Mother Teresa

• 1. Introduction

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  Mother Teresa once summed herself up in a handful of short sentences. "By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world." The woman who said this was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, and the Catholic Church later named her Saint Teresa of Calcutta. She founded a religious order that spread from one city in eastern India to many parts of the globe. Her story raises several questions. How did a girl from the Ottoman Empire end up working in the slums of Calcutta? What did she actually build there? Why did one life earn the admiration of world leaders and also some of the sharpest public criticism ever aimed at a modern religious figure? And what did she carry privately, in letters she begged to have destroyed, that almost nobody knew about while she lived?

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• 2. Leaving Skopje

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  Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born on the 26th of August 1910 in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire and now the capital of North Macedonia. Her family was Kosovar Albanian. Her first name is a form of Agnes, and Gonxhe means "flower bud" in Albanian. She was baptised the next day, and she later treated that day, the 27th of August, as her true birthday.

  She was the youngest child of Nikollë and Dranafile Bojaxhiu. Her father took part in Albanian-community politics in Ottoman Macedonia. In 1919, when she was eight, he travelled to Belgrade for a political meeting. Afterwards he was probably poisoned, and the act was attributed to Serbian agents.

  A biography by Joan Graff Clucas describes a child fascinated by stories of missionaries serving in Bengal. By the age of twelve she was convinced that she should give her life to religion. On the 15th of August 1928 she prayed at the shrine of the Black Madonna of Vitina-Letnice, a place she often visited on pilgrimage, and her resolve grew stronger.

  That same year, at eighteen, she left home for Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham, Ireland, to join the Sisters of Loreto. Ireland was partly a language course. The sisters taught in English in India, and she needed English to become a missionary. She never saw her mother or her sister again.

  Her family stayed in Skopje until 1934 and then moved to Tirana. There, communist leader Enver Hoxha regarded her as a dangerous agent of the Vatican. Many countries made requests on her behalf, yet she was refused permission to see her relatives. Both her mother and her sister died during Hoxha's rule. Dom Lush Gjergji, in his book Our Mother Teresa, describes her crying as she left an embassy after one attempt, saying: "Dear God, I can understand and accept that I should suffer, but it is so hard to understand and accept why my mother has to suffer. In her old age she has no other wish than to see us one last time."

  She reached India in 1929 and began her novitiate in Darjeeling, in the lower Himalayas. There she learned Bengali and taught at St. Teresa's School near her convent. She took her first vows on the 24th of May 1931. She wanted to be named after Thérèse de Lisieux, the patron saint of missionaries, but another nun in the convent had already taken that name. So she chose the Spanish spelling, Teresa.

  On the 14th of May 1937 she took her solemn vows while teaching at the Loreto convent school in Entally, in eastern Calcutta. Loreto custom gave her the title of Mother. She served at the school for nearly twenty years and became its headmistress in 1944. She enjoyed teaching, but the poverty outside the walls disturbed her more and more. The Bengal famine of 1943 had brought misery and death to the city, and Direct Action Day in August 1946 began a period of Muslim-Hindu violence. Only a few weeks later, she believed her own conscience told her to leave.

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• 3. The Call Within

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  On the 10th of September 1946, Teresa travelled by train from Calcutta to Darjeeling for her annual retreat. She later called what happened there "the call within the call." In her words: "I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order. To fail would have been to break the faith." Joseph Langford, who founded the order's priests, later wrote that no one knew it at the time, but Sister Teresa had just become Mother Teresa.

  She asked for permission to leave the school and received it. In 1948 she began working with the poor, trading her traditional Loreto habit for a plain white cotton sari with a blue border. She took Indian citizenship and spent several months in Patna getting basic medical training at Holy Family Hospital. Then she went into the slums. She founded a school in Motijhil, Calcutta, before she began tending to the hungry and sick.

  Her diary records a punishing first year. She had no income and begged for food and supplies. Indian officials, including the prime minister, soon noticed her efforts. One entry describes walking until her arms and legs ached while she searched for a home, and imagining how much worse the ache must be for people with nowhere to go. The comfort of Loreto tempted her, a voice repeating, "You have only to say the word and all that will be yours again." She chose to stay, and wrote, "I did not let a single tear come."

  On the 7th of October 1950 the Vatican gave permission for a diocesan congregation that would become the Missionaries of Charity. She said it would care for "the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone."

  In 1952 Calcutta officials helped her open her first hospice. She took over an abandoned Hindu temple and turned it into the Kalighat Home for the Dying, free for the poor, renamed Nirmal Hriday, the Home of the Pure Heart. Residents received medical attention and the chance to die according to their own faith. Muslims heard the Quran read, Hindus received water from the Ganges, and Catholics received extreme unction. She said a beautiful death was for people who had lived like animals to die like angels, loved and wanted.

