We explain who Mother Teresa of Calcutta was, why she received the Nobel Peace Prize and how she was canonized by the Catholic Church.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta was the founder of the congregation of the Missionaries of Charity in 1950.
Who was Mother Teresa of Calcutta?
Saint Teresa of Calcuttapopularly known as the Mother Teresa of Calcuttawas an Albanian Catholic nun, beatified and canonized by the Catholic Church. She was the founder of the congregation of the Missionaries of Charity in the city of Calcutta, India and also one of the most popular media personalities of the 20th century.
Of secular name Agnes (Anjezë in Albanian), Teresa discovered her religious vocation at an early age and She dedicated her life to the service of others, first in a convent in Ireland and later in India.. Its international popularity is due, in large part, to the documentary Something Beautiful for God by Malcolm Muggeridge, produced and broadcast in the 1970s, and to the Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to him in 1979.
In life, Teresa It was worthy of praise and recognition from many, and also of severe criticism from others.due to his reactionary attitudes and the poor humanitarian care provided by the centres of his congregation. However, on the centenary of his birth, on 26 August 2010, his figure and his work received homage from the whole world.
Birth and youth of Teresa of Calcutta
With the Albanian name of Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, Teresa of Calcutta was born in the city of Skopje, the main city of present-day North Macedonia.on August 26, 1910. At that time, that territory was part of the Ottoman Empire.
His parents were Nikölle Bojaxhiu and Dranafile Bernai, a well-off Albanian couple from the Kosovo region. Practitioners of the Christian religion, they baptized their daughter the day after she was born.which is why Agnes considered that date to be her true birthday. Agnes was also the youngest of three siblings.
His father, Nikölle, was a successful building materials dealer and was also involved in local politics: he had been a councillor in Skopje, linked to local nationalist parties.
In 1919 a congress of national affirmation was held in Belgrade, in which Nikölle participated, and was taken directly to the hospital, with a medical condition of spasms and internal bleeding. which led to the suspicion that he had been poisonedHours later, he died. A large part of the city attended his funeral. Agnes was barely nine years old.
The Balkan region of Europe, to which modern-day North Macedonia belongs, has been a disputed territory throughout history, successively controlled by great medieval and modern empires such as the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire. As a result, the region has a highly ethnically and religiously diverse population, which is a source of cultural wealth as well as social and political tensions.
In the absence of her father, Agnes and her mother turned to the Catholic faith. Agnes was part of her parish choir, where she sang as a soprano soloist.as well as the Sodalitium of Our Lady, a Marian congregation founded in 1563.
During those first years of life, Agnes learned religious devotion, inspired above all by the stories of the Yugoslav Jesuit missionaries in Bengal.whose example she would imitate a few years later. These readings were provided to her by the local parish priest, Father Jambrekovic, with whom Agnes had taken communion and confirmation.
At the age of twelve, young Agnes knew she would dedicate her life to the Catholic religion. and to work for the poor and dispossessed. I wanted to be a missionary nun.
The departure for Ireland
Once Agnes managed to convince her mother of the seriousness of her vocation and her purposes, she asked Father Jambrekovic for guidance in choosing the next steps to take. Thanks to him who knew about the Sisters of Our Lady of Loreto: a congregation known as the “Irish Ladies”whose emphasis was on education and teaching, and which had a presence in different cities in India.
So if Agnes was going to join the order, He had to first go to the outskirts of Dublin, in the heart of Catholic Ireland.Such a journey, during the first third of the 20th century, represented a great effort in terms of time and cost.
But on August 15, 1928, while praying in the chapel of Our Lady of Letnice, Agnes came to the conclusion that her vocation merited effort and sacrifice. In less than a month he said goodbye to his family, whom he would never see again, and boarded a train to leave Scopia behind. After a stop in Croatia and another in Paris, Teresa arrived at the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in Rathfarnham, Ireland.
His stay in Ireland, however, did not exceed two months. Although the initial plan was to learn the English language there, Agnes was admitted as a postulant and transferred with the novice Betika Kajn in November 1928 to the city of Calcutta, India. The journey by boat to their new destination took more than a month. They arrived on January 6, the day on which the missions are commemorated. Teresa was 19 years old.
The Novitiate in India
Teresa Bojaxhiu began her novitiate in India on January 6, 1929 at the age of 19.
