About St. Mother Teresa

ST. MOTHER TERESA

1910 — 1997
Feast Day September 5
Patron Saint of World Youth Day, Missionaries of Charity and a co-patron of the Archdiocese of Calcutta alongside St. Francis Xavier.

Mother Teresa is a universal symbol of God's merciful and preferential love for the poor and forgotten.

Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on August 26, 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia, the youngest of three children. She attended a youth group called Sodality, run by a Jesuit priest at her parish, and her involvement opened her to the call of service as a missionary nun.

She joined the Sisters of Loretto at age 17 and was sent to Calcutta where she taught at a high school. She contracted Tuberculosis and was sent to rest in Darjeeling. It was on the train to Darjeeling that she received her calling — what she called "an order" from God to leave the convent and work and live among the poor. At this point, she did not know that she was going to found an order of nuns, or even exactly where she was to serve. "I knew where I belonged, but I did not know how to get there," she said, recalling the moment on the train.

Confirmation of the calling came when the Vatican granted her permission to leave the Sisters of Loretto and fulfill her calling under the Archbishop of Calcutta. She started working in the slums, teaching poor children, and treating the sick in their homes. She was joined a year later by some of her former students and together they took in men, women, and children who were dying in the gutters along the streets and cared for them.

In 1950 the Missionaries of Charity was born as a congregation of the Diocese of Calcutta and in 1952 the government granted them a house from which to continue their service among Calcutta's forgotten.

The congregation very quickly grew from a single house for the dying and unwanted to nearly 500 around the world. Mother Teresa set up homes for AIDS sufferers, for prostitutes, for battered women, and orphanages for poor children.

She often said that the poorest of the poor were those who had no one to care for them and no one who knew them. And she often remarked with sadness and desolation of millions of souls in the developed world whose spiritual poverty and loneliness was such an immense cause of suffering.

She was a fierce defender of the unborn and strongly opposed abortion saying, "We must not be surprised when we hear of murders, of killings, of wars, of hatred. If a mother can kill her own child, what is left but for us to kill each other."

Mother Teresa died on September 5, 1997 and was beatified only six years later, on October 19, 2003.

Mother Teresa once said, "I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples." As Christians, each one of us is called to follow her lead and cast the stones of Faith, Truth, Hope and Charity.