Mother Teresa

Who is Mother Teresa?

Mother Teresa, born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, was a Roman Catholic nun and missionary of ethnic Albanian heritage honored throughout the Albanian-speaking world. She was born in 1910 in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire and now the capital of North Macedonia, into a Kosovar Albanian family whose paternal roots traced to the Mirdita region of northern Albania. She left home at eighteen in 1928 to join the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland and was later sent to India, where she taught in Calcutta for nearly two decades before founding the Missionaries of Charity in 1950, a religious congregation dedicated to caring for "the poorest of the poor." Under her leadership the order grew to operate hundreds of missions, hospices, orphanages, and clinics across dozens of countries, including care for people with leprosy, tuberculosis, and later HIV/AIDS. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and India's highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna, in 1980. During Albania's communist era under Enver Hoxha she was barred from visiting her family, and she was only able to return to Albania in the early 1990s after the regime's collapse, opening a mission in Tirana. She died in Calcutta in 1997 and was canonized by the Catholic Church in 2016.

Sources: The Nobel Prize, "Mother Teresa: Facts", NobelPrize.org · Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Mother Teresa" · Missionaries of Charity, official congregation history