find Jesus in all persons, but he is especially present in the poor and those considered grotesque. Recipients of the missionaries’ aid are not proselytized, nor are they limited to the Catholic population. Unlike most missionaries, the Missionaries of Charity do not preach religion but teach by example.

Mother Teresa was an extremely practical woman with one goal in life: to serve the poor. While in charge of her order, she fed her sisters well, on the advice of the medical sisters who gave her her early training, so that they could resist contagion as they dressed the sores of lepers or treated other sick people. Perhaps the most impressive phenomenon associated with Mother Teresa is the small social revolution that she instigated in her adopted homeland. In India, girls of very old and well-to-do castes have become sisters to give succor to the so-called Untouchables. They have said that they were first brought to the order by a desire to work beside Mother Teresa.

Bibliography

Doig, Desmond. Mother Teresa: Her People and Her Work. Harper, 1976.

Duchane, Sangeet. The Little Book of Mother Teresa. Barnes, 2004.

Gonzalez-Balado, José-Luis, and Janet N. Playfoot, eds. My Life for the Poor: Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Harper, 1985.

Le Joly, Edward. Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Harper, 1985.

Rae, Daphne. Love Until It Hurts. Harper, 1980.

Rocca, Francis X. "Mother Theresa Canonized as a Saint by Pope Francis." Wall Street Journal, 4 Sept. 2016, www.wsj.com/articles/mother-teresa-canonized-as-a-saint-by-pope-francis-1472980320. Accessed 18 Oct. 2016.

Scott, David. A Revolution of Love: The Meaning of the Life of Mother Teresa. Loyola, 2005.

Tower, Courtney. “Mother Teresa’s Work of Grace.” Reader’s Digest, Dec. 1987.