On September 4th, 2016 Pope Francis will declare Mother Teresa a saint. Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhu on Aug. 26, 1910, in Macedonia, Mother Teresa recognized her calling to missionary work at an early age and decided to commit herself to a religious vocation. She was 18 years old when she left her home to become a nun and joined the Sisters of Loreto in Dublin, Ireland where she took the name Sister Mary Teresa after Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. After learning English, she transferred to the Sisters of Loreto convent in Darjeeling, India.
It was during her time in the slums when Mother Teresa started to catch global attention due to her amazing works and outpour of love and generosity towards the poor. She began an open-air school and managed to convince the city government to donate her a dilapidated building, which she used to start a home for dying poor people. In 1950, she won canonical recognition for the Missionaries of Charity, a group she founded with a few former staff members from the St. Mary’s School.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, she opened a leper colony, an orphanage, nursing home, family clinic and a few mobile health clinics, and in 1971 she opened her first American-based house of charity in New York City. She launched her second American charity group home in 1985 called Gift of Love, which was created to help those suffering from HIV/AIDS.
Mother Teresa Quotes
- Let us always meet each other with a smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.
- We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon, and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.
- Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier.
- We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.
- The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.
- There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in – that we do it to God, to Christ, and that’s why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.
- Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.
- Love is a fruit in season at all times and within reach of every hand.
- If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
