Feast day: September 5
St. Teresa of Calcutta
Albanian sister who left her comfortable convent to serve the dying in Calcutta's slums, founding the Missionaries of Charity — and enduring decades of inner darkness in secret.
She was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in 1910 to an Albanian family in Skopje, in what is now North Macedonia. At eighteen she left home to join the Sisters of Loreto, took the name Teresa, and was sent to India, where for nearly twenty years she taught geography and history at a girls' school in Calcutta and eventually became its headmistress — a happy, ordinary religious life.
Everything changed in 1946 on a train to Darjeeling, when she received what she called 'a call within a call' — an unmistakable summons to leave the convent and serve the poorest of the poor while living among them. After much testing, permission came, and in 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity. In a plain white sari edged with blue, she went into the worst slums of Calcutta to gather the dying off the streets so that they might die with dignity, knowing they were loved.
Her work grew into a worldwide order serving the unwanted, the abandoned, lepers, orphans, and the dying on every continent. Small, wrinkled, and tireless, she became the most recognizable Christian in the world, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, and used every platform to speak for the poor and the unborn — yet always insisted she was 'a little pencil in the hand of God.'
Only after her death in 1997 did her private writings reveal that for decades she had served in a painful interior darkness, feeling none of the consolation of God's presence while never wavering in her faith or her work — a hidden share in the very abandonment of those she served. She was canonized in 2016 as St. Teresa of Calcutta, an icon of mercy for the modern world.
Her private letters revealed she felt God's absence for nearly 50 years — and served joyfully anyway. Her faith ran deeper than feelings.
“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
— St. Teresa of Calcutta
Image: Kingkongphoto & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA (CC BY-SA 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
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