  She also opened a hospice for people with leprosy and called it Shanti Nagar, the City of Peace. Her sisters set up leprosy-outreach clinics across Calcutta, handing out medication, dressings and food. As more homeless children came to them, she opened Nirmala Shishu Bhavan, the Children's Home of the Immaculate Heart, in 1955. By the 1960s hospices, orphanages and leper houses stood throughout India, and she then took the congregation abroad.

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• 4. A Worldwide Order

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  Venezuela received the first house outside India in 1965, staffed by five sisters. Houses in Rome, Tanzania and Austria followed in 1968. During the 1970s the order opened houses and foundations in the United States and in dozens of countries across Asia, Africa and Europe. Its first American home was in the South Bronx area of New York City, and by 1984 the order ran 19 establishments across the United States.

  The family around her kept widening. The Missionaries of Charity Brothers was founded in 1963, and a contemplative branch of the sisters followed in 1976. Lay Catholics and non-Catholics joined as Co-Workers of Mother Teresa, as Sick and Suffering Co-Workers, and as Lay Missionaries of Charity. Priests asked for a place too. In 1981 she founded the Corpus Christi Movement for Priests, and in 1984 she and Joseph Langford founded the Missionaries of Charity Fathers.

  Members of the order take vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. They add a fourth, to give "wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor." The scale of that promise grew steadily. A congregation that began with 13 members in Calcutta had more than 4,000 sisters by 1997, running orphanages, AIDS hospices and charity centres. They cared for refugees, the blind, the disabled, the aged, alcoholics, and victims of floods, epidemics and famine. By 2007 the order counted about 450 brothers and 5,000 sisters, and by the 1990s its co-workers numbered over one million.

  Mother Teresa spoke five languages: Bengali, Albanian, Serbo-Croatian, English and Hindi. In 1971 she took four sisters to Belfast during the Troubles. Her suggestion that conditions there justified a permanent mission caused some embarrassment. Senior clergy reportedly believed that "the missionary traffic should be in other direction." Despite a warm local welcome, she and her sisters abruptly left in 1973.

  At the height of the Siege of Beirut in 1982, she rescued 37 children trapped in a front-line hospital. She brokered a temporary cease-fire between the Israeli army and Palestinian guerrillas. Then she travelled with Red Cross workers through the war zone to evacuate the young patients.

  When Eastern Europe opened up in the late 1980s, she started dozens of projects in Communist countries that had earlier rejected her order. Criticism of her stands against abortion and divorce did not deter her. "No matter who says what, you should accept it with a smile and do your own work," she said. She visited Armenia after the 1988 earthquake and met Soviet Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov. She also travelled to help the hungry in Ethiopia and radiation victims at Chernobyl. In 1991 she returned to Albania for the first time and opened a Missionaries of Charity Brothers home in Tirana.

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• 5. Fame And Honours

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  Malcolm Muggeridge's 1969 BBC documentary Something Beautiful for God made her famous in the West, and he followed it with a book of the same name in 1971. Filming inside the Home for the Dying, the crew feared their footage was unusable because the light was poor and the film was new and untested. Back in England the footage turned out to be extremely well lit. Muggeridge called it a miracle of "divine light" from Teresa. Other crew members credited a new, ultra-sensitive Kodak film. Muggeridge, who was on a spiritual journey of his own, later converted to Catholicism.

  India gave her the Padma Shri in 1962, the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding in 1969, and the Bharat Ratna, its highest civilian award, in 1980. The government issued her a diplomatic passport under the name Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu. Also in 1962 she received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding. Its citation said: "The Board of Trustees recognises her merciful cognisance of the abject poor of a foreign land, in whose service she has led a new congregation."

  The Catholic world followed. Pope Paul VI gave her the inaugural Pope John XXIII Peace Prize in 1971, and she received the Pacem in Terris Award in 1976. The Albert Schweitzer International Prize came in 1975 and the Balzan Prize in 1978. Australia named her an honorary Companion of the Order of Australia in 1982. Britain awarded her the Order of Merit in 1983, and on the 16th of November 1996 she became an honorary citizen of the United States.

  In 1979 she received the Nobel Peace Prize "for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress, which also constitutes a threat to peace." She turned down the customary banquet for laureates and asked that its $192,000 cost go to the poor in India. Asked what people could do to promote world peace, she answered, "Go home and love your family." In her Nobel lecture she contrasted hunger, which a plate of rice can end, with the pain of a person shut out by society. That second poverty, she said, she found far harder to remove, in the West above all.

