Saint Teresa of Calcutta

Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born in Skopje on August 26, 1910 AD, the youngest of five children of Albanian parents. Her father, Nikola Bojaxhiu, a merchant, died suddenly in 1918 AD and left the family short of money. Her mother raised the three surviving children alone and gave them a solid grounding in the Catholic faith.

As a girl she sang in the choir of the Jesuit parish of the Sacred Heart and belonged to its mission group. In September 1928 AD, at eighteen, she left home to join the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland, meaning to serve in India.

Gonxha Bojaxhiu was received as a postulant at the Loreto convent at Rathfarnham, near Dublin, in October 1928 AD. She received the religious name Sister Teresa and chose St. Thérèse of Lisieux as her patron. Sister Teresa reached Calcutta on January 6, 1929 AD.

After two years as a novice in Darjeeling, she made her first vows in May 1931 AD and was sent to teach at St. Mary's, a Bengali-language school for girls at Entally in Calcutta. She made her final vows on May 24, 1937 AD and was called Mother Teresa from then on, and in 1944 AD she became the school's principal. Her years in Loreto were deeply happy, though she was somewhat fragile and often unwell.

On September 10, 1946 AD, on the train from Calcutta to Darjeeling for her yearly retreat, Mother Teresa received a call: to serve Christ in the poorest of the poor. By her own account, over the next months she heard what she understood to be Jesus speaking within her, asking her to found a new community of sisters to serve the poorest. She wrote later that she feared she was being deceived, and she took the matter to her spiritual director and to Archbishop Ferdinand Périer of Calcutta.

Her spiritual director told her that it was Jesus who was asking. Archbishop Périer weighed the request for nearly two years, and in 1947 AD her superiors sent her to Asansol in the meantime. With the approval of the archbishop and the permission of the Holy See, she left the Loreto convent at Entally in August 1948 AD, dressed for the first time in a white sari with a blue border.

After a short course of medical training with the Medical Mission Sisters at Patna, Mother Teresa came back to Calcutta in December 1948 AD and lodged with the Little Sisters of the Poor. On December 21 she went into the slums for the first time. She visited the sick, gathered street children to teach them, and opened her first school and a dispensary in the Motijhil slum.

Each day began with the Eucharist, and then she went out with a rosary in her hand. After some months her former pupils began to join her, one by one. On October 7, 1950 AD, in a small chapel at 14 Creek Lane, Archbishop Périer established them as a congregation of the archdiocese, the Missionaries of Charity.

In the early 1950s AD Mother Teresa found many people dying in the streets of Calcutta. Hospitals often refused them as beyond medical help. On August 22, 1952 AD, the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, she opened Nirmal Hriday at Kalighat, a house where people dying in the street could be nursed back to health or die with someone caring for them.

She opened Shishu Bhavan, a home for abandoned children, in 1955 AD, and began work among people with leprosy in 1957 AD. By 1979 AD more than 36,000 people had been brought to Nirmal Hriday from the streets.

From about 1949 AD, as the work in the streets was beginning, Mother Teresa lived with a painful sense that God was absent and had rejected her. She called it the darkness, and she hid it even from the people closest to her. It lasted to the end of her life.

In 1960 AD she described the darkness in a letter to Father Joseph Neuner and offered it to God. Pope St. John Paul II said at her beatification that in her darkest hours she held on even harder to prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. The Church now reads that letter in the Office of Readings on her feast.

On February 1, 1965 AD, Pope Paul VI raised the Missionaries of Charity from a congregation of the Calcutta archdiocese to one approved by the Holy See. That year her sisters opened their first house outside India, at Cocorote in Venezuela, and houses near Rome and in Tanzania followed in 1968 AD.

Mother Teresa accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on December 10, 1979 AD. She told the audience about a Hindu family in Calcutta whose eight children had not eaten for a long time. When she brought them rice, the mother divided it and carried half to the hungry Muslim family next door.

In March 1997 AD Mother Teresa blessed Sister Nirmala Joshi, newly elected to lead the Missionaries of Charity after her. She went to Rome to introduce Sister Nirmala to Pope St. John Paul II. After meeting him for the last time, she returned to Calcutta and spent her final weeks receiving visitors and instructing her sisters.

She died on the evening of September 5, 1997 AD, at eighty-seven, in her room at the Mother House, with her sisters around her. Hundreds of thousands of people of every class and religion came to her body in St. Thomas' Church, beside the Loreto convent where she had first arrived in Calcutta. After a state funeral on September 13 she was buried in the Mother House.