Saint Teresa of Calcutta

Life and historical context

Anjezë (Agnes) Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born on 26 August 1910 in Skopje, then in the Kosovo Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire, now the capital of North Macedonia. She was the youngest of three children of Nikollë Bojaxhiu, an Albanian-Catholic merchant and city councillor, and Drane Bernai. Her father died suddenly in 1919 when Anjezë was eight years old, possibly poisoned for his Albanian nationalist political activities. The family fell into poverty but remained intensely Catholic; her mother supported the children through embroidery work and a small textile business while keeping the family's parish of the Sacred Heart in Skopje at the center of their daily life.¹

By her own later testimony, Anjezë's vocation to religious life crystallized around 1922, when she was twelve, and she resolved at that time to devote her life to missionary work. At the age of eighteen, in September 1928, she left home and joined the Sisters of Loreto in Dublin, Ireland, an Irish branch of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary established in 1822 specifically for missionary work in India. She took the religious name Mary Teresa (after Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, then recently canonized in 1925) and after her novitiate at Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham was sent to the Loreto mission in India in 1929. She made her first vows in 1931 at the Loreto convent in Darjeeling and her perpetual vows in 1937.²

Sister Teresa taught at Saint Mary's School for Girls in Calcutta from 1931 to 1948, eventually serving as the school's headmistress. The decisive turn in her life occurred on 10 September 1946 during a train journey from Calcutta to Darjeeling for her annual retreat. She experienced what she later called her "call within a call": an interior conviction that Christ was asking her to leave the relative security of the Loreto community to serve the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta. The interior locutions she received during this journey and over the following months are documented in her later spiritual director's notes and in the canonization records.³

After two years of canonical procedures, on 17 August 1948 Teresa received permission from Pope Pius XII to leave the Sisters of Loreto and live as a sister outside any existing congregation. She received basic medical training from the Medical Mission Sisters in Patna, then returned to Calcutta and began her work in the slums in December 1948. The first years were extraordinarily difficult: she lived in genuine poverty, begged for food, and was at one point so destitute that she considered returning to Loreto. In 1950 the Archbishop of Calcutta canonically erected the new community as the Missionaries of Charity, and the Vatican issued a Decree of Praise in 1965 elevating the community to a religious institute of pontifical right.⁴

The Missionaries of Charity grew rapidly across India and the world. By the time of Mother Teresa's death in 1997, the community numbered more than four thousand sisters in 610 missions in 123 countries. Her work received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985, and India's highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna, in 1980. She died at the Calcutta motherhouse on 5 September 1997, six days after her eighty-seventh birthday.⁵

Theological and spiritual significance

Mother Teresa's spirituality is concentrated on the identification of Christ with the suffering poor, particularly with the dying. The principal scriptural text underlying her work is Matthew 25:31-46, the parable of the Last Judgment in which Christ identifies himself with "the least of these my brethren": "as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me." The Missionaries of Charity Constitutions, drafted by Mother Teresa with the assistance of theologians at the Archdiocese of Calcutta, treat the work of caring for the dying poor as a literal sacramental encounter with the body of Christ.⁶

A particularly significant dimension of Mother Teresa's spirituality, only fully revealed after her death, was her experience of profound spiritual darkness across nearly fifty years of her life. The interior letters preserved among her spiritual directors and published posthumously in Come Be My Light (2007) document a sustained interior dryness in which she described herself as feeling abandoned by God, unable to perceive his presence, while at the same time continuing the daily routine of prayer, sacramental life, and service to the poor. The phenomenon, which Catholic spiritual theology recognizes as the "dark night of the soul" described by Saint John of the Cross, has been read by theologians since 2007 as the interior counterpart of her external work: just as she served Christ in the despised and dying, so she lived spiritually in a participation in the abandonment Christ experienced on the Cross ("My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?").⁷

The cause for Mother Teresa's canonization was opened in 1999 by Pope John Paul II, who waived the standard five-year waiting period after her 1997 death (the same waiver later granted for John Paul II's own cause). She was beatified by John Paul II on 19 October 2003 and canonized by Pope Francis on 4 September 2016, the day before what would have been the nineteenth anniversary of her death. Pope Francis chose the date deliberately to coincide with the Year of Mercy he had declared, identifying her work of mercy as the canonical exemplar of the year's theme.⁸

Devotion and liturgical observance

The feast of Saint Teresa of Calcutta is celebrated on 5 September, the day of her death, in the universal Roman Calendar with the rank of optional memorial. The Missionaries of Charity and the dioceses where they minister observe the feast with greater solemnity. The Archdiocese of Calcutta, of which Mother Teresa is a co-patron, observes the feast as a solemnity.⁹

