Mother Teresa
When it comes to prominent religious figures throughout time, many people pay attention to the Pope and, for the most part, other men. However, there are many women that do and should stand out from the rest and Mother Theresa is one of those people. This brief report will be a chronicling of her life, her faith and her work over the course of her life. She has been gone from this earth, at least physically, for a good amount of time now but her legacy lives on. While many are dismissive of her contributions and/or some of the words she had to say, Mother Theresa has a permanent place etched in the history of the Christian church as well as world history in general.
Biography
As many are aware, Mother Teresa was a nun. She was the founder of what came to be known as the Order of the Missionaries, which was part of the larger Roman Catholic church. Her group of women were dedicated to helping the poor within the areas that they operated. Mother Teresa was born on August 27th, 1910 in the city of Skopje. That city is in the country current-day Macedonia. Much of Mother Teresa's earlier adult life was spent teaching in the country of India. At that point, she explained that she had a "call within a call" to devote herself specifically to helping the poor. To that end, her order established a hospice center for the blind, aged and disabled. There was also a leper colony within the system she helped established. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her humanitarian work. She died in September 1997 and was beatified by the Catholic Church in 2003. In December 2015, current Pope Francis recognized a second miracle for her. This clears the way for her becoming a saint sometime later in 2016. This is known as canonization. These are the highlights of her life but there are many other details that are worth exploring (Biography, 2016).
As is common with the children of Catholics, she was baptized the very day after her birth. She was baptized under the name Agnes Gonsha Bojaxhiu. Her parents were Nikola and Dranafile Bojaxhiu, both of Albanian descent. Her father was a business-createor in the construction sphere and the trading of medicines. Both of Mother Teresa's parents were devout Catholics and they were heavily involved in the church. They were also heavily involved in the Albanian peace movement. Mother Teresa's father died very suddenly when she was only eight years old. To this day, it is unclear precisely what happened but many have surmised that he was poisoned by an enemy due to political differences. Mother Teresa, still a young child, responded to this sudden death by becoming much closer to her mother. Her mother made it a point to teach her daughter how to be committed to charity. To "practice what she preached," Teresa's mother would welcome anyone and everything who was "destitute' to dine with them. This was no small thing given that her family was by no means wealthy and this was especially true in light of the husband's death.
Teresa attended a primary school run by a convent. She sang in the choir and her congregation would make an annual pilgrimage to the Black Madonna in Letnice. One of those trips led to Teresa believing that religious life and assisting the poor would be her calling. In 1928, at the age of 18, Teresa became a nun and set off to join the Sisters of Loreto in Dublin, Ireland. It was at that point she took on the name Sister Mary Teresa. She was named after Saint Therese of Lisieux. As noted in the first part of this biographical summary, Teresa then went to India. She took the Final Profession of Vows in 1937. Part of these vows is a vow of poverty. She taught at Saint Mary's in Clacutta until 1944, when she became the principal.
The "call within a call" was Teresa perceiving that she should abandon her teaching and go instead to aid the sickest and the poorest in the streets of Calcutta. She took a vow of obedience earlier on and could not make such a move unilaterally. She had to have the approval of the church. It took a year and a half but she finally got this permission in January 1948. The permission was extended by Archbishop Ferdinand Perier. It was at this point she started wearing the blue/white "sari" that would be her outfit of choice for the rest of her life. She took six months of medical training and then ventured in the heart of the Calcutta slums (Biography, 2016).
After spending some time in the slums, she started to refine and perfect precisely what she would be doing to help the poor. She started off by convincing the city to give her a dilapidated building to teach school and to run a hospice. In 1950, she won canonical recognition for a new congregation, the aforementioned Missionaries of Charity. This group started with only a few members and most of those came from the student body or teaching staff at the St. Mary school from which she came. Word about her school spread very quickly and donations started to pour in. She used these donations to establish a leper colony, an orphanage, a nursing home, a family clinic and a number of mobile health clinics. She opened her first United States location in 1971. Opened in 1971, it was her first American-based charity house. In 1982, she took some rather risky trips as she secretly went to Beirut in Lebanon to meet with the Christians in the area. She also spoke to Muslims in the country and was happy to aid people from either group. She eventually went back to New York and opened a location called "Gift of Love" which was to help care for those with HIV and AIDS (Biography, 2016).
In terms of her faith, she made some comments from time to time that stirred up a lot of controversy. One example was her wide condemnation of abortion. She called it "the greatest destroyer of peace." She said this, no less, when she was accepting her Nobel Peace Prize. She was also soundly against divorce as she stated in 1995 that she did not want to see a rescinding of the ban that allowed for divorce and remarriage in Ireland. Some of the critique of Mother Teresa was rather scathing. Noted atheist Christopher Hitchens asserted that she "glorified" poverty and used it for her own owns. He further stated that she supported policies, institutions and beliefs that would encourage and expand poverty and thus would feed the need that she was filling (Biography, 2016).
Other sources asserted Mother Teresa's faith, however. Indeed, the American Catholic website stated that Teresa was quoted as saying she "never doubt" God's calling to do what she was doing. This is quite fortunate because she noted there was a never-ending demand for the services that she rendered as she found poverty and destitution everywhere that she worked, even if it was a matter of degree (American Catholic, 2016). The Vatican website notes that her death was largely a product of old age and problems with her heart, kidneys and lungs. Before she passed, she was able to appoint a successor of her choosing based on her experiences and knowledge of the people that she worked with. She met with Pope John Paul II one last time and spent her last few weeks on earth receiving visitors and instructing sisters on what to do after she was gone. Due to the wide adulation and respect for mother Teresa, official discussion of her canonization started a mere two years after her death and that is quite out of the ordinary. This proves to the author of this report and many others that Teresa had a very major impact and stories of her lifelong commitment to the church will probably be equaled by only a few humans over the course of human history (Vatican, 2016).
Conclusion
The impacts and waves created by Mother Teresa over the course of her life are nothing short of astounding. She grew up in a very devout family and her father's apparent murder did not dissuade her or her mother from being generous and helpful to the poor. Indeed, people that are looking for a good influence need not look any further than her or people that lived in a similar way. While some of her positions were extreme to some, they made sense given the positions of the church and the words of the Bible that she surely knew by heart.
References
American Catholic. (2016). Mother Teresa Biography. Americancatholic.org. Retrieved 1 March 2016, from http://www.americancatholic.org/Features/Teresa/WhoWasTeresa.aspx
Biography. (2016). Mother Teresa. Biography.com. Retrieved 1 March 2016, from http://www.biography.com/people/mother-teresa-9504160#controversy
Vatican. (2016). Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997), biography. Vatican.va. Retrieved 1 March 2016, from http://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/saints/ns_lit_doc_20031019_madre-teresa_en.html
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