St. Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa)

Their story

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born in 1910 in Skopje, in what is now North Macedonia. At eighteen she joined the Sisters of Loreto, taking the name Teresa, and was sent to India. For nearly twenty years she taught at a girls’ school in Calcutta and later served as its principal. On September 10, 1946, while traveling by train to Darjeeling for a retreat, she experienced what she called a “call within a call.” She heard Jesus asking her to serve him among the poorest of the poor, and she understood his cry from the cross, “I thirst,” as his longing for souls and for love. In 1948 she left her convent, put on a simple white sari with a blue border, and went into the slums of Calcutta with almost nothing. In 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity. Mother Teresa and her sisters opened homes for the dying, orphans, people with leprosy and the abandoned, first in India and then around the world. She saw Jesus in each person, especially the ones no one else wanted. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. Letters published after her death revealed that for decades she felt a painful sense of God’s absence, yet she kept loving and serving with a smile. She died in 1997 and was canonized in 2016.