  Her audiences heard similar advice. In April 1976 she told 4,500 people at the University of Scranton to "know poor people in your own home and local neighbourhood." When she returned in August 1987 for an honorary degree, she told over 4,000 students and members of the Diocese of Scranton to "do small things with great love."

  Gallup's annual poll of the most admired man and woman placed her among the top 10 women 18 times, and first several times in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1999 she headed Gallup's list of the Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century, ahead of every other answer volunteered. Two of her honours, Albania's Golden Honour of the Nation in 1994 and the Haitian Legion of Honour, would bring her trouble of their own.

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• 6. Critics And Defenders

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  Three Canadian academics, Serge Larivée, Geneviève Chénard and Carole Sénéchal, wrote a paper about her clinics. They argued that the clinics received millions of dollars in donations yet lacked medical care, systematic diagnosis, proper nutrition and enough painkillers. In their view, Mother Teresa believed the sick must suffer like Christ on the cross. They suggested the money might have built advanced palliative care facilities for the city's poor.

  The English journalist Christopher Hitchens was among her most outspoken critics. In a 2003 article he wrote that she was no friend of the poor, because she called suffering a gift from God. He accused her of hypocrisy for choosing advanced treatment for her own heart condition, and said she lied to donors about how their money was used. His 1994 documentary Hell's Angel argued that she urged the poor to accept their fate while the rich were favoured by God. It was the precursor of his essay The Missionary Position.

  Her defenders answered back. Her biographer Navin Chawla said she never meant to build hospitals. She meant to offer a place where people refused admission elsewhere "could at least die being comforted and with some dignity." He said her own hospital stays were arranged by staff against her wishes, and he disputed claims of unethical conversions. Sister Mary Prema Pierick, a former Superior General of the order, said the homes were never a substitute for hospitals. Patients who needed hospital care were taken there. She also denied that the order cultivated suffering. Simon Leys accused critics of attacking Mother Teresa simply for being a Christian.

  Fr. Des Wilson, who hosted her in Belfast in 1971, offered a different complaint. He said she was content to pick up the sad pieces left by a vicious political and economic system. He compared her with Archbishop Óscar Romero of El Salvador, who attacked the causes of misery as well as picking up the pieces, and who was shot in the head.

  Inside India the verdict was split. Aroup Chatterjee, a physician raised in Calcutta, said he never saw any nuns in the slums where he was an activist around 1980. His 2003 book drew on more than 100 interviews. He accused her of promoting a cult of suffering and a distorted image of Calcutta, and said some hygiene problems, such as reused needles, improved after her death. Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, mayor of Calcutta from 2005 to 2010, said she had no significant impact on the poor of the city. He added that Calcutta was never a city of lepers and beggars.

  On the Hindu right, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad opposed her state funeral. Its secretary, Giriraj Kishore, said her first duty was to the Church and that social service was incidental. He also accused her of conducting secret baptisms of the dying. The magazine Frontline dismissed the charges as patently false. In February 2015, Mohan Bhagwat of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh said her objective was to convert the people she served. Derek O'Brien, Atul Anjan and Arvind Kejriwal protested his statement.

  Outside India, she was criticised for implicitly supporting the Duvaliers and corrupt businessmen such as Charles Keating and Robert Maxwell. She wrote to the judge in Keating's trial asking for clemency. In 1994 she defended her confessor, the Jesuit priest Donald McGuire, against abuse allegations, stating her "confidence and trust in Fr. McGuire" and pushing for his reinstatement. He was reinstated, but in 2006 he was convicted of molesting children in the 1960s. In 2009 he was convicted of further charges and sentenced to 25 years.

  Abortion-rights groups attacked her opposition to abortion and contraception. She called abortion "the greatest destroyer of peace today." Barbara Smoker of the magazine The Freethinker argued that her stance diverted funds from effective ways to solve India's problems. Both Hitchens and Chatterjee would later put their case before the Vatican tribunal examining her life.

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• 7. The Long Darkness

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  For 66 years Mother Teresa wrote letters to her confessors and superiors, most notably Calcutta Archbishop Ferdinand Perier and the Jesuit priest Celeste van Exem, her spiritual advisor since the Missionaries of Charity began. The letters revealed doubts that lasted nearly 50 years, until the end of her life. She wrote of grave doubts about God's existence and of "nothing but emptiness and darkness." When she tried to lift her thoughts to heaven, she said, they returned "like sharp knives" that hurt her soul.

  In 1958, after the death of Pope Pius XII, she was praying for him at a requiem Mass when she felt relieved of "the long darkness: that strange suffering." The relief followed about ten years of doubt. Five weeks later the spiritual dryness came back.

