Mother Teresa: A Revered Nun

Mother Teresa, the revered nun whose work with the dying and the destitute made her an icon of the 20^th Century Christianity was declared a saint today. The elevation of the Nobel Peace Prize winner to Catholicism’s celestial pantheon comes on the eve of the 19^th anniversary of her death in the Kolkata slums with which she is synonymous.

Mother Teresa was honored with many awards throughout her life, from the Indian Padma Shri in 1962 to the inaugural Pope John XXIII Peace Prize in 1971 to Albania’s Golden Honor of the Nation in 1994. In 1964, during a visit to India, Pope Paul VI gave his ceremonial limousine to her which she offered to raise money for the leper colony.

Born to Kosovar Albanian parents in what is now Macedonia in 1910, Teresa died on 5^th September 1997. Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on 26 August 1910, in Macedonia, she was fascinated with missionaries from an early age, and by 12 she knew that she would commit herself to a religious vacation. Mother Teresa left home at the age of 18 and joined Sisters of Loreto in Dublin to become a nun. She never saw her family again in her entire life.

She was a household name around the world and also a citizen of India, the adopted homeland that embraced the diminutive and doggedly determined sister to the extent that she was granted a state funeral. Sister Teresa began teaching history and geography in Calcutta at St. Mary’s, a high school for the daughters of the wealthy. She remained there for 15 years and enjoyed the work, but was distressed by the poverty she saw all around her.

Her canonization has been completed in unusually quick time on the back of the extraordinary popularity she enjoyed during her lifetime and with the help of influential supporters. The late Pope John Paul II, was the pontiff at the time of Teresa’s death and he fast-tracked her beatification. When she was travelling from Calcutta to the Himalayan Foothills to participate in a retreat, she had a calling that Christ asked her to leave teaching and join the service of the sick and the poor.

The current pope, Francis, is also an admirer of women he sees as embodying his vision of a “poor church for the poor.” In 1982, she travelled to Beirut, Lebanon, to offer her service to the children of Christian dominated East Beirut and Muslim dominated West Beirut. The Missionaries of Charity, the order that Teresa created in 1950, now operates in 133 countries and comprise almost 5,000 male and female members.

Mother Teresa also founded the Missionaries of Charity Brothers in 1963, the contemplative branch of the Sisters in 1976, the Contemplative Brothers in 1979, and the Missionaries of Charity Fathers in 1984. During her life, Teresa was widely revered as a self-sacrificing force for good, despite ferocious criticism from prominent intellectuals including the British writer Christopher Hitchens and the Australian feminist academic Germaine Greer.