Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu or Mother Teresa as she is known was born on August 26, 1910 in Skopje, Macedonia into an Albanian family.
Little Agnes knew that she wanted to be a missionary at the age of 12. When she was 18, she joined the Order of the Sisters of Our Lady of Loreto, Ireland to learn English, which was the language used by the Order.
Named Teresa, after St Terese of Lisieux, she journeyed to Calcutta, in 1929, leaving her family behind forever.
She taught for 17 years as a nun but was deeply troubled by the poverty she saw around her. She experienced what she describes as a “call within a call” to leave the comfortable convent and tend to the poor on the streets. She obtained special permission from the Vatican to establish a new order of nuns called ‘The Missionaries of Charity’ in 1950.
The primary task of this Order was to love and care for the people that nobody cared for. She and her fellow missionaries gathered the poor and dying off the streets of Calcutta and cared for them. What started as a small seed community is now a congregation with more than 4,500 nuns and branches in 133 countries.
Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, but declined the ceremonial banquet asking that the $192,000 cost of the banquet be given to the poor. She was honoured with the Bharat Ratna in 1980.
She died on September 5, 1997, aged 87. She once said, “To be able to love the poor, we must be poor ourselves. So we possess nothing, we own nothing, we are the poorest of the poor”.
She had a different understanding of poverty as we know it. She once said that the poverty she found in India was easy to overcome with food and clothing, but the poverty she witnessed in the developed world was a poverty of spirituality and love, which according to her, was much more difficult to overcome.
She liked to repeat, “Do little things with great love”. She was declared a saint of the Catholic Church on October 19, 2003 by Pope John Paul II.
Picture Credit : Google