The motherhouse of the Missionaries of Charity at 54A AJC Bose Road in Calcutta houses Mother Teresa's tomb and is the principal pilgrimage destination associated with the saint. The Nirmal Hriday (Pure Heart) home for the dying at Kalighat in Calcutta, the first Missionaries of Charity facility opened by Mother Teresa in 1952, is a secondary pilgrimage site. Her childhood home in Skopje is preserved as a memorial museum, and the Memorial House of Mother Teresa stands on the site of the parish church where she was baptized.

The traditional iconography of Mother Teresa shows her in the distinctive habit she designed for the Missionaries of Charity: a white cotton sari edged with three blue stripes (the three stripes representing the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience plus the fourth Missionaries of Charity vow of "wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor"). She is most commonly depicted holding a rosary or carrying a child or a sick person, with her face deeply lined and her hands often raised in blessing or prayer. Her liturgical color on the feast is white.

Prayers and novenas associated with Mother Teresa

The principal devotion to Saint Teresa of Calcutta in current Catholic practice is the Mother Teresa Novena, a nine-day prayer for the spirit of charity, the protection of the dying poor, and the imitation of the Missionaries of Charity charism.

A traditional brief prayer drawn from Mother Teresa's writings:

Make us worthy, Lord, to serve our fellow men throughout the world who live and die in poverty and hunger. Give them, through our hands, this day their daily bread, and by our understanding love, give peace and joy.

This prayer, recited daily by the Missionaries of Charity before meals, is one of the most commonly quoted texts associated with the saint.

Catholics commonly pair Mother Teresa devotions with the Holy Rosary, particularly the Sorrowful Mysteries (in connection with her spirituality of identification with Christ's abandonment), the Memorare, and the Anima Christi. Mother Teresa instructed the Missionaries of Charity to pray the Memorare nine times in succession for urgent intentions ("flying novena," named because it is "flown" rather than spread over nine days).

For broader theological context, see Communion of Saints, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (whose name Mother Teresa took at her religious profession), and Saint John Paul II (who beatified her).

Sources

Footnotes

1. Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta, edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk M.C. (2007). The biographical introduction includes detailed treatment of her early life. Catholic Encyclopedia entries on Mother Teresa were written after her canonization in 2016 and are available in updated digital editions. ↩

2. Mother Teresa: A Simple Path, by Lucinda Vardey (1995), with extensive interviews and biographical detail. The Loreto Sisters' archives at Rathfarnham, Dublin, preserve documentation of her postulancy, novitiate, and assignment to Darjeeling and Calcutta. ↩

3. Come Be My Light, sections II and III, on the 1946 train journey and the "call within a call." The interior locutions Teresa received during 1946 and 1947 are documented in letters to her spiritual directors, particularly Father Celeste Van Exem S.J. and Archbishop Ferdinand Périer S.J. of Calcutta. ↩

4. Butler's Lives of the Saints, September 5 entry on Saint Teresa of Calcutta (revised post-2016 edition). Pope Pius XII, Indult of 17 August 1948 permitting Teresa's release from the Loreto Sisters. Decree of canonical erection of the Missionaries of Charity by Archbishop Périer of Calcutta, 7 October 1950. Decree of Praise issued by the Sacred Congregation for Religious in 1965. ↩

5. The growth statistics of the Missionaries of Charity are documented in the official histories of the Congregation. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on 17 October 1979. ↩

6. Constitutions of the Missionaries of Charity (1953, revised under canonical norms in subsequent decades). The Mt 25 framework and the sacramental theology of service to the dying are central organizing principles. The Catechism of the Catholic Church treats the corporal works of mercy in paragraphs 2447 and the Last Judgment in paragraphs 1038-1041. ↩

7. Come Be My Light, the principal published source for the interior darkness Teresa experienced from 1948 onward. The theological treatment of the dark night of the soul in Catholic spiritual tradition is grounded in Saint John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul. ↩

8. Pope John Paul II, dispensation of 1999 from the five-year waiting period. Beatification homily of 19 October 2003. Pope Francis, canonization homily of 4 September 2016. All available at vatican.va. ↩

9. General Roman Calendar, current edition, on the rank and date of the feast of Saint Teresa of Calcutta on 5 September. The Archdiocese of Calcutta's elevation of the feast to solemnity is documented in the local liturgical calendar. ↩