Mother Teresa

Their life

Albanian-born nun who left the safety of a convent classroom to found the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta's poorest streets, building a global order devoted to the dying, the abandoned, and the unwanted. Nobel Peace laureate who kept working in sandals.

Known for

• Founding the Missionaries of Charity
• Nirmal Hriday home for the dying
• Decades of work in Calcutta's slums
• 1979 Nobel Peace Prize
• Global hospice and orphanage network
• Canonized as Saint Teresa of Calcutta

The road they walked

She was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire, to Albanian Catholic parents in a region where Catholics were a small minority among Muslims and Orthodox Christians. Her father, a merchant involved in Albanian nationalist politics, died when she was eight, possibly poisoned for his political activities, leaving the family in financial hardship. It was a devout household, and by eighteen she had left home for good, joining the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland, learning English, and taking the name Sister Mary Teresa after Thérèse of Lisieux. She never saw her mother or sister again.

She was sent to Calcutta in 1929 and spent nearly two decades teaching geography and catechism at St. Mary's High School, a comfortable post behind convent walls in a city convulsed by poverty, and then by the famine of 1943 and the sectarian violence of Partition in 1947. In 1946, on a train to Darjeeling for a retreat, she experienced what she later called a 'call within a call' — an instruction, as she described it, to leave the convent and work among the poorest of the poor. It took two years to get permission from Rome. In 1948 she exchanged her habit for a plain white sari with a blue border, took basic medical training, and walked into the slums of Motijhil with no funding and no institution behind her, teaching slum children in the open air and washing the wounds of the dying.

What she built from that was the Missionaries of Charity, founded in 1950, which grew from a single home for the destitute dying — Nirmal Hriday, opened in a former Kali temple in 1952 — into a global order running hospices, orphanages, leper clinics, and AIDS shelters across more than 130 countries. She became, in her lifetime, one of the most photographed and argued-over people on earth: revered by millions as a living saint, criticized by others over the quality of medical care in her homes, her fundraising relationships, and her rigid stances on contraception and abortion. She accepted the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the poor, asked that the customary banquet be cancelled and the money given to the destitute instead, and continued the work personally into her eighties despite failing health.

How their story ended

She died in Calcutta on 5 September 1997 at age 87, after years of declining heart and kidney health that had included a pacemaker and repeated hospitalizations. India gave her a state funeral, an honor rarely extended to a foreign-born private citizen. She was beatified in 2003 and canonized by Pope Francis in 2016, and the order she founded has continued her work in the decades since her death.

In their words

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