Saint Teresa of Calcutta

Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born in Skopje on August 26, 1910, into a well-off Albanian family from Kosovo. It was her mother who chose her names: Anjezë, like Agnes, and Gonxhe, which in Albanian means rosebud. Her father died when she was eight, probably poisoned for political reasons, and the family fell on hard times. At eighteen she left for Ireland, to join the Loreto Sisters, and from there for India. For twenty years she taught at a school for well-to-do girls in Calcutta, and became its principal. On September 10, 1946, on a train to Darjeeling, she had what she called “the call within the call”: to leave the convent and go live among the poorest of the poor. It took two years to get permission. She walked out with five rupees and a white sari edged in blue, bought at the market. From there came the Missionaries of Charity, who today are in more than one hundred thirty countries. The first house she opened was for the dying picked up off the street: a place where those who had no one could die with someone beside them. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and turned down the official banquet, asking that the money go to the poor of Calcutta. After her death, something came out that almost nobody knew: her letters reveal nearly fifty years of inner darkness, in which she felt nothing. She kept going anyway. She died in Calcutta on September 5, 1997. If your name is Teresa, today is your name day.