Agnes’ first stop in India was in the city of Calcutta, where the Sisters of Our Lady of Loreto ran a convent and two schools for girls: one fee-paying, for India’s wealthy classes, and another free school for girls from poor homes. There he had His first sad impressions of the colonial order and the rickshaws pulled by their own drivers.
However, he would only be in Calcutta for a couple of weeks, as the novitiate house was in Darjeeling, near the Himalayas, where the British Raj encouraged tea cultivation and holiday accommodation. There he undertook the rigors of the novitiate, whose second year culminated on March 24, 1931..
So, according to tradition, she had to choose a religious name, and she chose that of a recently canonized saint: the Discalced Carmelite Saint Therese of Lisieux (1873-1897), better known as Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, patron saint of missionaries. That day a new servant of God was born in the Christian faith: Teresa Bojaxhiulater known as Teresa “of Calcutta”.
It so happened that in the same novitiate house in Darjeeling, another nun had chosen the same name as Teresa, possibly for similar reasons. To distinguish between the Irish Teresa and the Slavic Teresa, the name of the former was written in French: Thèréseand the second one simply TeresaCastilianized.
This led to some confusion as to whom Agnes was honouring with her religious name, so she was often forced to clarify that it was not in honour of Teresa of Avila (Saint Teresa of Jesus), nicknamed “the great”, but of “the little” Saint Teresa of Lisieux.
During her stay in Darjeeling, Agnes, now Teresa, He improved his English and learned Bengali, which he later used to teach Geography and History at the school near the convent in Calcutta.. Furthermore, in Darjeeling she took her vows of poverty, chastity and obedience on 24 May 1931.
Once fully incorporated into the order, Teresa returned to Calcutta and joined the teaching staff at the Loreto Convent School, during the first year of probation of her vows. This figure of the Sisters of Our Lady of Loreto allows a nun to conclude her vows and return to lay life after one year of exercising them, or even to not have them renewed by her superiors, if necessary.
Neither of these things happened with Teresa, whose vows were renewed for another three years.and then for another three, at the end of which she was considered a permanent member of the congregation. On May 25, 1937, after nine years dedicated to the order, Teresa Bojaxhiu made lifelong vows of obedience, chastity and poverty.
The call within the call
Teresa was a Geography, History and Religion teacher for almost 20 years, after which she was promoted to director of the congregation’s educational center. During those years He witnessed the inequalities and cruelties of India’s caste society, as well as the iniquities resulting from the British colonial order.determined to suppress the Indian people’s independence movement.
With particular pain he witnessed the famine of 1943 in Bengal during the Second World War and the violent conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in 1946. And on September 10 of that same year he experienced what he later defined as a “calling within a calling,” that is, a divine summons to dedicate his life to alleviating the pain of the most disadvantaged sectors of society. This happened during a train journey from Calcutta to Darjeeling, for his annual retreat.
Teresa went with this new revelation to her confessor, the Belgian Jesuit Celeste van Exem (1908-1993), who asked her to try to put into words the mystery she had experienced. Thanks to this, we know Teresa’s impressions: not only the irresistible call to care for the poor and dispossessed, but also the push to renounce the congregation of Our Lady of Loreto and found something of his own, something newBut that would come much later.
Although Teresa expressed her call to van Exem, to the superior of her order and to the Archbishop of Calcutta himself, the Jesuit Ferdinand Perier (1875-1968), the instruction she received was to wait. Wait for two years, dealing day by day with the so-called which was getting stronger.
Finally, His case was presented before the Holy See of the Vatican, in RomeAnd against the recommendations of the archbishop, who proposed that Teresa return to secular life, the Vatican decided to grant her exclaustration, that is, permission to live outside the convent.
In 1948 he was granted permission to leave the cloister. and began her pilgrimage among the poor of Calcutta. She left the convent, leaving behind her entire life and exchanging her habit for the white sari with blue stripes with which she was later identified. She had only five rupees in her pocket.
Her permission to exclaustrate, however, was provisional. It was to last for a year, be evaluated, and then be renewed. On the advice of Father van Exem, she temporarily stayed at the “St. Joseph” asylum of the Little Sisters of the Poor and immediately made her first trips around Calcutta. For a year he devoted himself mainly to teaching poor children to read and write and to imparting them with basic knowledge of personal hygiene..
His labors, however, were arduous and he experienced helplessness and loneliness. He often had to beg for food and resources to care for…