Mother Teresa of Calcutta
His feast is celebrated on September 5
Biography
Ganxhe Agnes Bojaxhiu -named after Mother Teresa of Calcutta- was born on August 26, 1910 in Skopje, the capital of present-day Macedonia, which at that time was a small city of 20,000 inhabitants under Turkish rule, but had long belonged to to Albania. She lived in an Albanian Catholic family. She expressed it in these words:
“By blood I am Albanian. By citizenship, India. As far as faith is concerned, I am a Catholic nun. By my vocation, I belong to the world. As far as my heart is concerned, I totally belong to the Heart of Jesus.”
She was the youngest child of Nikola and Drane Bojaxhiu and made her First Communion at the age of five and a half and received Confirmation in November 1916. From the day of her First Communion, she carried within her the love for souls . The sudden death of her father, when Gonxha was about eight years old, left the family in great financial straits. Drane, her mother, raised her children with firmness and love, greatly influencing the character and vocation of her daughter. In her religious formation, Gonxha was also assisted by the vibrant Jesuit Parish of the Sacred Heart, in which she was very integrated.
“I was not yet 12 years old when I felt the desire to be a missionary,” Mother Teresa later recounted. “At the feet of Our Lady of Letnice, one day I heard the Divine call that convinced me to serve God,” said Mother Teresa many years later, who confessed to discovering the intensity of the call thanks “to a great inner joy.”
When she was eighteen years old, moved by the desire to become a missionary, Gonxha left her home in September 1928 to enter the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, known as the Sisters of Loreto, in Rathfarnham, Ireland. She there she received the name of Sister Maria Teresa (for Saint Teresa of Lisieux). In December, she began her journey to India, arriving in Calcutta on January 6, 1929. After professing her first vows in May 1931, Sister Teresa was assigned to the Loreto Entally community in Calcutta, where she taught at the St. Mary’s School for Girls. On May 24, 1937, Sister Teresa made her perpetual profession, thus becoming, as she herself said, “the bride of Jesus” for “all eternity.” From that moment she was called Mother Teresa. She went on to teach at St. Mary’s, becoming director of the center in 1944. A person of deep prayer and deep love for her religious sisters and students, Mother Teresa’s twenty years in Loreto were filled with deep joy. Characterized by her charity, altruism and courage, by her capacity for hard work and by a natural talent for organizing, she lived her consecration to Jesus among her companions with fidelity and joy.
On September 10, 1946, while traveling from Calcutta to Darjeeling for her annual retreat, Mother Teresa received her “inspiration,” her “call within the call.” That day, in a way she would never explain, the thirst for love and souls took hold of her heart and the desire to quench the thirst of Jesus became the driving force of her entire life. During the following weeks and months, through interior locutions and visions, Jesus revealed her heart’s desire to find “victims of love” who would “radiate her love to souls.” “Come and be my light,” Jesus pleaded with her. “I can’t go alone.” She revealed to him her pain at the neglect of the poor, her sorrow at their ignorance of Him and her desire to be loved by them. He asked Mother Teresa to found a religious congregation, Missionaries of Charity, dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor. Almost two years of testing and discernment passed before Mother Teresa received permission to begin. On August 17, 1948, she dressed for the first time in a white sari trimmed in blue and walked through the doors of her beloved convent in Loreto to enter the world of the poor.
After a short course with the Medical Missionary Sisters in Patna, Mother Teresa returned to Calcutta where she found temporary accommodation with the Little Sisters of the Poor. On December 21, she goes to the slums for the first time. She visited families, washed the wounds of some children, took care of a sick old man who was lying in the street and cared for a woman who was dying of hunger and tuberculosis. She began each day by entering into communion with Jesus in the Eucharist and leaving home, rosary in hand, to meet and serve Jesus in “the unwanted, the unloved, those no one cared for.” After a few months her former students began to join her, one by one.
On October 7, 1950, the new congregation of the Missionaries of Charity was officially established in the Archdiocese of Calcutta. In the early 1960s, Mother Teresa began sending her Sisters to other parts of India. The Decree of Praise, granted by Pope Paul VI to the Congregation in February 1965, encouraged Mother Teresa to open a house in Venezuela. This was quickly followed by foundations in Rome, Tanzania, and successively on every continent. Beginning in 1980 and continuing through the 1990s, Mother Teresa opened houses in nearly every communist country, including the former Soviet Union, Albania, and Cuba.
