Distinction Comes Six Years After Mother Teresa’s Death

By CINDY WOODEN, CNS

Published: October 9, 2003

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Just over six years and six weeks after her death, Mother Teresa of Calcutta will be beatified by Pope John Paul II Oct. 19 in St. Peter’s Square.

The founder of the Missionaries of Charity died of cardiac arrest Sept. 5, 1997, in Calcutta, India. A mere 15 months later, Pope John Paul gave permission for her beatification process to begin, even though church rules require a waiting period of five years.

Small of stature and full of energy, she was acclaimed as a living saint during her lifetime. She won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize and, just three months before her death, was awarded the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal.

Wearing a white and blue sari, she traveled the world delivering a single message: that love and caring are the most important things in the world.

“The biggest disease today,” she once said, “is not leprosy or tuberculosis but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for and deserted by everybody. The greatest evil is the lack of love and charity, the terrible indifference toward one’s neighbor who lives at the roadside, assaulted by exploitation, corruption, poverty and disease.”

Born Aug. 26, 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia, to parents of ethnic Albanian origin, Agnes Ganxhe Bojaxhiu attended public schools and participated in a Catholic sodality with an interest in foreign missions.

She later said that she knew at age 12 that she wanted to be a missionary.

She left home in 1928 to join the Loretto Sisters in Dublin, Ireland. The sisters sent her to India at the beginning of 1929 to study at their novitiate in Darjeeling.

Teaching at a fashionable Catholic girls’ school in Calcutta, she could not ignore the incredible poverty around her, especially the suffering endured by the dying and destitute on the city’s streets.

Riding on an Indian train Sept. 10, 1946, she received what she described as a “call within a call.”

“The message was clear,” she later said. “I was to leave the convent and help the poor, while living among them.”

Two years later, the Vatican gave her permission to leave the Loretto Sisters and follow her new calling under the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Calcutta.

After three months of medical training with the American Medical Missionary Sisters in Patna, India, Mother Teresa went into the Calcutta slums, opening a school for children who had had no access to education.

Soon volunteers, many of them her former students, came to join her.

In 1950 the Missionaries of Charity became a diocesan religious community, and 15 years later the Vatican recognized it as a pontifical congregation, directly under Vatican jurisdiction.

In 1952 the city of Calcutta gave Mother Teresa a former Hindu hostel, which she and her sisters turned into the Nirmal Hriday (Pure Heart) Home for Dying Destitutes.

Although most Missionaries of Charity are sisters working with the poor, orphans, the aged, the handicapped and the dying, Mother Teresa also founded a branch of contemplative sisters, contemplative brothers and an order of priests.

The Missionaries work in more than 130 countries.