Mother Teresa

Before the world knew her as Mother Teresa, she was Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, born on 26 August 1910 in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire. She grew up in a devoutly Catholic Kosovar Albanian family and was baptised the day after her birth, a date she later regarded as her “true birthday.” The youngest child of Nikollë and Dranafile Bojaxhiu, she was still a girl when her father died after a political meeting in Belgrade, an event later described as probable poisoning. In those early years, stories of missionaries and their service in Bengal took hold of her imagination.

By age 12, Anjezë was convinced she should commit herself to religious life. At 18, she left home for Ireland to join the Sisters of Loreto at Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham, learning English because it was the language of instruction used by the order in India. She never saw her mother or sister again. In 1929 she arrived in India, began her novitiate in Darjeeling, learned Bengali, and taught at St. Teresa’s School near her convent. She took her first religious vows in 1931, choosing the name Teresa after Thérèse de Lisieux, the patron saint of missionaries.

Teresa took her solemn vows in 1937 while teaching at the Loreto convent school in Entally, eastern Calcutta, and, following Loreto custom, became known as Mother Teresa. She served there for nearly twenty years and was appointed headmistress in 1944. Yet the city around her weighed on her. The Bengal famine of 1943 brought misery and death to Calcutta, and the violence that followed Direct Action Day in August 1946 deepened the suffering she saw outside the school walls. During a train trip to Darjeeling in September 1946, she later said she experienced “the call within the call,” a conviction that she should leave the convent and serve the poor while living among them.

In 1948, she began that work, exchanging her Loreto habit for a simple white cotton sari with a blue border. She adopted Indian citizenship, received basic medical training at Holy Family Hospital in Patna, and went into the slums of Calcutta. She founded a school in Motijhil before tending to the poor and hungry more broadly. In 1950, she established the Missionaries of Charity, a religious congregation dedicated at first to serving “the poorest of the poor” in Calcutta’s slums. Its members took vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, along with a fourth vow: to give “wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor.”

Over the decades, the Missionaries of Charity expanded far beyond Calcutta. By 2012, it operated in more than 133 countries, with more than 4,500 nuns managing homes for people dying from HIV/AIDS, leprosy, and tuberculosis, as well as soup kitchens, dispensaries, mobile clinics, orphanages, and schools. Mother Teresa received major honours, including the 1962 Ramon Magsaysay Peace Prize and the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. She also drew criticism for poor conditions and lack of medical care or pain relief in her houses for the dying. Her life inspired books, documentaries, and films, and her authorized biography by Navin Chawla was published in 1992.

Mother Teresa died on 5 September 1997, and that date is now observed as her feast day. On 4 September 2016, the Catholic Church canonised her as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, and in 2017 she was named a co-patron of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Calcutta alongside St Francis Xavier. Her words still resonate because they are small enough to carry into ordinary life and large enough to challenge it. “Peace begins with a smile” captures the scale she often worked in: one face, one act, one person in need at a time.