St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta

St. Teresa of Calcutta, known to the world as Mother Teresa, was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu on August 26, 1910, to an Albanian family in Skopje, in what is now North Macedonia. Drawn to missionary life from her youth, at eighteen she left home to join the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland, and in 1929 arrived in India. For nearly twenty years she taught at St. Mary's School for girls in Calcutta, eventually serving as its principal, known for her cheerfulness and devotion. On September 10, 1946, during a train journey to Darjeeling, she experienced what she called a 'call within a call'—a profound conviction that Jesus, thirsting for love from the cross, was asking her to serve him in the poorest of the poor. In 1948 she received permission to leave the Loreto convent; she exchanged her habit for a simple white sari with blue borders, took basic medical training, and went into the slums. In 1950 the Missionaries of Charity were established as a religious congregation, vowed to wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor. Her works multiplied: Nirmal Hriday, the home for the dying at Kalighat, opened in 1952; then homes for abandoned children and people with leprosy, and in time houses on every inhabited continent. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, accepting it 'in the name of the poor,' and became one of the most recognized Christian witnesses of the twentieth century. Her posthumously published letters revealed that for decades she endured a profound interior darkness, a hidden share in the thirst of Christ that has deepened, not diminished, appreciation of her faith. Mother Teresa died in Calcutta on September 5, 1997. St. John Paul II beatified her in 2003, and Pope Francis canonized her on September 4, 2016, before vast crowds in St. Peter's Square. Her feast is kept on September 5, and her tomb at the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata is a place of quiet pilgrimage. She is honored as patroness of the Missionaries of Charity and of all who serve the unwanted, the unloved, and the uncared for.