Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, the youngest of three children of an Albanian builder, on August 26, 1910 in Skopje, Macedonia. She felt that August 27, 1910, the day of her baptism, was her true birthday.
At the age of 18 she joined the Order of the Sisters of Our Lady of Loreto in Ireland. She trained in Dublin, where the motherhouse of the Loreto Sisters was. She chose the name of Sister Teresa, in memory of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. In December 1928 she began her journey to India and continued to Darjeeling, at the base of the Himalayan Mountains, where she would continue her training towards her religious vows. Soon after, on January 6, 1929 arrived in Calcutta, the capital of Bengal, India to teach at a school for girls. While in Calcutta, she was moved by the presence of the sick and dying on the city's streets.
On September 10, 1946, on the long train ride to Darjeeling where she was to go on a retreat and to recover from suspected tuberculosis, something happened. She had a life-changing encounter with the Living Presence of the Will of God. Mother Teresa recalls:
"I realized that I had the call to take care of the sick and the dying, the hungry, the naked, the homeless - to be God's Love in action to the poorest of the poor. That was the beginning of the Missionaries of Charity."
She didn't hesitate, she didn't question. She asked permission to leave the Loreto congregation and to establish a new order of sisters. She received that permission from Pope Pius XII. Surely it was no coincidence that she chose a simple white sari with sapphire blue bands (representing God's Will) as her order's garment.
In 1952 Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity began the work for which they have been noted ever since. Her order received permission from Calcutta officials to use a portion of the abandoned temple to Kali, the Hindu goddess of transition and destroyer of demons. Mother Teresa founded here the Kalighat Home for the Dying, which she named Nirmal Hriday (meaning "Pure Heart"). She and her fellow nuns gathered dying Indians off the streets of Calcutta and brought them to this home to care for them during the days before they died.
In an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge, in the book Something Beautiful for God, Mother Teresa tells how she for the first time picked up a woman from the street.
"The woman was half eaten up by rats and ants. I took her to the hospital, but they could do nothing for her. They only took her because I refused to go home unless something was done for her. After they cared for her, I went straight to the townhall and asked for a place where I could take these people, because that day I found more people dying in the street. The employee of health services brought me to the temple of Kali and showed me the "dormashalah" where the pilgrims used to rest after they worshipped the goddess Kali. The building was empty and he asked me if I wanted it. I was very glad with the offer for many reasons, but especially because it was the center of prayer for Hindus. Within 24 hours we brought our sick and suffering and started the Home for the Dying Destitutes."
Ever since then, thousands of men, women and children (more that 42,000) have been taken from the streets of Calcutta and transported to Nirmal Hriday. Approximately 19,000 of those have had the opportunity to die in an environment of kindness and love. In their last hours they met human and Divine Love, and could feel that they also were children of God. For those who didn't die, the Missionaries of Charity tried to find jobs or they were sent to homes where they could live happily some more years in a caring home.
Mother Teresa's first orphanage was started in 1953, while in 1957 she and her Missionaries of Charity began working with lepers. In the years following, her homes (she called them "tabernacles") have been established in hundreds of locations in the world. You can contact them at one of their United States locations at: Missionaries of Charity, 335 East 145th Street, Bronx, New York 10451; or their Calcutta location: Missionaries of Charity, 54A, Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Road, Calcutta 700 016, India.
