Missionaries of Charity

St. Teresa of Calcutta

Saint Teresa of Calcutta was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Skopje, now in North Macedonia, on 26 August 1910. At eighteen she left her home for Ireland, and then for India with the Sisters of Loreto, and spent nearly twenty years teaching at the Loreto school in Calcutta. In 1946, travelling by train to Darjeeling, she heard what she always described as a call within a call: to leave the convent and serve the poorest of the poor in the streets themselves. With her archbishop's permission she put on the white sari with three blue stripes, learned to nurse the sick, and began to gather children off the pavements and the dying off the gutters. In 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity, a community of women bound by a fourth vow of free service to the poorest of the poor; from that first house grew schools, leper settlements, homes for the dying and missions in every continent. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and asked that the banquet money be spent on the poor. Her letters show a long and painful dryness in prayer that never loosened her trust or her smile. She died in Calcutta, now Kolkata, on 5 September 1997, and was canonized on 16 October 2016.

Patronage · Missionaries of Charity; people in poverty