Mother Teresa Biography

Mother Teresa grew famous for humbly ministering to lepers, the homeless and the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta (otherwise known as Kolkata), India. She was proclaimed a saint by the Catholic Church in 2016.

In 1928, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu joined the Sisters of Our Lady of Lareto, a Catholic order that did charity work in India. She took the name Sister Teresa and for 17 years taught school in the country. In 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity, a new order devoted to helping the sick and the poorest of the poor; the order grew to include branches in more than 100 cities around the world, and Mother Teresa became a worldwide symbol of charity, meeting with Princess Diana and many other public figures.

Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1979, and in 1985 she was awarded the Medal of Freedom from the United States. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 19 October 2003, who judged that Teresa’s supernatural intervention had cured an Indian woman suffering from an abdominal tumor.

In 2015, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had formally attributed a second miracle to Mother Teresa: the healing of a Brazilian man with brain tumors in 2008. That cleared the way for canonization, with Mother Teresa officially declared a saint in a Vatican service on September 4, 2016, with Pope Francis saying “We declare and define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta to be a saint and we enroll her among the saints, decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church.”