Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in 1910 to an ethnic Albanian family in what is now Skopje, North Macedonia, spent nearly seven decades in India and became, through her work among the destitute of Calcutta's slums, one of the most globally recognized symbols of selfless humanitarian service in the twentieth century — a legacy that earned her the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, canonization as a Catholic saint in 2016, and, alongside these honors, a body of sustained criticism regarding aspects of her methods and public positions that any complete account of her legacy should acknowledge.

From Albanian grocer's daughter to Loreto nun

Agnes's father, a moderately successful merchant, died when she was only eight, and she was raised primarily by her devout mother within a close-knit Catholic community. At eighteen, drawn by a growing fascination with the lives of Catholic missionaries, she left home to join the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish religious order with an established missionary presence in India, training briefly in Dublin before being sent to India in 1929, where she began her novitiate in Darjeeling. She took her initial vows as a nun in 1931, choosing the name Teresa in honor of the nineteenth-century French saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and spent the following seventeen years teaching geography and eventually serving as principal at St. Mary's High School in Calcutta.

A "call within a call"

In 1946, while riding a train to a retreat in Darjeeling, Teresa experienced what she later described as a second, more specific calling — an inspiration to leave the security of convent life and dedicate herself directly to living and working among Calcutta's poorest residents, rather than continuing to observe their suffering from within the relative comfort of the mission school. It took two years to secure permission from her religious superiors and the Holy See; in 1948, she was finally released from her teaching duties, adopted the simple white cotton sari with blue trim that became her lifelong and instantly recognizable habit, underwent brief medical training to prepare for direct nursing work, and began operating an open-air school for slum children with no funding beyond what she described as her reliance on Divine Providence.

Founding the Missionaries of Charity

On October 7, 1950, Mother Teresa received formal permission from the Holy See to establish her own religious congregation, the Missionaries of Charity, whose explicitly stated mission was to care for "the poorest of the poor" — those whom she felt no one else was prepared to look after. From this foundation, the order expanded steadily to establish homes for the dying, orphanages, centers for the blind, aged and disabled, and leprosy treatment facilities, first across Calcutta and eventually throughout India and internationally, growing by the time of her death in 1997 into a global organization comprising thousands of sisters, alongside an associated lay support network, the Co-Workers, that had grown to more than a million members across more than forty countries by the 1990s.

The Nobel Peace Prize and its aftermath

In 1979, Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her humanitarian work; characteristically, she declined the traditional ceremonial banquet and requested that its roughly $192,000 cost be redirected to the poor in India, using her acceptance speech to focus attention on global poverty rather than on her own achievement. Her stated theology, frequently summarized in the line "in the poor it is the hungry Christ that we are feeding," framed her entire ministry as a direct form of religious devotion — service to the destitute understood not merely as charity but as service to Christ himself, present, in her understanding, within every suffering person she and her sisters encountered.

Sustained public scrutiny alongside global acclaim

Mother Teresa's work and public statements also attracted significant and sustained criticism during and after her lifetime, including from medical professionals and journalists who raised concerns about conditions and standards of care within some Missionaries of Charity facilities, from critics of her public opposition to contraception and abortion, and from commentators questioning the sourcing and use of the substantial international donations her organization received. A complete account of her legacy includes both the scale of global admiration she received — she topped Gallup's list of the century's most widely admired people and was granted India's highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna — and this body of documented critical examination, which readers researching her further are encouraged to consult directly rather than relying solely on either purely hagiographic or purely critical accounts.