To better respond to the physical and spiritual needs of the poor, Mother Teresa 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. However, her inspiration was not limited only to those who felt a vocation to religious life. She created the Collaborators of Mother Teresa and the Sick and Suffering Collaborators, people of different beliefs and nationalities with whom she shared her spirit of prayer, simplicity, sacrifice and her apostolate based on humble works of love. This spirit later inspired the Lay Missionaries of Charity. In response to requests from many priests, Mother Teresa also started the Corpus Christi Movement for Priests in 1981 as a “little path to holiness” for those priests who wished to share her charism and spirit.
During these years of rapid development, the world began to take notice of Mother Teresa and the work she had begun. Numerous awards, beginning with the Indian Padmashri Prize in 1962 and most notably the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, have honored her work. At the same time, the media began to follow her activities with increasing interest. She received both the awards and the growing attention “to the glory of God and on behalf of the poor.”
The whole life and work of Mother Teresa was a testimony to the joy of loving, to the greatness and dignity of each human person, to the value of small things done with fidelity and love, and to the incomparable value of friendship with God. But, there was another heroic side to this woman that came to light only after her death. Hidden from all eyes, hidden even from those closest to her, her inner life was marked by the experience of a deep, painful and constant feeling of separation from God, even of feeling rejected by Him, coupled with an ever-increasing desire of his love. She herself called her inner experience “darkness.” The “painful night” of her soul, which began around the time she began her work with the poor and continued until the end of her life, led Mother Teresa into an ever deeper union with God. Through the darkness, she participated in the thirst of Jesus (the painful and burning desire for love of Jesus) and shared the inner desolation of the poor.
During the last years of her life, despite increasingly serious health problems, Mother Teresa continued to direct her Institute and respond to the needs of the poor and of the Church. In 1997 the Sisters of Mother Teresa had nearly 4,000 members and had established 610 foundations in 123 countries around the world. In March 1997, Mother Teresa blessed her newly elected successor as Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity, successively undertaking another trip abroad. After meeting Pope John Paul II for the last time, she returned to Calcutta where she spent the last weeks of her life receiving people who came to visit her and instructing her Sisters.
On September 5, 1997, Mother Teresa’s earthly life came to an end. The Government of India granted her the honor of holding a state funeral and her body was buried at the Motherhouse of the Missionaries of Charity. Her tomb quickly became a place of pilgrimage and prayer for people of faith and from diverse social backgrounds (rich and poor alike). Mother Teresa left us the example of solid faith, invincible hope and extraordinary charity. Her response to Jesus’ call, “Come and be my light,” made her a Missionary of Charity, a “mother to the poor,” a symbol of compassion for the world, and a living witness to the thirst for God’s Love.
Less than two years after her death, because of the widespread fame of Mother Teresa’s sanctity and the favors attributed to her, Pope John Paul II allowed the opening of her Cause for Canonization. On December 20, 2002, the same Pope approved the decrees on the heroic virtues and on the miracle obtained through the intercession of Mother Teresa. On October 19, 2003, Pope John Paul II beatified her.
Pope Francis canonized Mother Teresa of Calcutta on September 4, 2016. 1,500 poor people, cared for by the Missionaries of Charity in Italy, received a very special gift from Pope Francis at the end of the canonization mass of Mother Teresa of Calcutta . In the atrium of the Paul VI Hall they were able to eat Neapolitan pizza. The guests, who came from the hostels that the sisters manage in Italy – Milan, Bologna, Florence and Naples – traveled the night before by bus to participate first in the canonization and then in the meal. Lunch was served by some 250 sisters of Mother Teresa, 50 brothers from the male congregation and some volunteers. The pizzas were prepared by Neapolitan pizza masters with their team of almost 20 people and with mobile equipment made up of 3 ovens.
The miracle that made her a saint occurred in 2008 in Brazil. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints credited Mother Teresa of Calcutta with curing a 42-year-old Brazilian man who had been diagnosed with a “viral brain infection that resulted in multiple abscesses with triventricular hydrocephalus,” according to priest Brian Kolodiejchuk. , who was the postulator of the cause of canonization. The man underwent emergency surgery while in a coma in December 2008. An hour and a half later, the…