Saint Teresa of Calcutta

Saint Teresa of Calcutta, widely known as Mother Teresa, was a religious sister and the foundress of the Missionaries of Charity, a congregation devoted to serving the poorest of the poor. She was born in 1910 in Skopje and died in 1997 in Calcutta. The Church commemorates her on September 5, the day of her death.

She was born on August 26, 1910, into a Catholic Albanian family, and the next day she was baptized with the names Gonxha Agnes. When she was eight, her father died suddenly, and her mother raised the children alone in deep faith. In September 1928, at the age of eighteen, Gonxha left for Ireland to enter the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Sisters of Loreto. She received the religious name Teresa and chose Saint Thérèse of Lisieux as her patron.

On January 6, 1929, she arrived in Calcutta, India. She made her first vows in 1931 and her final vows on May 24, 1937. She taught at Saint Mary’s school for girls and in 1944 became its principal. On September 10, 1946, on the train to Darjeeling, where she was going for her annual retreat, she received what she called “a call within a call”: a summons to serve the poorest of the poor and so to quench the thirst of Jesus, who cried out on the cross, “I thirst.”

In August 1948, with the permission of the Holy See, she left the Loreto community. Dressed in a white sari with a blue border, in December she began working in the slums of Calcutta: she visited the sick, taught street children, and opened the first schools. Her former pupils soon joined her. On October 7, 1950, the Missionaries of Charity were erected as a religious congregation of the Archdiocese of Calcutta. In 1952 Mother Teresa opened Nirmal Hriday, a home for the dying, and in the following years a home for abandoned children and a shelter for people with leprosy.

The congregation spread throughout India and, from 1965, to other countries and continents. Mother Teresa also founded the Missionaries of Charity Brothers, contemplative branches, and a branch of priests. In 1979 she received the Nobel Peace Prize. After her death it became known that from the beginning of her work among the poor until the end of her life she had lived through a painful interior darkness, a sense of separation from God. John Paul II said that during those long years she shared in a special way in the Passion of Christ.

She died on September 5, 1997, in the Mother House of the congregation in Calcutta, where she was buried after a state funeral. The congregation then numbered nearly four thousand sisters working in about one hundred twenty countries. John Paul II beatified her on October 19, 2003, in Saint Peter’s Square, on World Mission Sunday, and Pope Francis canonized her there on September 4, 2016, during the Jubilee of Mercy. By a decree of December 24, 2024, issued at the decision of Pope Francis, her optional memorial on September 5 was inscribed in the General Roman Calendar.