'When a poor person dies of hunger, it has not happened because God did not take care of him or her. It has happened because neither you nor I wanted to give that person what he or she needed.' Mother Teresa.
Mother Teresa [real name Agnese Gonxhe (meaning 'rosebud' in Albanian) Bojaxhiu] was born on August 26, 1910, in Uskiib, Ottoman Empire (now Skopje, capital of the Republic of Macedonia). Although she was born on August 26, she considered August 27, the day she was baptized, to be her 'true birthday.' She was the youngest of the three children of a family from Shkoder, Albania, born to Nikolle and Drana Bojaxhiu.
Her family was of Albanian descent. Her father was involved in Albanian politics. In 1919, Agnesí father fell
ill and died when she was about eight years old. Her mother raised her as a Roman Catholic after her father's
death. According to a biography by Joan Graff Clucas, in her early years Agnes was spellbound by stones of the lives of missionaries and their service, and by age 12, she felt deeply the call of God. She knew she had to spread the love of Christ through her service as a missionary. At age 18, she left her parental home in Skopje never to see her mother or sister again and joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India.
Agnes initially went to the Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham, Ireland, to learn English, the language the Sisters of Loreto taught schoolchildren in India. She arrived in India in 1929, and began her novitiate in Darjeeling. She took her first religious vows as a nun on May 24, 1931. At that time, she opted for the name Teresa after Therese de Lisieux, the patron saint of missionaries. She took her solemn vows on May 14, 1937, while serving as a teacher at the Loreto convent school in eastern Calcutta. Although Teresa took pleasure in teaching at the school, she was increasingly perturbed by the poverty surrounding her in Calcutta. In 1943, appalling famine and the outbreak of Hindu/Muslim violence in August 1946 pushed the city into despair and horror. In Calcutta, Sister Teresa taught geography and catechism (an established group of questions and answers, especially about a set of Christian beliefs) at St. Mary's High School. In 1944, she became the principal of St. Mary's. Soon Sister Teresa caught tuberculosis, was unable to continue teaching. On September 10, 1946, she was sent to Darjeeling for rest and recovery. It was on the train to Darjeeling that she received her second call 'the call within the call.' Mother Teresa recalled iater, 'I was to leave the convent and work with the poor, living among them. It was an order. I knew where I belonged but I did not know how to get there.' In 1948, the Vatican granted Sister Teresa permission to leave the Sisters of Loretto and pursue her calling under the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Calcutta.
Mother Teresa started with a school in Motijhil in the slums to teach the children of the poor. She also learned
essential medicine and visited the homes of the sick to treat them. In 1949, some of her former pupils joined her. They found men, women, and children dying on the streets who were discarded by local hospitals. The group rented a room so they could care for unaided people otherwise condemned to die in the gutter. In 1950, the Church established the group as a Diocesan Congregation of the Calcutta Diocese. They called it the Missionaries of Charity. Its mission was to care for, in her own words, 'the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, and 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.'ft began as a small order with 13 members in Calcutta; today it has more than 4,000 nuns running orphanages, AIDS hospices, and charity centers worldwide, and caring for refugees, the blind, disabled, aged, alcoholics, the poor and homeless, and victims of floods, epidemics, and famine.
In 1952, Mother Teresa opened the first Refuge for the ying in space made available by the City of Calcutta.
With the help of Indian officials, she converted an abandoned Hindu temple into the Kalighat Home for the Dying, a free hospice for the poor. She renamed it Kalighat, the Home of the Pure Heart (Nirmal Hriday). Those brought to the home received medical attention and were afforded the opportunity to die with dignity, according to the rituals of their faith; Muslims were read the Quran, Hindus received water from the Ganges, and Catholics received the Last Rites. 'A beautiful death,' she said, 'is for people who lived like animals to die like angels loved and wanted.' Mother Teresa soon opened a home for those suffering from Hansen's disease, commonly known as leprosy, and called the hospice Shanti Nagar (City of Peace). The Missionaries of Charity also established several leprosy outreach clinics throughout Calcutta, providing medication, bandages, shelter, and food. As the number of lost children at the Missionaries of Charity increases, Mother Teresa felt the need to create a home for them. In 1955, she opened the Nirmala Shishu Bhavan, the Children's Home of the Immaculate Heart, as an asylum for orphans and homeless youth.
By the 1970s, the whole world recognized her as a humanitarian and advocate for the poor and helpless, due
in part to a documentary, and book, Something Beautiful for God by Malcolm Muggeridge. In 1962, Mother Teresa received the Philippines-based Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding, given for work in South or East Asia. The citation read as 'the Board of Trustees recognizes her merciful cognizance of the abject poor of a foreign land, in whose service she has led a new congregation.î In the same year, the Indian government honored her with Padma Shri. One decade later in 1972, she was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and India's highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna, in 1980 for her humanitarian work. The United Kingdom and the United States each repeatedly granted awards, culminating in the Order of Merit in 1983, and honorary citizenship of the United States received on November 16, 1996. Mother Teresa's Albanian homeland granted her the Golden Honor of the Nation in 1994. Besides all these, she was awarded the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize (1971). Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity continued to get bigger, and at the time of her death it was operating 610 missions in 123 countries, including hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, childrenís and family counseling programs, orphanages, and schools.
Its first house outside India was opened in Venezuela in 1965 with only five sisters. Others followed in Rome,
Tanzania, and Austria in 1968; during the 1970s the order opened houses and foundations in dozens of
countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the United States. In 1982, at the peak of the Siege of Beirut, Mother Teresa rescued 37 children trapped in a front line hospital by brokering a temporary cease-fire between the Israeli army and Palestinian guerrillas. She with the aid of Red Cross workers traveled through the war zone to the devastated hospital to evacuate the young patients. When Eastern Europe experienced increased openness in the late 1980s, she extended her efforts to Communist countries that had previously rejected the Missionaries of Charity, embarking on dozens of projects. She was nothing daunted by criticism about her stiff stand against abortion and divorce stating, 'No matter who says what, you should accept it with a smile and do your own work.' Mother Teresa traveled to assist and minister to the hungry in Ethiopia, radiation victims at Chernobyl, and earthquake victims in Armenia. In 1991, Mother Teresa returned for the first time to her homeland and opened a Missionaries of Charity Brothers home in Tirana, Albania.
Mother Teresa died on September 5, 1997. Her death was mourned in both secular and religious communities. In tribute, Nawaz Sharif, the Prime Minister of Pakistan said that she was 'a rare and unique individual who lived long for higher purposes. Her life-long devotion to the care of the poor, the sick, and the disadvantaged was one of the highest examples of service to our humanity.' The former U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar said: 'She is the United Nations. She is peace in the world.' In 1999, Mother Teresa was ranked as the 'most admired person of the 20th century' by a poll in the US. Following her death she was beatified by Pope John Paul II and given the title Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.
She has been memorialized through museums, been named patroness of various churches, and had various
structures and roads named after her. Various tributes have been published in Indian newspapers and magazines authored by her biographer, Navin Chawla.
