Mother Teresa has moved far beyond her human existence to become a legend and
a symbol. The deceased humanitarian still stands today for compassion and
infinite goodness, she is particularly invoked by those pleading for charity to
the poor. Pope John Paul II beatified her in 2003, which was considered a very
swift decision because it was only six years after her death. He was heavily
influenced by her popularity not just among Roman Catholics but among many
religious and nonreligious people who all admired her for the work she did.
She’s had her share of criticism and her legacy continues to face controversy as
any public figure but it’s important to remember that many people base their
opinions only on a small percent of who she was as well as what she did. Knowing
the facts of Mother Teresa's life and understanding their context is the only
way to truly appreciate her, these 15 interesting facts should help shed some
light.
15) Her Name Comes
From Her Patron Saint
Mother Teresa was born with the name Agnes Gonxha Bajaxhiu on August 26, 1910 in
a region in Albania called Skopje, Macedonia. The name ‘Teresa’ was one she took
for herself upon taking her orders to become a nun in 1931; she chose it to
honor her patron saint, St. Therese of Lisieux. St. Therese is the patron saint
of missionaries, florists, Australia, AID's sufferers, those who have lost
parents and people with tuberculosis.
St. Therese was a strong influence on Mother Teresa through her entire life
and was a wise choice of patron saint; St. Therese was the main reason that
Mother Teresa chose to begin as a nun in a convent in Ireland. Mother Teresa
suffered the loss of her parents over her life, devoted herself to mission work
and supported the care of poor AIDs patients at a time when the Catholic
Church’s well known stance was that AID's was not simply a disease but a result
of sin.
Mother Teresa was born to a wealthy Albanian family with a father, Nikola
Bojaxhiu, who was a successful merchant and a political activist. Catholics
were a minority in their area, so she and her siblings began their education
in Catholic schools but were placed into state schools later. When Agnes'
father died the family had few connections to rely on; that is why her
mother kept the children close to the church to strengthen their faith. They
church helped them to promote hospitality and charity to the poor, despite
the fact that the family became poor themselves due to a loss of status.
Agnes had a strong interest in missionaries as a child and a childhood friend
described her in the New York Times as always being serious as well as
contemplative with a lot of scruples. When she was 12 she decided to do mission
work and at the age of 18 she left for the Sisters of Loreto convent in
Rathfamham, Ireland. Though she did insist she felt called to the work becoming
a nun was also a conscious choice for her. She knew she wanted a life of service
and to help others, especially through education. It was her belief that the
church would provide that opportunity for her, though she may not have known how
far it would go.
Young Agnes
13) She Never Saw
Her Family After Leaving for India
Her mother and sister are buried in Albania, she visited their graves often in
her declining years before her own death when she was buried there too. She
devoted care to their graves and oversaw the repositioning of one so that mother
as well as daughter could be closer in their resting place.
Mother Teresa took her orders in Ireland but not long after was transferred
to the Sisters of Loreto in India. Her mother always supported her work, despite
being shocked by the idea of her youngest daughter doing long term mission work
so far away. It took her mother only one day to give approval when Teresa
initially advised her mother of her plan. Her brother didn’t support the
decision, being young at the time, and angrily argued with her in letters about
her choice; he couldn't understanding why someone would choose a life of
chastity as well as poverty. Her brother has a military career at the time and
she used his career to explain that he was serving a king of a couple million
subjects; she was serving the king of “the whole world”.
Sisters of Loreto, Darjeeling, India
By Shahnoor Habib Munmun, via
Wikimedia Commons
Mother Teresa's Grave
By Steve Browne & John Verkleir, via
Wikimedia Commons
12) She Built Homes
One of the aspects of poverty Mother Teresa tackled was homelessness; she began
her work in places like the Calcutta slums where illness often meant being
forced into the streets because the inability to work with high medical bills
keep individuals and families from paying for housing. There were orphaned
children as well that ended up as street urchins because no guardians were in
place.
