Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Albanian-born founder of the Missionaries of Charity, who spent nearly fifty years serving the poorest and dying in the slums of India and became one of the most recognized figures of modern Catholicism.

Saint Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997), universally known as Mother Teresa, was an Albanian-born Catholic nun who founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, India. Born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Skopje, she joined the Sisters of Loreto and was sent to India, where she taught school for nearly two decades. In 1946 she experienced what she called a ‘call within a call’ to leave the classroom and serve Christ directly among the poorest of the poor. She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950, opening homes for the dying, the abandoned, and the sick across Calcutta and eventually around the world. Her work brought her international recognition, including the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, even as letters published after her death revealed decades of profound interior spiritual darkness she endured while continuing her ministry. She died in Kolkata in 1997 and was canonized by Pope Francis in 2016.

Quick Facts

• Born: August 26, 1910, Skopje (then Ottoman Empire; now North Macedonia)
• Died: September 5, 1997, Kolkata (Calcutta), India
• Feast Day: September 5
• Beatified: October 19, 2003, by Pope John Paul II
• Canonized: September 4, 2016, by Pope Francis
• Founded: Missionaries of Charity, 1950

Who Was Saint Teresa of Calcutta?

Mother Teresa was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in 1910 in Skopje, in a family of Albanian Catholic background, at the time part of the Ottoman Empire. At eighteen she left home to join the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish missionary congregation, taking the religious name Sister Mary Teresa and traveling soon after to India, where she taught geography and history at a Loreto school in Calcutta for nearly two decades, eventually becoming its principal. In September 1946, while traveling by train to a retreat in Darjeeling, she experienced what she later described as a ‘call within a call,’ an unmistakable inner conviction that she was to leave the convent school and live among the poorest of the poor, serving Christ in their midst. After receiving permission from Rome, she left the Loreto sisters in 1948, trained briefly in basic medical care, and began working alone in the slums of Calcutta. In 1950 she formally established the Missionaries of Charity, whose sisters take a distinctive fourth vow, beyond poverty, chastity, and obedience, of wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor. The congregation grew from a single house into a worldwide network of homes for the dying, orphanages, leper clinics, and shelters, and Mother Teresa herself became one of the most recognized religious figures of the twentieth century, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She continued leading the Missionaries of Charity until shortly before her death in Kolkata in 1997.

Historical Setting

Mother Teresa’s ministry unfolded against the backdrop of India’s transition from British colonial rule to independence in 1947 and the mass displacement and violence of Partition that followed, conditions that left Calcutta’s streets crowded with refugees, the sick, and the dying. Her work also coincided with the era of the Second Vatican Council, which encouraged renewed emphasis on the Church’s direct engagement with the poor and marginalized, and with the rise of global mass media, which brought her small community of sisters serving in Calcutta’s slums to international attention, most famously through Malcolm Muggeridge’s 1969 documentary and subsequent book.

Why the Church Venerates Saint Teresa of Calcutta

The Church honors Mother Teresa for her radical, hands-on embodiment of the corporal works of mercy, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and above all caring for the dying so that no one would die unloved and alone. Her insistence on seeing the person of Christ in the most disfigured and abandoned bodies gave a concrete, unsentimental face to Catholic teaching on human dignity. The posthumous publication of her private letters, revealing that she endured nearly fifty years of intense spiritual dryness and felt God’s apparent absence even while founding and leading her mission, has only deepened the Church’s regard for her, presenting a model of holiness sustained by disciplined faith rather than by consoling religious feeling.

Canonization and Feast Day

Pope John Paul II, who greatly admired her, granted a waiver of the usual five-year waiting period so her cause could open soon after her death; she was beatified on October 19, 2003. Pope Francis canonized her on September 4, 2016, one day before the nineteenth anniversary of her death, in a ceremony attended by tens of thousands in St. Peter’s Square. Her feast day is celebrated on September 5, the date of her death in 1997.

What Catholics Can Learn Today

Mother Teresa’s life challenges the idea that love must be grand or visible to matter, urging instead attention to ‘the one in front of you,’ the specific dying, hungry, or lonely person encountered today. Her decades of hidden spiritual darkness, endured without abandoning her mission, also offer a strikingly honest model for believers who experience doubt or spiritual dryness: faithfulness, she showed, does not require constant felt consolation.

A Prayer to Saint Teresa of Calcutta

Saint Teresa of Calcutta, you saw the face of Christ in the poorest, the dying, and the unwanted, and you served them with your own hands even through years of inner darkness. Teach us to notice the person in front of us, to do small things with great love, and to keep faith even when we feel nothing of God’s presence. Help us build a world where no one dies unloved. Amen.

Sources

• Vatican.va, biography for the canonization of Teresa of Calcutta
• Missionaries of Charity, official congregational history
• EWTN, saints biography archive
• Encyclopaedia Britannica