Born in Macedonia as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, the nun known to the world as Mother Teresa (1910–1997) became one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated religious figures by devoting her life to the sick and dying in Calcutta, India. An inspiration to millions, she frequently topped opinion polls as the world’s most respected woman.
Of ethnic Albanian descent—her birth name means “rosebud” in Albanian—Teresa decided as a twelve-year-old to become a Roman Catholic missionary. She joined an Irish religious order at age eighteen and traveled to Dublin to learn English. She sailed next to Calcutta, where she spent the next seventeen years teaching history and geography.
The turning point in Teresa’s life came in September 1946, during a 400-mile train ride. During the trip, she later recounted, Jesus appeared to her and told her to give up teaching and work instead in the Calcutta slums, helping the sick and destitute. With the permission of the pope, she founded a religious group, the Missionaries of Charity, in 1950 to carry out her newfound calling. The group would grow rapidly, from 62 nuns in 1957 to roughly 4,000 in 1992. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.
Teresa attracted some criticism, however, for her conservative views on abortion and contraception, both of which she opposed. In keeping with Catholic teaching, she also campaigned against an Irish referendum to legalize divorce in 1995. Near the end of her life, Teresa’s reputation was further called into question by journalist Christopher Hitchens (1949–), whose 1995 book The Missionary Position detailed the often-mysterious finances of the Missionaries of Charity. A subsequent investigation found that despite the millions raised for her organization, some patients in India were treated with reused hypodermic needles. Nevertheless, Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) nominated Teresa for sainthood shortly after her death, and she is widely expected to be canonized.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- When she was awarded the Nobel Prize, Teresa devoted a lengthy portion of her Oslo lecture to attacking abortion, which she called “the greatest destroyer of peace today … because it is a direct war, a direct killing—direct murder by the mother herself.”
- Teresa became an Indian citizen in 1948, after the country gained its independence from Britain.
- Under Vatican regulations, Teresa must cause two miracles after her death to be considered for sainthood. The first purported miracle came in 1998, when an Indian woman claimed that she had been cured of a cancerous tumor after praying to the nun. (The woman’s doctors, however, insisted that the tumor had never been cancerous and that it had been healed using conventional treatments.)