Mother Teresa and her many assistants built houses along with nursing homes;
this provided hospice services for the terminal, shelter for the sick as well as
a roof over the heads of many orphans all over the world. The New York Times
article on her life mentions that she built places for those with leprosy and
other socially shunned conditions; the care in many places was still meager but
patients were jubilant to simply not be on the streets anymore. Mother Teresa
recognized that having a place to call home is a basic comfort and attempted to
give that to as many as she could.
Mother Teresa's Home, Nirmal Hriday,(Home for the Dying),
Calcutta, India
11) She taught
children
When Mother Teresa began her time in India, her convent’s assignment had been
teaching wealthy children in private schools and this experience as a teacher
was something she took with her to the streets. Along with providing housing for
orphans, she began to teach many children in the slums with very little
equipment available. Mother Teresa taught them to read and write by drawing in
the dirt with sticks, which was an ancient teaching method.
Mother Teresa taught children important basics in addition to formal
educational, such as: hygiene, something that was lacking in many poor
areas from ignorance and inaccessibility of supplies. She would work with many
of the families of her students to provide for the needs they mentioned to her
in whatever ways she could, understanding that cleanliness could help them
prevent diseases and help them lead longer as well as healthier lives.
10) She Won the
Nobel Peace Prize
According to many sources, Mother Teresa won over 100 separate prizes for
her work but her most famous honor was the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She
refused the traditional Nobel banquet that is hosted for most recipients as a
celebration and insisted that the $192,000 usually budgeted to fund the dinner
be donated to charities that help the poor she was living as well as working
among.
The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the five categories of honor instituted by
Nobel himself when he created the prizes and the Peace prize is awarded to
someone based on their ability to promote brotherhood as well as influence
demilitarization.. There is varying speculation on why he made the idea of peace
equal to physics, chemistry, medicine and literature but he considered it is
just as important as a human’s fundamental right to academic pursuits. Some have
argued that Mother Teresa’s work did not qualify her in the way the award is
intended but the overseeing board in Norway stands by its decision, citing that
the definition left by Nobel is open ended and the way Mother Teresa’s work
still inspires others today supports the choice.
9) She Gave Up Her
Convent for Service
As mentioned before, Mother Teresa began her work in India at a wealthy girls’
school called St. Mary’s. Her time in the city of Calcutta quickly drew her eyes
from her work; she was upset by the poverty she saw throughout the city over her
15 years there. Meditating on these difficulties brought her to a moment in 1946
where she claims to have heard a calling about what she should do for the poor;
she traveled to Darjeeling for a retreat and crystallized her desire to give up
what she had to serve Christ in the slums.
Fully realizing her vision took determination and over the course of two
years, she took a nursing course to educate herself on the areas she would be
going into then applied to the archdiocese as well as her own convent for
permission to begin her mission. The Sisters of Loreto granted her request to
leave the order while retaining her vows and the Archbishop of Calcutta allowed
her to live as well as work among the poverty stricken as a representative of
the church. Mother Teresa chose a plain white sari and sandals over a
traditional habit to better integrate herself with the people she would be
working with then she moved to a small rental. Her life became much harder
because she lost the comforts of the convent and the financial support she had
received there, she had to rely on donations along with her own faith to see her
work through.
Mother Teresa's house Calcutta, India
8) She Kept a Pope
Waiting
Her work paid off and she gained attention from church leaders who started
calling on her, support finally came in. She still remained true to her
professed values and put her mission work above all. The Hindustan Times speaks
of an incident in 1965 when Pope Paul VI came to visit her in India; she
informed him she was too busy with her work among the poor to meet with him. The
pope was impressed with her dedication and declared his commitment to helping
her with her cause, which included giving her the Lincoln he had been riding
around in for his trip. She accepted the gift then auctioned it off to raise
monetary funds for the people she was helping.
She later meet with him and his successors up until her death in 1997 but no
matter who she was around, her attitude remained the same. She believed that the
poor deserved everyone’s focus and blessing, that honoring their needs was more
important than honoring authority as well as power.
