Mother Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu (26 August 1910 – 5 September 1997) was an Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun and missionary. In 1950, Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic religious congregation that had over 4,500 nuns and was active in 133 countries in 2012. Teresa received a number of honors, including the 1962 Ramon Magsaysay Peace Prize and 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. A controversial figure during her life and after her death, Teresa was admired by many for her charitable work.
About Mother Teresa in brief
Mother Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu (26 August 1910 – 5 September 1997), honoured in the Catholic Church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, was an Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun and missionary. In 1950, Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic religious congregation that had over 4,500 nuns and was active in 133 countries in 2012. Teresa received a number of honors, including the 1962 Ramon Magsaysay Peace Prize and 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. A controversial figure during her life and after her death, Teresa was admired by many for her charitable work. She was praised and criticized on various counts, such as for her views on abortion and contraception, and was criticized for poor conditions in her houses for the dying. Her authorized biography was written by Navin Chawla and published in 1992, and she has been the subject of films and other books. On 6 September 2017, Teresa and St. Francis Xavier were named co-patrons of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese ofCalcutta. Teresa was born in Skopje, then part of the Kosovo Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire, on 26 August 1910. She left home in 1928 at age 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto at Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham, Ireland, to learn English with the intent of becoming a missionary. She arrived in India in 1929 and began her novitiate in Darjeeling, in the Himalayas, where she learned Bengali and taught at St Teresa’s School.
Teresa took her first religious vows on 24 May 1931 and was named after Thérse de Lisieux, the patron of missionaries; because a nun had already chosen that name, she opted for its Spanish spelling. Although Teresa enjoyed teaching at the school, she was appointed its headmistress in 1944 and served there for nearly 20 years. She later considered 27 August, the day she was baptised, her true birthday, to be her ‘true birthday’ She was canonised on 4 September 2016, and the anniversary of her death is her feast day. She never saw her mother, nor her sister again. Her father, who was involved in Albanian community politics in Ottoman Macedonia, died in 1919 when she was eight years old. Her mother may have been from a village near Gjakova. Teresa is a cognate of \”Agnes\”; Gonxhe means ‘rosebud’ or ‘little flower’ in Albanians. She took her solemn vows on 14 May 1937 and was a teacher at the Loreto convent in Entally, eastern India, while she was a student at St. Teresa’s School near Darjeel. She began her religious vows at 24 May 1937; she chose to be named ‘Thérse’ after the patron saint of missionaries, because she was already a nun; because the convent had already had a nun in the convent.
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This page is based on the article Mother Teresa published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 24, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
