Saint Teresa of Calcutta

The woman smiled, laid her wrinkled hand on his forehead and answered gently:

“Because I love you, and Jesus loves you!”

That little woman, who weighed less than forty-five kilograms, was Mother Teresa of Calcutta, before whom the whole modern world bowed in respect. In an age that chased wealth and comfort and worshiped material power, she swam against the tide. She went down to the very bottom of misery to embrace the people society found most repulsive and drove away: lepers covered in sores, AIDS patients in their last days, newborns thrown into garbage bins.

When Gonxha was nine, her father died suddenly after a violent illness; many suspected he had been poisoned because of his politics. With the breadwinner gone, her mother worked hard at a sewing and embroidery business to raise three young children. Though the family was now much poorer, Dranafile never forgot the poor. She often told her little daughter:

“Whenever you share a piece of bread with the poor, remember that you are sharing it with Jesus Himself!”

There was always room at the Bojaxhiu table for a wandering beggar.

At eighteen, feeling an urgent call to the missions, Gonxha said goodbye to her mother and her homeland to join the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland, an order devoted to teaching in mission lands. She was sent to India at the beginning of 1929.

After her novitiate in Darjeeling at the foot of the snowy Himalayas, she made her vows and took the religious name Teresa, after Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, the saint of the “little way.”

For nearly twenty years Sister Teresa lived peacefully behind the solid walls of St. Mary’s high school on the outskirts of Calcutta. She taught geography and history to girls from well-off families and was later made principal. She was an exemplary nun, dearly loved by students and colleagues. Yet just beyond the school’s brick wall lay the slums of Motijhil, among the poorest, dirtiest and hungriest in the world.

The call asked her to give up everything: to leave the safe, comfortable school, take off the Loreto habit and go out to live among the poor, sharing their destitution completely.

In 1949 a former student, Subashini Das, became the first to join her. On October 7, 1950, the Holy See officially recognized the founding of the Missionaries of Charity.

Besides the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, her sisters took a special fourth vow:

“wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor”

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In 1952 Mother Teresa opened her first home for the dying at Kalighat, in an abandoned pilgrims’ hostel within the grounds of the Hindu temple most sacred to the goddess Kali, and named it Nirmal Hriday, “Pure Heart.”

At first, angry Hindu extremists surrounded the place, demanding that she be driven out; they suspected she was using charity to lure people into Christianity. She calmly came out and told the police officer:

“If you want to kill me, kill me; but let these poor people have a place to die in peace!”

Then one day she found a young Hindu priest with cholera, abandoned by his own people and lying in the street waiting to die. Mother carried him in herself, washed him lovingly and nursed him back to health. Seeing a love that made no distinction of religion, the people knelt to apologize and began to call her a living saint. Over the decades, Nirmal Hriday took in more than fifty-four thousand dying people from the streets of Calcutta, and more than twenty-three thousand of them died there in loving arms instead of alone in the gutters.

Mother said:

“They lived like animals in the street; but we want them to die like angels — loved and respected!”

Wherever people suffered abandoned, Mother and her sisters went: to storms, earthquakes and wars. During the siege of Beirut in 1982, she crossed the lines under bombardment herself to rescue thirty-seven disabled children left behind in a psychiatric hospital.

In 1979, Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At the ceremony in Oslo, Norway, she declined the lavish banquet, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and asked that the money be used to buy food for the hungry.

Before heads of state and world-famous scholars, the woman in the faded sari spoke up for innocent unborn children:

“The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion... If a mother can kill her own child in her womb, what is left to stop you and me from killing each other?”

Her whole outlook on life fits into a few simple words:

“God does not ask us to be successful; He asks us to be faithful... It is not how much we do, but how much love we put into what we do!”

Her letters to her spiritual directors, published after her death, stunned the world. From 1948 until the day she died, she hardly ever felt the comfort of God’s presence. Her soul was sunk in dryness, coldness and emptiness. She felt completely abandoned by God.

That was her deepest sharing in the thirst of Jesus on the Cross:

“My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”

She did not give up. The more absent God seemed, the more tightly she clung to faith; the emptier she felt inside, the more love she poured out on the suffering. Her holiness was not a string of sweet, fervent days. It was a heroic act of the will, daring to love until it hurts.

The government of India, a mostly Hindu nation, gave her a state funeral with the highest honors, normally reserved for heads of state. Her coffin was carried on the same gun carriage that had once borne the body of Mahatma Gandhi. Millions of people of every religion, color and caste poured into the streets, weeping, to say goodbye to their beloved Mother.

On October 19, 2003, Pope John Paul II beatified her. On September 4, 2016, Pope Francis canonized Mother Teresa of Calcutta in Saint Peter’s Square. The Church celebrates her on September 5 each year.

She reminds us:

“Find the poor right in your own home, and begin to love right there!”