7) She Was Staunchly
Pro-Life
You might think it unusual for someone so liberally involved with social work to
speak out against abortion and contraceptives but Mother Teresa did both. In a
speech later reported by the Catholic News Agency, Mother Teresa stated she
believed abortion to be a “destroyer of peace” that keeps future parents from
taking responsibility and learning to love. She felt that the availability of
abortion along with birth control cheapened the value of human creation and
eroded family values in the West. She went so far as to express her concern that
these issues were what affected behaviors of the young, particularly leading to
drug use and poor relationship interactions.
You may be wondering how this coincided with her working among poor people
unable to afford their own care, yet alone more children. She considered unborn
babies “the weakest of the weak” and called on others to care for expectant
mothers as well as infants, her suggested remedy for not being able to
take care of a child was adoption. Many have been criticized for taking this
stance then doing nothing to actually support their cause but she spent her life
actively working with orphans and attempting to care for them herself with
housing, food as well as education when she could not place them with families.
Mother Teresa helping children
6) She faced
personal doubt in her beliefs
Such a megalith of faith, like Mother Teresa, can bring feelings of shame on
believers who feel themselves inadequate in comparison, both in actions and
faith. If Mother Teresa makes you feel like that, whatever your convictions are,
take to heart that she expressed many doubts and agonized over her religious
life. The UK Daily Mail reports from correspondence collected over Mother
Teresa's lifetime that she faced many doubts about God and couldn’t always feel
his presence in her life as strongly as she felt she should; she blamed herself
for the misery this caused her.
This could be one more impetus that drove her to work with the needy because
it fulfilled her own need to be closer to God through good works. It appears
that her faith may not have always gone the way she wanted it to because it
would be difficult to believe in a merciful and loving God the way that
she did when situated in an area where there was so much suffering. Instead of
giving up, she let that struggle be a fact of her life and never let it be a
stumbling block in her mission work.
Mother Teresa questioned her faith at times
By Evert Odekerken, via
Wikimedia Commons
5) She lived a
strict life of discipline
One of the nuns who worked with Mother Teresa, Susan Shields, has gained
notoriety in publicizing what she considers the truth of the beatified
humanitarian. Susan claims that many donations that Mother Teresa oversaw didn't
seem to go to those in need, that the nun was very stubborn and insistent about
how to care for the poor as well as distribute supplies, she is not convinced
Mother Teresa was as altruistic as she claims. She especially points out the
strictness of the humanitarians in how she treated fellow nuns by denying them
many creature comforts, including: heating, mattresses and proper seating.
It’s important to remember Mother Teresa’s background; she gave up a
comfortable life twice over to do what she did, first with her father’s death
when she was young and then again when she took on her public mission in the
slums. She was highly influenced by her early experiences, which included
watching her mother sell off much of the family’s property to pay bills and
living a life of relative poverty herself when being taught to help others. She
returned to this state and then some when she left the sisterhood order in the
early years of her work. Shields also said that Mother Teresa claimed this kind
of life would make them more “holy” and she decries this as a cover in Teresa’s
mind but it very well could have been her convicted belief, for good or bad. She
lived very close to those she worked for and made decisions that were frugal to
the extreme of being disconcerting, selling off nearly everything she was gifted
for money that went to her work, despite receiving comfortable modern medical
care at the end of her life.
Mother Teresa lived a strict life of morals
4) Founded the
Mission of Charity
Mother Teresa did not remain alone in her work; word began to spread about what
she was doing and many other volunteers showed up to help over time. She
officially founded the Mission of Charity in 1950, which is a ministry dedicated
to those deemed a “burden” on society. She sought to care for the homeless,
disabled people, the sick and anyone else she felt society shunned as “unwanted,
unloved or uncared for”. This sentiment is one that is commonly professed among
many religious groups but what sets Mother Teresa and those who followed her
apart is that they actually took action.
There are now five active branches of the Mission of Charity, which include:
the original Sisters, the Brothers, contemplative branches of the Sisters along
with the Brothers and the Fathers. The first two are out of Calcutta, the others
hail from Rome and New York City; they offer support to the work that continues
around the world. Mother Teresa involved laypeople with the order too,
establishing the Lay Missionaries of Charity. Today, the Sisters of Missionaries
of Charity alone number around 4,000 members in 131 countries.
Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, India
3) She Attempted to
Resign from Her own Mission
Last days of Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa was considered integral to the functions of the order she founded
but she knew years before her death that she could not always be a part of it
and as her health began to decline, she attempted to step back to let others
take leadership. In 1983, during a visit to the current pope, she suffered a
heart attack. Six years later another heart attack struck and she eventually
received a pacemaker. When she realized the seriousness of her condition, she
resigned as head of the mission but was still voted to stay on by the well
meaning board who loved her dearly.
Mother Teresa stayed on the board until March of 1997 but by this time her
heart was so worn out from working that she passed away in September, with her
order in the faithful hands of those she trusted.
2) She received a
State Funeral
When Mother Teresa died in 1997, the Indian government gave her a state funeral
that honored her work with the poor and needy. State Funerals in India are
traditionally reserved for ministers but the President of India gets to decide
if a state funeral should be given to the family of an honorable individual; the
criteria is based on their service to the country and it’s not an honor lightly
bestowed on anyone. The entire country is asked to mourn, the national flag may
be set to half mast and the day of the funeral is considered a national holiday
along with other attributes of the state funeral.
Mother Teresa was honored this way because of her diligent work with the poor
and her encouragement of compassion as well as humanity among the citizens of
Calcutta.
Mother Teresa's State Funeral
By Beth Jenn,via www.oocities.org
1) She’s Short on
Miracles
Mother Teresa was beatified in 2003 and beatification is the first step towards
sainthood in the Catholic Church. Beatification allows you to openly pray to and
venerate someone you believe to be a saint in Heaven. It gives this person a
feast day, puts them on the Liturgical calendar in certain areas that hold them
in high esteem and allows for the veneration of relics belonging to the
beatified. It’s not the same as canonization and does not carry the title of
“Saint”, so Mother Teresa is currently referred to formally as “The Blessed
Mother Teresa”.
The process of canonization takes time, despite Mother Teresa's short
beatification period, and becoming a full saint is a difficult process. For this
to happen, the church requires evidence of a supernatural intercession by her on
someone who venerates her and this is known as a miracle. Unlike beatification,
which takes the presence of such intercession from her living works, this must
take place after her beatification. With the availability of science to explain
so much more phenomenon than it used to, proving a true miracle in the eyes of
the church is much more difficult than it once was.
Mother Teresa was Beatified at St. Peter's Basilica
Final Words
Even if she isn’t a saint in the official sense, it was Mother Teresa’s natural
works that won her the acclaim she holds even in death. It might very well be
she wasn’t always what she seemed but she did a lot of good in this world and
left a positive legacy for many. Even other Christians and avowed atheists have
written supportive words concerning her life’s work on places as prominent as
the Huffington Post. Whether she represents true goodness to you or just another
hypocritical figurehead, you have to admit her biography is a fascinating study
into the mind of a unique individual with a focused perspective on life.
References: 15) Her Name Comes From Her Patron Saint
catholic.org - (whole section)
14) She Realized Her Vocation as a Child
New York Times - (Catholics were a minority in their area)
Legacy.com - (whole section)
13) She Never Saw Her Family After Leaving for India
New York Times - (devoted care to their graves, even)
12) She Built Homes
Nobelprize.org - (Mother Teresa and her many assistants built houses
and..)
11) She taught children
legacy.com - (whole section)
10) She Won the Nobel Peace Prize
legacy.com - (her most famous honor was the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979)
9) She Gave Up Her Convent for Service
legacy.com - (she was upset by the poverty she saw throughout the city)
5) She lived a strict life of discipline
Legacy.com - (whole section)
4) Founded the Mission of Charity
Legacy.com - (By 1950, she officially founded the Mission of Charity,
which is..)
catholic.org - (There are now five active branches of the Mission of
Charity)
3) She Attempted to Resign from Her own Mission
Historynet.com - (in 1983, during a visit to the current pope, she
suffered a heart attack)
2) She received a State Funeral
Times of India - (State Funerals in India are traditionally reserved for
ministers)
1) She’s Short on Miracles
EWTN - (beatification allows you to openly pray to and venerate someone
you believe to be a saint in Heaven)
Father Solanus Guild - (Unlike beatification, which takes the..)
