Biography of Mother Teresa of Calcutta :- Albanian nationalist Indian woman, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1979. When Mother Teresa of Calcutta died in 1997, the Congregation of the Missionaries of Charity More than five hundred centers in a hundred countries.
But perhaps the order he founded, whose aim is to help “the poorest of the poor,” is the minor part of his legacy; The greatest was to be set in a recent inspiring example, in the palpable and living proof of how generosity, self-denial and self-giving to others also make sense in modern times.
Biography of Mother Teresa of Calcutta
- Born:- 26 August 1910, Skopje, Macedonia (FYROM)
- Died:- 5 September 1997, Kolkata, India
- Fullname:- Saint Teresa of Calcutta
- Awards:- Nobel Peace Prize, Bharat Ratna, Order of the Smile
Born in the bosom of an Albanian Catholic family, the deep religiosity of her mother aroused in Agnes the missionary vocation at the age of twelve. While still a child, she entered the Marian Congregation of the Daughters of Mary, where she began her activity of assisting the needy.
See Also: Biography of Subhas Chandra Bose
Moved by the chronicles of a Christian missionary in Bengal, at eighteen she left her hometown forever and traveled to Dublin to profess in the Congregation of Our Lady of Loreto.
Since she wanted to be a missionary in India, she embarked for Bengal, where she studied teaching and chose the name Teresa to profess.
As soon as the votes were made, he passed to Calcutta, the city with which he would identify his life and his vocation of surrender to the most needy. For nearly twenty years she served as a teacher at St.
Mary’s High School in Calcutta. However, the deep impression caused by the misery she observed in the streets of the city prompted Pius XII to leave the order to abandon the order and give him completely to the cause of the needy.
Strong and resolute in her intentions, St Teresa of Calcutta said at that time what would be the fundamental principle of her message and her action: “I want to bring God’s love to the poorest of the poor, I want to show them that God loves the world and that He loves them. ”
In 1948, soon after proclaiming the independence of India, he obtained the authorization of Rome to dedicate himself to the apostolate in favor of the poor.
While studying nursing with the Missionary Medical Sisters of Patna, Teresa of Calcutta opened its first childcare center.
In 1950, when he also adopted Indian nationality, he founded the Congregation of the Missionaries of Charity, whose full recognition would find many obstacles before Paul VI made it effective in 1965.
While her congregation, whose members had to add to the traditional vows to dedicate themselves totally to the needy, opened centers in various cities of the world, she attended to thousands of disinherited and dying regardless of which religion they belonged to: “For us it does not have The least importance is the faith professed by the people we are assisting in.
Our criterion of help is not beliefs but necessity. We never allow someone to leave us without feeling better and happier, because there is another poverty in the world Worse than material: the contempt that the marginalized receive from society, which is the most unbearable of poverty. ”
In accordance with these words, St. Teresa of Calcutta became the prize of a raffle a convertible car given by Pope Paul VI during his visit to India in 1964 (gift of the Catholic community in turn) and allocated the funds raised To the creation of a leprosarium in Bengal; Later convinced Pope John Paul II to open a shelter for indigents in the Vatican itself.
The enormous moral prestige that Mother Teresa of Calcutta was able to demonstrate with her work in favor of “the poorest poor” led the Holy See to appoint her representative to the United Nations World Conference held in Mexico in 1975 on the occasion of the International Year Of the Woman, where it formulated its ideario based on the action above the organizations.
Four years later, sanctified not only by those he helped but also by governments, international institutions and powerful characters, he received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Conscious of the respect it inspired, Pope John Paul II appointed it in 1982 to mediate the conflict in Lebanon, although its intervention was hampered by the complexity of the political and geostrategic interests of the area.
From positions considered by some sectors of opinion to be excessively conservative, he was a keen participant in the debate on the most crucial issues of his time, to which he was never an outsider.
Thus, in May 1983, during the First International Encounter for the Defense of Life, he vehemently defended the doctrine of the Church, conceptive, pro-abortive and contrary to divorce.
In 1986 he received the visit of John Paul II in the Nirmal Hidray or House of the Pure Heart, founded by her and better known in Calcutta as the House of the Dying. In the course of the following years, although he maintained his same dynamism in the fight to relieve the pain of others, his health began to decline and his heart to weaken.
In 1989, she underwent surgery to implant a pacemaker, and in 1993, after being subjected to other interventions, she contracted malaria in New Delhi, a disease that complicated her heart and lung problems.
Finally, after overcoming several crises, it yielded its position of superiora to sor Nirmala, a Hindu converted to the Christianity.
A few days after celebrating his 87 years, he entered the Woodlands Asylum Intensive Care Unit in Calcutta, where he died. Thousands of people from all over the world gathered in India to fire the Santa of the Sewers.
Six years after her death in October 2003, and coinciding with the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the pontificate of John Paul II, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was beatified at a massive mass attended by faithful from all over the world.
At the end of 2015, the Vatican approved his canonization; On September 4, 2016, before more than one hundred thousand faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square.
