Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity, a religious order that cares for the dying, the sick, orphans and the abandoned, and became for many people the face of Christian compassion.
She was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu on 26 August 1910 in Skopje, to an Albanian Catholic family. At 18 she joined the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland and was sent to India in 1929, where she taught for many years at a girls' school in Calcutta (Kolkata).
A call within a call
On 10 September 1946, travelling by train to Darjeeling, she experienced what she called "a call within a call": to serve Christ in the poorest of the poor. In 1948 she left the convent, put on a simple white sari with a blue border, and began working in the slums. The Missionaries of Charity were approved in Calcutta on 7 October 1950. In 1952 she opened Nirmal Hriday, a home where the destitute could die with dignity.
Recognition
The order spread across India and then the world, opening homes for the dying, people with leprosy, abandoned children and, later, people with AIDS. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.
Letters published after her death, in Come Be My Light (2007), revealed that for decades she had lived with a deep sense of God's absence while continuing her work in faith. She died in Calcutta on 5 September 1997 and was canonised by Pope Francis on 4 September 2016 as Saint Teresa of Calcutta.