  She asked that her letters be destroyed, worried that "people will think more of me - less of Jesus." They survived and were compiled in the book Come Be My Light. To a confidant, Michael van der Peet, she wrote that the silence and emptiness were so great that she looked and did not see, and listened and did not hear. She asked him to pray that she would let Jesus have a free hand.

  Her namesake Thérèse of Lisieux had described a similar experience as a "night of nothingness," and other saints reported spiritual dryness too. According to Langford, such doubts were typical and would not block canonisation.

  Pope John Paul II asked where she found the strength to place herself so completely at the service of others. His answer was "in prayer and in the silent contemplation of Jesus Christ, his Holy Face, his Sacred Heart." Francis of Assisi shaped her spirituality, even though her order was not connected to the Franciscans. Her sisters recite the prayer of Saint Francis each morning at Mass, during the thanksgiving after Communion. Pope Benedict XVI mentioned her three times in his first encyclical, Deus caritas est. He used her life to argue that time given to prayer is the inexhaustible source of loving service to a neighbour.

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• 8. Death And Sainthood

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  Mother Teresa had a heart attack in Rome in 1983 while visiting Pope John Paul II. After a second attack in 1989 she received a pacemaker. In 1991 a bout of pneumonia in Mexico was followed by more heart trouble. She offered to resign as head of the Missionaries of Charity, but the sisters voted by secret ballot for her to stay, and she agreed.

  In April 1996 she fell and broke her collarbone. Four months later she had malaria and heart failure, and she underwent heart surgery. Henry Sebastian D'Souza, Archbishop of Calcutta, said that when she was first hospitalised with cardiac problems he ordered an exorcism, with her permission, because he thought she might be under attack by the devil. On the 13th of March 1997 she resigned as head of the order. She died on the 5th of September.

  She lay in repose in an open casket at St Thomas in Calcutta for a week. The Indian government gave her a state funeral in gratitude for her service to the poor of all religions. Cardinal Secretary of State Angelo Sodano, the Pope's representative, delivered the homily. Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called her "a rare and unique individual who lived long for higher purposes." Former U.N. Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar said, "She is the United Nations. She is peace in the world."

  After her death, Brian Kolodiejchuk was appointed postulator for her cause, and he had to prove that her virtue was heroic. He submitted 76 documents totalling 35,000 pages, based on interviews with 113 witnesses who answered 263 questions. "We didn't have to prove that she was perfect or never made a mistake," he said. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints investigated the allegations raised against her and issued its nihil obstat on the 21st of April 1999. She was beatified on the 19th of October 2003.

  Beatification needed a miracle. In 2002 the Vatican recognised the healing of an abdominal tumour in Monica Besra, an Indian woman, after a locket with Teresa's picture was applied to it. Besra said a beam of light came from the picture. Her husband and some of her medical staff said conventional treatment cured her. Her husband called the miracle a hoax. Besra also said Sister Betta of the Missionaries of Charity confiscated her medical records, and officials at Balurghat Hospital said the order pressured them to call the cure miraculous.

  On the 17th of December 2015 the Vatican confirmed that Pope Francis had recognised a second miracle: the healing of a Brazilian man with multiple brain tumours in 2008. Pope Francis canonised her on the 4th of September 2016 in St. Peter's Square. Tens of thousands attended, including 15 government delegations and 1,500 homeless people from across Italy. Skopje announced a week-long celebration. On the 6th of September 2017, about 500 people attended a Mass in the Cathedral of the Most Holy Rosary in Calcutta. There she was named co-patron of the archdiocese alongside Francis Xavier, who had become its first patron saint in 1986. A bronze statue of her carrying a child was unveiled.

  Her life has inspired many portrayals. Geraldine Chaplin played her in Mother Teresa: In the Name of God's Poor. Olivia Hussey played her in a 2003 Italian television miniseries, and Juliet Stevenson played her in the 2014 film The Letters, based on her letters to Celeste van Exem. Noomi Rapace took the role in the 2025 film Mother. An Argentine musical, Teresa, la Obra en Musical, appeared in 2004.

  Her name now sits on airports, universities, trains and cathedrals. Albania's international airport carries it, and the 5th of September is Mother Teresa Day, a public holiday there. The Memorial House of Mother Teresa opened in Skopje in 2009. In Pristina, the Cathedral of Blessed Mother Teresa was consecrated on the 5th of September 2017. Indian Railways launched the Mother Express on the 26th of August 2010, her birth centenary. Since 2013 the United Nations General Assembly has marked the 5th of September as the International Day of Charity. In 2012 readers of Outlook India ranked her number 5 among the Greatest Indians. For the centenary, the government of India issued a special 5 coin on the 28th of August 2010, the amount of money she had when she arrived in India.

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