Mother Teresa

Skopje, Macedonia - Mother Teresa's Birthplace (http://fhaomotherteresa.blogspot.com/2009/05/biogr (Liz Sterndale))

Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in 1910 in Skopje, Macedonia, Mother Teresa would go on to become one of the most iconic nuns, Catholics, women, and humans of the 20th century. Her tireless effort to aid the poor have left an indelible mark on the souls that she touched, and the souls that recognized her selfless devotion to the lowliest of the low. As new generations enter the world she once loved (and still loves from Heaven), it is important that she be remembered and celebrated so that all people may follow in her humble footsteps.

Mother Teresa's journey of service and charity began in 1931 with her First Profession of Vows. After which, she was sent to Calcutta to teach at Saint Mary's High School for Girls, run by the Loreto Sisters who designed it as a school for the city's poorest Bengali families. She became fluent in Bengali and Hindi and skilled in the art of teaching high school students history and geography. Six years after taking her first vows, Mother Teresa took her Final Profession of Vows, promising to serve a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience. This was when, as custom by Loreto nuns, she received the title of Mother, a name which hundreds of millions of people would soon come to recognize. Ceaselessly working to provide an education for her students, Mother Teresa became the school's principle and embarked on a fateful retreat that would permanently alter the course of her life.

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She described this moment in her life as a "call within a call." As she was riding a train in 1946 from Calcutta to the Himalayan foothills for a retreat, Christ spoke to her and told her to stop teaching and to go into the slums of Calcutta and to aid the city's poorest people, ending her 17 years of teaching. A month later, donning her iconic blue and white sari, she left her convent and spent six months in medical training. Her only goal was to help "the unwanted, the unloved, and the uncared for." Immediately, she constructed an open-air school to serve the city's poorest children and convinced government officials to donate a building so that she could transform it into a home for the dying. With a handful of members, she was even able to convince the Holy See to recognize the Missionaries of Charities, a movement she founded herself, as a Catholic organization.

Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II (http://www.asianews.it/news-en/When-John-Paul-II-e (Nirmala Carvalho))

As the Missionaries of Charities began gaining a significant number of followers, donations flooded in from India and the entire world, allowing them to immensely increase the scope of their activities. Mother Teresa and her congregation were able to establish a leper colony, an orphanage, a nursing home, a family clinic, a hospice, centers for the blind, and many mobile health stations throughout the 1950's and 1960's. Taking note of her work, in 1965 Pope Paul VI awarded the Missionaries of Charity the Decree of Praise, which encouraged Mother Teresa to bring her charitable endeavors to the international stage. She garnered further international fame with her reception of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her humanitarian work.

Nearing the end of her life, Mother Teresa began to suffer from heart, lung, and kidney problems. After a protracted battle against her sicknesses, she succumbed to death on September 5, 1997 at the age of 87, leaving behind an organization with more than 4,000 religiously devoted, thousands more lay people, and 610 foundations operating in 123 countries. Six years later, she was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2003 and her private letters were published, revealing her constant internal struggle of maintaining her faith in God. At the end of 2015, Pope Francis recognized a second miracle attributed to Mother Teresa, which paves the way for her canonization in 2016.