Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on 26 August 1910 in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire and now the capital of North Macedonia. She came from an ethnic Albanian Catholic family. Her father, Nikola, was a merchant; her mother, Drane, raised the children in a devout household after Nikola died when Agnes was still a child. From an early age she felt drawn to religious life. At twelve she believed God was calling her to missionary work. At eighteen she left home for Ireland to join the Sisters of Loreto, took the name Teresa after Thérèse of Lisieux, and soon sailed for India. She never saw her mother or sister again.
In India she taught at St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta, learned local languages, and eventually became principal. For years she lived a relatively ordered convent life while the city outside the walls endured famine, communal violence, and extreme poverty. On 10 September 1946, travelling by train to Darjeeling for a retreat, she experienced what she later called a “call within a call”: an inner command to leave the classroom and serve the poorest of the poor by living among them. After obtaining permission, she left Loreto in 1948, received brief medical training, and began work in the slums. On 7 October 1950 the Vatican approved her new congregation, the Missionaries of Charity. Its habit was a simple white sari with blue borders. Its stated task was to care for those no one else would look after.
The order grew rapidly. Nuns opened homes for the dying, orphanages, and centres for people with leprosy. Kalighat’s Home for the Dying Destitutes became the most famous of these places: the abandoned and the terminally ill were brought in from the streets, washed, fed, and given a place to die with some dignity. Branches followed for brothers and later for priests. Lay co-workers multiplied. By the time she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 the congregation already had more than a thousand sisters and operations in many countries. She asked that the customary Nobel banquet money be given to the poor instead. India awarded her the Padma Shri and later the Bharat Ratna. Popes honoured her. She became a global symbol of self-sacrifice, instantly recognisable in her sari and sandals.
Her public message was consistent. She spoke of seeing Christ in the poorest person. She opposed abortion and contraception, calling abortion the greatest destroyer of peace in her Nobel lecture. She accepted donations from many sources and travelled constantly to open houses and raise funds. She also endured a long private darkness. Letters published after her death show decades of spiritual aridity: she wrote of feeling abandoned by God even while she continued the work she believed He had given her. That inner struggle did not halt the expansion of the order.
She died in Calcutta on 5 September 1997 at the age of eighty-seven. The Church moved quickly. She was beatified in 2003 and canonised as Saint Teresa of Calcutta on 4 September 2016. Her feast day is 5 September. The Missionaries of Charity remain active in scores of countries.
The same life that produced worldwide veneration also produced sharp criticism. Journalist and author Christopher Hitchens argued that she was less a friend of the poor than a friend of poverty, that she glorified suffering rather than relieving it, and that her homes offered inadequate medical care. In 1994 Robin Fox, then editor of The Lancet, visited the Home for the Dying and described the care as haphazard, with limited diagnostics and little use of strong pain relief. Former members of the order alleged that dying patients were sometimes baptised in secret. Critics also pointed to her acceptance of money and honours from controversial figures, including the Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and the American financier Charles Keating, later convicted in a savings-and-loan scandal. She wrote a character reference for Keating. After the Bhopal disaster she urged forgiveness more than structural change. Supporters reply that she worked in conditions where morphine was scarce even in hospitals, that she took in people hospitals would not accept, and that her aim was presence and love rather than modern hospice medicine. They note that large donations funded an expanding network of houses rather than personal luxury.
Both pictures contain truth. She did give her life to people who were otherwise discarded. She did build an organisation that still feeds, shelters, and buries the destitute. She also held a theology that valued redemptive suffering, ran institutions whose medical standards fell short of contemporary hospice practice, and mixed easily with powerful donors whose records were mixed. The icon and the critic each select from the same record.
What remains is a woman who left a secure convent for the streets of Calcutta, founded an order that outlived her, and forced the world to look at people it preferred not to see. Whether one regards her as a saint of the gutters or as a complicated religious entrepreneur, her life is inseparable from the twentieth-century encounter between Catholic mission, Indian poverty, and global celebrity. The Missionaries of Charity still wear the blue-bordered sari. The arguments about what that sari represented have not ended.