Mother Teresa

Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born on 26 August 1910 in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire and now the capital of North Macedonia, to an Albanian Catholic family. She joined the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland in 1928, taking the name Teresa after Therese of Lisieux, and was sent that same year to India, where she taught for nearly two decades at a Loreto convent school in Calcutta.

In 1946, travelling by train to a retreat in Darjeeling, she experienced what she later described as a call within her calling, an instruction to leave the convent and work directly among Calcutta's poorest residents. She received permission to do so in 1948, left the Loreto order, trained briefly as a nurse and began work alone in the city's slums, wearing for the first time the simple white sari bordered in blue that became her lifelong habit and, eventually, an internationally recognized symbol. The years that followed were difficult ones: she begged for food and supplies from local merchants, slept wherever shelter could be found, and was joined only gradually by former students and other volunteers willing to share the same austere conditions. That slow, uncertain beginning, rather than any sudden institutional backing, is what the earliest Missionaries of Charity accounts describe, and it shaped the congregation's later insistence on living among, rather than merely visiting, the people it served.

In 1950 she received Vatican approval to found a new religious congregation, the Missionaries of Charity, dedicated to what its constitution called wholehearted service to the poorest of the poor. What began as a single small community in Calcutta grew, over the following decades, into a congregation with houses in more than a hundred countries, running hospices, orphanages, clinics and shelters, and Mother Teresa herself became one of the most publicly recognized religious figures of the twentieth century, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for that work.

She died in Calcutta on 5 September 1997. Pope John Paul II beatified her in 2003 and Pope Francis canonized her in 2016 as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, one of the fastest canonizations in modern Catholic history. Her posthumously published private letters revealed decades of profound spiritual doubt and a felt absence of God that stood in stark contrast to her public image, a disclosure that reshaped how scholars and believers alike have since read her life and work. The congregation's work expanded well beyond Calcutta during her lifetime to include homes for the dying, leprosy treatment centers, orphanages and, later, hospices for those with HIV and AIDS, and it continued to grow after her death under successive superiors general, still following the constitution she had established in 1950.