Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta
- Aug 26, 2015
- 2 min read
Born as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, on August 26, 1910 in Macedonia, Mother Teresa was the youngest of three children. She always felt that August 27, 1910, the day of her baptism, was her true birthday. At the age of 18 she joined the Order of the Sisters of Our Lady of Loreto in Ireland. She trained in Dublin, where the Motherhouse of the Loreto Sisters was located. She chose the name of Sister Teresa, in memory of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.
In December 1928 Mother Teresa began her journey to India and went to Darjeeling, where she continued her training towards her religious vows. On January 6, 1929 she arrived in Calcutta, India to teach at Saint Mary's High School for Girls. Through her kindness, generosity and unfailing commitment to her students' education, she sought to lead them to a life of devotion to Christ. "Give me the strength to be ever the light of their lives, so that I may lead them at last to you," she wrote in prayer. While in Calcutta, she was moved by the presence of the sick and dying on the city’s streets.
On September 10, 1946, while on the long train ride to Darjeeling where she was to go on a retreat and to recover from suspected tuberculosis, something happened. Mother Teresa recalls: “I realized that I had the call to take care of the sick and the dying, the hungry, the naked, the homeless – to be God’s Love in action to the poorest of the poor. That was the beginning of the Missionaries of Charity.” Without any question and hesitation she asked permission to leave the Loreto congregation so that she could establish a new order of sisters. Due to the vow of obedience that she had taken, she could not leave the convent without official permission. She received the permission from Pope Pius XII. In 1952 Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity began the work. Her order received permission from the Calcutta officials to use a portion of the abandoned temple of Kali. Mother Teresa founded here the Kalighat Home for the Dying, which she named Nirmal Hriday which meant “Pure Heart”. She and her fellow nuns gathered dying people off the streets of Calcutta and brought them to this home to care for them during the days before they died.
In 1953, Mother Teresa’s first orphanage began and in 1957 she and her Missionaries of Charity began working with lepers. In the years following, her homes, which she called “tabernacles” was set in hundreds of locations around the world. After several years of battling with health problems, in which she suffered from heart, lung and kidney problems, Mother Teresa died on September 5, 1997, at the age of 87. She was beatified in October 2003.
However, despite the enormous scale of her charitable activities and the millions of lives she touched, to her dying day she held only the most humble conception of her own achievements. Summing up her life in characteristically self-effacing fashion, Mother Teresa said, "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. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus."
Adapted from Bio.
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