Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa founded an order that runs homes for the dying in a hundred and thirty countries, won the Nobel Peace Prize, was made a saint nineteen years after her death, and was argued about for the whole of her fame in a way no other modern saint has been. She was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Skopje in 1910, the daughter of an Albanian merchant who died when she was eight, possibly poisoned for his politics. She left for the Loreto sisters in Ireland at eighteen and never saw her mother again. Loreto sent her to Calcutta in 1929, where she taught geography in a convent school for seventeen years, and in 1946, on a train to Darjeeling, she received what she called the call within the call: to leave the convent and live among the poorest. The Missionaries of Charity were recognised in 1950 with twelve members and a sari with a blue border. The home for the dying at Kalighat opened in 1952 in a disused Hindu pilgrims' hostel, and the order grew to four thousand sisters, running hospices, leper colonies, orphanages and soup kitchens on the principle that the destitute should be able to die seen and touched. The world noticed in 1969, when Malcolm Muggeridge's film made her a figure, and she used the standing without shyness - the Nobel in 1979, the audiences with popes and presidents, the flights into Beirut and Ethiopia - to raise money and to speak, always, against abortion and contraception. The criticism was that the homes gave comfort and not medicine, that money went into the order's vows of poverty rather than into its clinics, that she took it from Duvalier and from a savings-and-loan fraudster, and that she preferred the poor poor. Christopher Hitchens made the case at book length and testified against her canonisation. Her own letters, published after her death, showed fifty years of feeling abandoned by God, which her admirers read as the dark night and her critics as the same thing. She died in Calcutta in 1997, was beatified in 2003 and canonised in 2016, and Skopje, Tirana and Calcutta each claim her.
- Lived: 1910 CE – 1997 CE
- Nationality: Albanian
- Roles: nun, religious_leader, humanitarian
