Mother Teresa

Life and work

Born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Skopje (in present-day North Macedonia) to an ethnic Albanian family, she joined the Sisters of Loreto at eighteen and was sent to India, taking the name Teresa and teaching for nearly two decades at a Loreto convent school in Calcutta.

In 1946, on a train journey to Darjeeling, she experienced what she described as a distinct call within her vocation — "the call within the call" — to leave the convent and serve Christ directly among the poorest of Calcutta's slums. After receiving permission and basic medical training, she began her new work in 1948, and in 1950 founded the Missionaries of Charity, a new religious order dedicated to serving the destitute, dying, and abandoned.

The Missionaries of Charity grew from a single Calcutta house into a global order operating homes for the dying, orphanages, and hospices in dozens of countries, drawing both wide admiration for its direct, hands-on care of society's most marginalized and, from some critics including physician-writer Aroup Chatterjee and journalist Christopher Hitchens, sharp criticism over the medical standards of its facilities and its acceptance of donations from controversial figures.

Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, using her acceptance speech to speak against abortion as, in her framing, a form of violence against the vulnerable. The posthumous publication of her private letters in Come Be My Light (2007) revealed decades of profound spiritual darkness and doubt she experienced privately even while publicly radiating serene faith, adding a complex and much-discussed dimension to her legacy.

She was canonized by Pope Francis in 2016 as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, and remains one of the most globally recognized Catholic figures of the modern era.

Questions and debates

Medical standards at Missionaries of Charity facilities were criticized by some visiting physicians and journalists as inadequate; her acceptance of donations from figures later convicted of fraud, and her public opposition to contraception and abortion in contexts of severe poverty, drew significant criticism as well as strong defense from supporters.

In their own words

"Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love."attributed

Spoke of "the greatest destroyer of peace today" as being what she described as abortion.Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, 1979

Further reading

• Encyclopedia Britannica: Mother Teresa
• Nobel Prize official biography