Birth and Original Name
St. Mother Teresa was born on August 26, 1910 in Skopje, Macedonia. St. Mother Teresa’s original name was Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu.
Early Life
She was the youngest child of Nikolle Bojaxhiu and Dranafile Bojaxhiu. She has three siblings. Her father’s sudden death when Gonxha was about eight years old left.
At the age of 12, she decided that she wanted to be a missionary and spread the love of Christ.
At the age of 18, she left her parental home in Skopje and joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India.
Education Qualification
Mother Teresa only attended school when she was moved by the missionary’s work in Bengal at age 12 and felt she should also dedicate her life to the poor. So, she dedicated her life to religious learning and did not attend college.
Arrived India
Mother Teresa came to India on 6 January 1929. From 1931 to 1948, Mother Teresa taught geography and catechism at St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta. On 24 May 1937, Sister Teresa made her Final Profession of Vows, becoming, as she said, the “spouse of Jesus” for “all eternity.” From that time on she was called Mother Teresa. In 1944 became the school’s principal.
Started working for poorest people
n 1948, she received permission from her superiors to leave the convent school and devote herself to working among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta . On August 17, 1948, she dressed for the first time in a white, blue-bordered sari and passed through the gates of her beloved Loreto convent to enter the world of the poor.
Missionaries of Charity
She started an open-air school for homeless children. On 21 December she went for the first time to the slums. On October 7, 1950 Mother Teresa received permission from the Vatican to start her own order. Vatican originally labeled the order as the Diocesan Congregation of the Calcutta Diocese, and it later came to known as the “Missionaries of Charity”.
The primary task of the Missionaries of Charity was to take care of those persons who nobody was prepared to look after
Charity started Across India
By the early 1960s, Mother Teresa began to send her Sisters to other parts of India. The Decree of Praise granted to the Congregation by Pope Paul VI in February 1965 encouraged her to open a house in Venezuela. It was soon followed by foundations in Rome and Tanzania and, eventually, on every continent. Starting in 1980 and continuing through the 1990s, Mother Teresa opened houses in almost all of the communist countries, including the former Soviet Union, Albania and Cuba.
Awards and Recognition
Indian Padma Shri Award in 1962, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, Pope John XXIII Peace Prize (1971), Nehru Prize for Promotion of International Peace & Understanding (1972), Balzan Prize (1978), Bharat Ratna (1980) and more and more.
Death
On 20 December 2002 Pope John Paul II approved that Mother Terasa has affected by decrees of her heroic virtues and miracles. She died on September 5, 1997. Her body was buried in the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity.