Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta(1910-1997)Feast Day September 5

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the tiny woman recognized throughout the world for her work among the poorest of the poor, was beatified October 19, 2003.  Among those present were hundreds of Missionaries of Charity, the order she founded in 1950 as a diocesan religious community.  Today the congregation also includes contemplative sisters and brothers and a community of priests.

Born to Albanians parents in what is now Skopje, Macedonia (then part of the Ottoman Empire), Gonxha (Agnes) Bojaxhiu was the youngest of the three children who survived.  For a time, the family lived comfortably, and her father’s construction business thrived.  But life changed overnight following his unexpected death.  During her years in public school, Agnes participated in a Catholic sodality and showed a strong interest in the foreign missions.  At age eighteen she entered the Loreto Sisters in Dublin.  It was 1928 when she said goodbye to her mother for the final time and made her way to a new land and a new life.  The following year she was sent to the Loreto novitiate in Darjeeling, India.  There she chose the name Teresa and prepared for a life of service.  She was assigned to a high school for girls in Calcutta, where she taught history and geography to the daughters of the wealthy.  But she could not escape the realities around her- the poverty, the suffering, the overwhelming numbers of destitute people. 

In 1946 while riding a train to Darjeeling to make a retreat, Sister Teresa heard what she later explained as “a call within a call."  The message was clear.  "I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them.”  She also heard a call to give up her life with the Sisters of Loreto and, instead, to “follow Christ into the slums to serve him among the poorest of the poor.”

This excerpt taken from Saint of the Day  (W1078)