Who Was Mother Teresa? by Jim GigliottiBorn a humble girl in what is now Albania, Agnes Bojaxhiu lived a charitable life. She pledged herself to a religious order at the age of 18 and chose the name Sister Teresa, after the patron saint of missionaries. While teaching in India, where famine and violence had devastated the poor, Teresa shed her habit and walked the streets of Calcutta tending to the needs of the destitute. Her charity work soon expanded internationally, and her name remains synonymous with compassion and devotion to the poor.
Mother Teresa Biography
Mother Teresa's devotional work among the poor and dying of India won her the Nobel Prize for Peace in She is also known as the founder of the only Catholic religious order still growing in membership. At the time of her birth Skopje was located within the Ottoman Empire, a vast empire controlled by the Turks in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Agnes was the last of three children born to Nikola and Dranafile Bojaxhiu, Albanian grocers. When Agnes was nine years old, her happy, comfortable, close-knit family life was upset when her father died. She attended public school in Skopje, and first showed religious interests as a member of a school society that focused on foreign missions groups that travel to foreign countries to spread their religious beliefs. By the age of twelve she felt she had a calling to help the poor.
Nun and missionary Mother Teresa, known in the Catholic church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, devoted her life to caring for the sick and poor. Her order established a hospice; centers for the blind, aged and disabled; and a leper colony. She died in September and was beatified in October In December , Pope Francis recognized a second miracle attributed to Mother Teresa, clearing the way for her to be canonized on September 4, Mother Teresa at a hospice for the destitute and dying in Kolkata Calcutta , India, Mother Teresa was born on August 26, , in Skopje, the current capital of the Republic of Macedonia. The following day, she was baptized as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu.
Questions and Answers on Mother Teresa. Her family was of Albanian descent. At the age of twelve, she felt strongly the call of God. She knew she had to be a missionary to spread the love of Christ. At the age of eighteen she left her parental home in Skopje and joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India. From to Mother Teresa taught at St.
Her parents, Nikola and Drana Bojaxhiu, had given birth to five children, but only three had managed to survive. Her father was a contractor, employed in a successful construction business.
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