Mother Teresa
One of the greatest humanitarians of all time.
Mother Teresa with children.
Here's a Time line of Mother Teresa
- 1910 - Born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu; Albanian, in Skopje (now the capital of the Republic of Macedonia).
- 1928 -She left home at age 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto at Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham, Ireland, to learn English with the view of becoming a missionary, as English was the language of instruction of the Sisters of Loreto in India.
- 1929 - She arrived in India in 1929 and began her novitiate in Darjeeling, in the lower Himalayas, where she learnt Bengali and taught at St. Teresa's School near her convent.
- 1931 - She took her first religious vows that when She chose to be named after Thérèse de Lisieux, the patron saint of missionaries. Because a nun in the convent had already chosen that name, Agnes opted for its Spanish spelling (Teresa).
- 1937 - She took her solemn vows while she was a teacher at the Loreto convent school in Entally, eastern Calcutta,India.
- 1944 - After having served there for nearly twenty years, she was appointed its headmistress.
- 1946 - She experienced what she later described as "the call within the call" when she travelled by train to the Loreto convent in Darjeeling from Calcutta for her annual retreat. "I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order. To fail would have been to break the faith." Joseph Langford later wrote, "Though no one knew it at the time, Sister Teresa had just become Mother Teresa".
- 1948 - She began missionary work with the poor replacing her traditional Loreto habit with a simple, white cotton sari with a blue border. Teresa adopted Indian citizenship, spent several months in Patna to receive basic medical training at Holy Family Hospital and ventured into the slums. She founded a school in Motijhil, Kolkata, before she began tending to the poor and hungry.
- 1949 - At the beginning of that year, she was joined in her effort by a group of young women, and she laid the foundation for a new religious community helping the "poorest among the poor".
- 1952 - She opened her first hospice with help from Calcutta officials. She converted an abandoned Hindu temple into the Kalighat Home for the Dying, free for the poor, and renamed it Kalighat, the Home of the Pure Heart (Nirmal Hriday).
- 1955 - She opened Nirmala Shishu Bhavan, the Children's Home of the Immaculate Heart, as a haven for orphans and homeless youth.
- 1963That year Missionaries of Charity Brothers was founded, and a contemplative branch of the Sisters followed in 1976.
- 1982 - At the height of the Siege of Beirut, She rescued 37 children trapped in a front-line hospital by brokering a temporary cease-fire between the Israeli army and Palestinian guerrillas. Accompanied by Red Cross workers, she travelled through the war zone to the hospital to evacuate the young patients.
- 1996 - She operated 517 missions in over 100 countries. Her Missionaries of Charity grew from twelve to thousands, serving the "poorest of the poor" in 450 centres worldwide.
- 1997 - Dies at the age of 87.
"By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus".