Mother Theresa

Mother Theresa

Mother Theresa was internationally respected for her work to relieve the sufferings of the poor, sick and dying. She began her work for helping the desperately poor of India by bringing dying persons from the streets into a home, where they could die in peace and dignity. She also established an orphanage. Through her untiring efforts she succeed in forming a congregation of sisters who work has now spread to five continent.

Mother Theresa was born in Skipje, Albania, on August 27, 1910, and was named Agnes Gonxha Bejaxhini. She left her home at the age of 18 to join the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dublin. She entered the order of the sisters of Our Lady of Loreto when she was 18 years old. She was sent to Calcutta by the sisters of Loreto and she became a Geography teacher in a school in Calcutta. While travelling on a train on September 10, 1946 she heard the cries of some sick and helpless people , which inspired her to help the poor. This experience she described as a “call within a call” to help the desperately poor of India.

In early 1948, the year she became an Indian citizen, she asked permission to leave her convent and Sister  Agnes became Theresa. She moved into the city’s slums and started nursing to help the destitute in Culcutta. She donned a blue trimmed white sari, which became the uniform of her Missionaries of Charity, founded on October 07, 1950. The Missionaries of Charity now number nearly 3000 sisters of various nationalities who work on five continents. They are helped by about 400 brothers and thousands of lay volunteers, who run 380 hospices, leper colonies and orphanages, including 160 in India.

Mother Theresa won many awards for her dedicated work in serving the poorest of the poor. She was awarded the first John XXIII Peace prize in 1968 by pope John Paul. She was honored with the Jawaharlal Nehru Prize for International Understanding in 1972 and India’s highest civilian decoration a year later.

Mother Theresa died in 1997 at the age of 87. She ended her life in Calcutta, the city that had inspired her as an 18 year old, to establish her Missionaries of Charity Order. Although Mother Theresa is no more, the good work she began lives on, as the order’s  homes, which first started in India, have spread to 87 countries. “A drop of deliverance in an ocean of suffering”  is the single phrase she often used to describe her life’s work.