The saints

Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Founder and Missionary · Feast day September 5 · 1910 to 1997 · Skopje and Calcutta · Also known as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Gonxhe Bojaxhiu

Saint Teresa of Calcutta, known to the world as Mother Teresa, left the security of a convent to serve the poorest of the poor in the slums of India, founding the Missionaries of Charity, who now care for the dying, the abandoned, and the unwanted across the globe. She served for decades in a hidden inner darkness, loving Christ in the distressing disguise of the poor, and is one of the most beloved figures of the modern age.

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.Matthew 25:40 (KJV)

The girl from Skopje

She was born Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in 1910 in Skopje, in what is now North Macedonia, the youngest child of a devout Albanian Catholic family. Her father, a moderately prosperous merchant, died suddenly when she was about eight, plunging the family into hardship, and she was raised in her faith by her strong and generous mother, who kept an open table for the poor of the town and taught her children that whatever they did for the needy they did for God. As a girl Anjeze was drawn to the stories of missionaries serving in distant India, and she felt, while still very young, the first stirrings of a call to give her life wholly to God in the service of others far from home.

At the age of eighteen she left her mother and her sister, whom she would never see again in this life, and joined the Sisters of Loreto, an order of nuns devoted to teaching, first traveling to Ireland to learn English and then sailing on to India. She took the religious name Teresa, after the missionary saint Therese of Lisieux, and was sent to Calcutta, where for nearly twenty years she taught geography and history in a comfortable convent school for girls, most of them from well-off families, and in time became the school's headmistress. She was, by every account, a happy, dedicated, and much-loved teacher, and she might have spent her whole life quietly in that vocation.

The call within a call

Then, on the tenth of September in 1946, on a train journey from Calcutta to the hill town of Darjeeling for her annual retreat, she experienced what she ever afterward called the call within a call. She became certain, through an interior locution she rarely spoke of, that Christ was asking her to leave the security and comfort of the convent altogether and to go out to live among the poorest of the poor, to serve him directly in the abandoned, the sick, and the dying in the teeming slums that lay just beyond her school's walls. It was to satiate, as she understood it, the thirst of Jesus on the cross for love and for souls, by loving him in the most rejected and unwanted of the earth.

Obeying such a call was not simple. It took nearly two years of patient requests before the church would grant permission for a nun to leave her order and undertake something so unprecedented and, to many, so reckless. But in 1948 the permission came, and Mother Teresa laid aside the Loreto habit for a cheap white cotton sari with a blue border, the dress of the poorest Indian women, took a brief course in basic nursing, and then, with a few rupees in her pocket and no plan beyond obedience, walked out of the convent gate and into the worst slums of Calcutta to begin, entirely alone, a work whose scale she could not possibly have imagined.

The Missionaries of Charity

She began with nothing but her sari, her faith, and her two hands. She gathered dying people off the pavements where they had been left to die alone, opened an open-air school for slum children and taught them their letters by scratching in the dirt with a stick, and tended sores and wounds that others would not go near. It was slow, discouraging, and often lonely work, and she was tempted more than once, she later admitted, to return to the comfort she had left. But she persevered, and gradually others were drawn to join her, among them former students from her school, and in 1950 the church formally approved her new order, the Missionaries of Charity.

The sisters of the new order took the three traditional religious vows and added a fourth, found in no other order, to give wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor, seeking no payment and no reward, and they bound themselves to live in the same poverty as those they served, owning almost nothing. The work grew beyond anything Mother Teresa could have foreseen. She opened a home for the dying destitute in a building beside a Hindu temple, where people found abandoned in the streets could die clean, fed, and cared for rather than alone in a gutter, and she insisted always that every person, whatever their religion or condition, deserved to die knowing that they were wanted and loved. She opened homes for abandoned and orphaned children, colonies and clinics for lepers whom society had cast out, and shelters for the destitute and the dying, and from that first house in Calcutta the Missionaries of Charity spread across India and then across the whole world.

Something beautiful for God

Mother Teresa's fame spread far beyond the church and the borders of India. Her tiny, stooped, sari-clad figure became one of the most recognized in the world, and she used the world's fascination with her relentlessly, not for herself, but to speak for the poor, the sick, the unborn, and the unwanted, and to press upon the comfortable and the powerful the truth that the deepest poverty of all is not hunger but the feeling of being unloved, unwanted, and uncared for. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and asked that the money customarily spent on the celebratory banquet be given instead to feed the poor of Calcutta. She met with presidents, kings, and popes and with the dying destitute in exactly the same manner, and she did not hesitate to tell the great of the world plainly what she believed God required of them.

Her message was disarmingly and even scandalously simple, and she never varied it. She spoke of doing small things with great love, insisting that not all of us can do great things but that all of us can do small things with great love. She spoke of serving Christ himself, really and personally, in every hungry, sick, lonely, or dying person, whom she called Christ in his distressing disguise. She offered no grand social programs and no political theories, only personal, hands-on, unglamorous love, given to one abandoned human being at a time. Give until it hurts, she told the world, and smile at the people you find hardest to love, and never forget that you yourself are precious in the sight of God.

The hidden darkness

After her death, a startling and deeply moving truth emerged from her private correspondence, which she had asked to be destroyed but which the church preserved. For most of the roughly fifty years of her ministry among the poor, Mother Teresa lived in a profound and painful spiritual darkness, an interior sense that God was silent, distant, and absent, even as she spoke to the whole world of his love and radiated warmth and joy to everyone she met. The very Christ whose vivid call on the train had sent her into the slums seemed, within her own soul, to have withdrawn entirely, leaving her in a loneliness and dryness that she carried in secret for decades, confiding it only to a few trusted spiritual directors and otherwise hiding it behind her constant smile.

Far from discrediting her, this hidden struggle deepened the respect of many who learned of it, and revealed the true heroism of her life. She had served faithfully not on a comforting wave of felt consolation but out of sheer love and naked obedience, choosing again and again, day after day for half a century, to love a God she could not feel and to serve his poor with a joy that cost her more than anyone had ever guessed. It placed her, without her ever seeking it, among the great mystics of the dark night described by John of the Cross, loving in the darkness, and it gave her tenderness toward the lonely and the unloved a depth that came from the inside, for she knew their desolation from within. She died in Calcutta in 1997, and was declared a saint in 2016, honored by the church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta.

Why Mother Teresa still matters

Mother Teresa is the modern face of the oldest Christian truth of all, that Christ himself is met and served in the least, the lost, and the last, and that love is shown not chiefly in fine words or warm feelings but in kneeling down beside the suffering and doing something for them with your own hands. She proved that one small, poor, unremarkable woman, wholly obedient to a call, can stir the conscience of the entire world, and that faithfulness held in darkness, without any comfort at all, is still faithfulness, and perhaps the purest kind. Whatever you have done unto the least of these my brethren, Jesus said, you have done unto me, and Mother Teresa spent her whole life taking her Lord at his word, one dying stranger at a time, until the day she died.

A note for all traditions: the saints are honored across the church as examples of faith and, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as friends who pray with us, never worshiped, for worship belongs to God alone. What Scripture records and what later tradition holds are distinguished above. In every tradition there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, and every believer, not only the saints, is called to follow him.

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