Mother Teresa (1910–97,) fully Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu, born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, honored as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, was a controversial Catholic nun, missionary, and social worker. This winner of the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize founded the Order of Missionaries of Charity, which became renowned for its work among the poor and the destitute in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in India.
Born in Shkup, Albania, in the Ottoman Empire (now Skopje, Macedonia,) Teresa was educated by Irish missionary nuns. Deciding to become a nun, she trained in Dublin and took her first missionary duty in Calcutta. She taught high school for several years and worked her way up to school principal.
On one occasion, Teresa came across a destitute woman dying on the street and decided to sit with her stroking her head until she died. That incident motivated her to establish a new religious order to nurse the “unwanted, unloved, and uncared for.” By the time she died, the Order of the Missionaries of Charity had consisted of more than 5,000 nuns and brothers, operating more than 2,500 orphanages, schools, clinics, and hospices in 120 countries.
Mother Teresa was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2003 and canonized by Pope Francis I in 2016; her feast day is September 5.
Controversy swirls around Teresa’s legacy. The journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens called her “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud” and “a lying, thieving Albanian dwarf.” In an extended essay, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995,) Hitchens censured her for indulging the rich and powerful “while preaching obedience and resignation to the poor.” A letter she wrote around when she won the Nobel Prize revealed the crisis of faith that afflicted her—she acknowledged how she no longer had any experience of God.
Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta (2007) is an anthology of Teresa’s letters. Kathryn Spink wrote Mother Teresa: A Complete Authorized Biography (1997.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Mother Teresa
Jesus taught us how to forgive out of love, how to forget out of humility. So let us examine our hearts and see if there is any unforgiven hurt—any unforgotten bitterness! It is easy to love those who are far away. It isn’t always easy to love those who are right next to us. It is easier to offer food to the hungry than to answer the lonely suffering of someone who lacks love right in one
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Conflict
Let us not use bombs and guns to overcome the world. Let us use love and compassion. Peace begins with a smile—smile five times a day to someone you don’t really want to smile at all—do it for peace. So let us radiate the peace of God and so light his light.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Peace
Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls. A joyful heart is the inevitable result of a heart burning with love.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Heart, Joy, Love, Excitement
Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Smiles, Smile
Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Helping, Mentoring, One liners, Action
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Peace
A smile is the beginning of peace.
—Mother Teresa
Peace begins with a smile. Only God knows our true needs.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Smile, Smiles
We want to create hope for the person … we must give hope, always hope.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Aspirations, Hope
People throughout the world may look different or have a different religion, education, or position, but they are all the same. They are the people to be loved. They are all hungry for love.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Humanity
God doesn’t look at how much we do, but with how much love we do it.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Love
Duty is a very personal thing. It is what comes from knowing the need to take action and not just a need to urge others to do something.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Duty
Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so that children have very little time for their parents. Parents have very little time for each other, and in the home begins the disruption of peace of the world.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Peace
One must really have suffered oneself to help others.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Suffering
Loneliness is the most terrible poverty.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: One liners, Loneliness
If we really want to love, we must learn how to forgive.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Forgiveness
Love begins by taking care of the closest ones-the ones at home.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Love
There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread, but there are many more dying for a little love.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Helping
If there are people who feel that God wants them to change the structures of society, that is something between them and their God. We must serve him in whatever way we are called. I am called to help the individual; to love each poor person. Not to deal with institutions. I am in no position to judge.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Correction, Reform
Love until it hurts. Real love is always painful and hurts; then it is real and pure.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Love
When Christ said: “I was hungry and you fed me,” he didn’t mean only the hunger for bread and for food; he also meant the hunger to be loved. Jesus himself experienced this loneliness. He came amongst his own and his own received him not, and it hurt him then and it has kept on hurting him. The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that’s real hunger.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Loneliness
It is easy to love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to us. It is easier to give a cup of rice to relieve hunger than to relieve the loneliness and pain of someone unloved in our own home. Bring love into your home for this is where our love for each other must start.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Love
One filled with joy preaches without preaching.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Role models, Happiness, Preaching, Evangelism
There are no great things, only small things with great love. Happy are those.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Love, Greatness & Great Things, Achieving
Life is luck, make it.
—Mother Teresa
I am not sure exactly what heaven will be like, but I know that when we die and it comes time for God to judge us, he will not ask, ‘How many good things have you done in your life?’ rather he will ask, ‘How much love did you put into what you did?’
—Mother Teresa
Never travel faster than your guardian angel can fly.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Driving
Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Riches, Wealth
If a rose represents love,
and love is everlasting,
then why does a rose wither and die?
—Mother Teresa
I prefer you to make mistakes in kindness than work miracles in unkindness.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Kindness
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