The 20th Century’s Greatest Saint: Mother Teresa of Calcutta
A tiny woman with a giant faith
What is true today will still be true 500 years from now: Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa of Calcutta are the two best-known saints of the 20th century. Of the two, however, it is not the pope who reigned for 27 years and helped bring an end to communism in Eastern Europe but rather the tiny Albanian woman who labored in the worst slums in India who is the most recognizable more than 25 years after her death. Let’s take a few minutes to meet her.
Born on August 26, 1910, to Albanian parents in Skopje, Macedonia, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu felt the call to the religious life from an early age. At 18 she heeded that call; desiring to be a missionary, she traveled to Ireland to study English with the Sisters of Loretto. It was there that Agnes took the name Sister Mary Teresa (after St. Thérèse of Lisieux, patron saint of missionaries). On January 6, 1929, she arrived in Calcutta.
Over the next two decades, Teresa taught at St. Mary’s, an all-girls’ primary school; she was named principal in 1944. She might have remained a teacher her whole life, but on September 10, 1946, during a train ride from Calcutta to a convent in Darjeeling for her annual retreat, everything changed. Hearing what she later described as “a call within the call,” she…
