A Servant of conviction who never bothered to count the costs

Mother Teresa is among the most well-known and highly respected women in the world in the latter half of the twentieth century. In 1948 she founded a religious order of nuns in Calcutta, India, called the Missionaries of Charity. Through this order, she has dedicated her life to helping the poor, the sick, and the dying around the world, particularly those in India. Her selfless work with the needy has brought her much acclaim and many awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in 1910 in Skopje, Yugoslavia (what is now Macedonia). Her parents, Nikola and Dronda Bojaxhiu, were Albanians who settled in Skopje shortly after the beginning of the century. Since her father was co-owner of a construction firm, her family lived comfortably while she was growing up. In 1928 she suddenly decided to become a nun and traveled to Dublin, Ireland, to join the Sisters of Loreto, a religious order founded in the seventeenth century. After studying at the convent for less than a year, she left to join the Loreto convent in the city of Darjeeling in northeast India. On May 24, 1931, she took the name of "Teresa" in honor of St. Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century Spanish nun.

In 1929 Mother Teresa had been assigned to teach geography at St. Mary's High School for Girls in Calcutta, south of Darjeeling. At the time, the streets of Calcutta were crowded with beggars, lepers, and the homeless. Unwanted infants were regularly left to die on the streets or in garbage bins. On a train back to Darjeeling in 1946, Mother Teresa felt the need to abandon her position at St. Mary's to care for the needy in the slums of Calcutta. After receiving the consent of her archbishop, she began her work. Founds the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta In 1948 Pope Pius XII granted Mother Teresa permission to live as an independent nun. That same year, she became an Indian citizen.

After studying nursing for three months with the American Medical Missionaries in the Indian city of Patna, she returned to Calcutta to found the Missionaries of Charity. For her habit she chose a plain white sari with a blue border and a simple cross pinned to her left shoulder. Mother Teresa initially focused her efforts on poor children in the streets, teaching them how to read and how to care for themselves. In 1949 she was joined by her first recruit, a young girl from the city of Bengal. Many of those who joined her order over the next few years were former students from St. Mary's. Each recruit was required to devote her life to serving the poor without accepting any material reward in return.

In 1952 Mother Teresa began work for which the Missionaries of Charity has been noted ever since. Her order received permission from Calcutta officials to use a portion of the abandoned temple to the goddess Kali, the Hindu goddess of death and destruction. Here Mother Teresa founded the Kalighat Home for the Dying. She and her fellow nuns gathered dying Indians off the streets of Calcutta and brought them to this home to care for them during the days before they died.

Other Mother Teresa links:

EWTN site page on Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa Center official site