Saint Teresa of Calcutta

She was born Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu to Albanian parents in what is now Skopje, the youngest of the three children who survived. ¹ For a time the family "lived comfortably, and her father's construction business thrived. But life changed overnight following his unexpected death." ¹

In public school she joined a Catholic sodality and showed a strong interest in the foreign missions. ¹ At eighteen she entered the Loreto Sisters of Dublin. Franciscan Media marks the year without commentary: "It was 1928 when she said goodbye to her mother for the final time and made her way to a new land and a new life." ¹ She never saw her again.

The following year she was sent to the Loreto novitiate in Darjeeling, where she took the name Teresa. ¹ She was assigned to a high school for girls in Calcutta and taught history and geography to the daughters of the wealthy. ¹

That is where she was for seventeen years, doing good and ordinary work behind a wall. "But she could not escape the realities around her - the poverty, the suffering, the overwhelming numbers of destitute people." ¹

In 1946, riding a train to Darjeeling to make a retreat, she heard it. Her own words are the ones to keep: "a call within a call. The message was clear. I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them." ¹

The phrase is doing precise work. She was already a nun, already a missionary, already in India, already teaching. The first call had been answered eighteen years earlier and was not being revoked. What she heard was a second one inside it: to give up her life with the Sisters of Loreto and "follow Christ into the slums to serve him among the poorest of the poor." ¹

It took permission - to leave Loreto, to found a new community, to begin the work - and then several months of a nursing course, because she did not know how to nurse. ¹ Then she went back to Calcutta, lived in the slums, and opened a school for poor children. ¹

She dressed in a white sari and sandals, "the ordinary dress of an Indian woman", and began getting to know her neighbors by visiting them. ¹ Nothing about the beginning was large.

"The work was exhausting, but Saint Teresa of Calcutta was not alone for long." ¹ Volunteers arrived, some of them her former students, and became the core of the Missionaries of Charity. ¹ Others gave food, clothing, supplies and the use of buildings. ¹

In 1952 the city of Calcutta gave her a former hostel, which became a home for the dying and the destitute. ¹ As the order grew it took in orphans, abandoned children, alcoholics, the aging and street people. ¹ Vatican News records what the order became: she is its founder, and the congregation now includes contemplative sisters and brothers and an order of priests. ¹²

For four decades she "crisscrossed the globe pleading for support and inviting others to see the face of Jesus in the poorest of the poor." ¹ She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. ¹ She died on September 5, 1997, was beatified on October 19, 2003 - "just over six years after her death" - and was canonized by Pope Francis on September 4, 2016. ¹

She belongs to the poor, to the sick and dying, and to missionaries, which is simply a description of who she spent fifty years with. ¹ Vatican News calls her "a witness of charity and mercy." ²

She is also, specifically, for the person who is already doing good work and suspects they are being asked for something else. The call within a call is hers before it is anyone's.

The feast of Saint Teresa of Calcutta is September 5, the day she died in 1997. ¹² Vatican News states it directly: "Saint Teresa is celebrated by the Church on September 5 each year." ²

She was canonized on September 4, 2016, the day before, during the Jubilee of Mercy. ¹

Seventeen years is the number to hold onto. She taught history and geography in a good school, well, to girls who needed teaching, and it was not wrong and it was not wasted, and it was not the thing. ¹ Most people who wait that long stop expecting anything else.

The call came on a train, on the way to a retreat rather than during one. ¹ She was in transit, doing something ordinary, and it arrived. And what it asked was not more of what she was doing but a different life entirely: leave the convent, live among them. ¹

Then the unglamorous middle. Permission had to be sought and granted. She had to go and learn nursing for several months, at thirty-six, because good intentions do not close a wound. ¹ She came back and opened a school and went visiting. The home for the dying came six years later, and only because the city handed her a building. ¹

And the sari. ¹ She did not design a habit for the new order; she put on what the women around her wore. Everything the Missionaries of Charity became is downstream of a decision to be less conspicuous rather than more.