Saint Teresa of Calcutta

Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born on 26 August 1910 in Skopje, then in the Ottoman Empire, to an Albanian Catholic family. Her father died when she was eight. As a girl she was drawn to the missions, and at eighteen she joined the Sisters of Loreto. She went to Ireland to learn English, and then to India, where she took the name Teresa after Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. For nearly twenty years she taught at a girls’ school in Calcutta and became its principal.

On 10 September 1946, on a train to Darjeeling for her annual retreat, she received what she called “a call within a call.” Jesus asked her to leave the convent and serve him in the poorest of the poor, and to satisfy his thirst for souls. In 1948 she received permission. She put on a simple white sari with a blue border, took a short course in nursing, and went alone into the slums.

Her former pupils began to join her, and in 1950 the Missionaries of Charity were established. In 1952 she opened Nirmal Hriday, a home for the dying where the destitute picked up from the streets could die with dignity, loved and cared for. Homes for abandoned children, lepers and the sick followed. By her death the congregation had thousands of sisters in over a hundred countries. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and asked that the money for the banquet be given to the poor.

After her death her letters revealed that for almost fifty years she had felt no consolation in prayer, only darkness, yet she went on smiling and loving. She died on 5 September 1997. Pope Francis canonized her on 4 September 2016.