Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in 1910 in Skopje, in what is now North Macedonia. Feeling a religious calling from a young age, she left home at eighteen to join the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland, and in 1929 arrived in India, where she taught at a convent school in Calcutta for nearly two decades.

In 1946 she experienced what she described as a call within a call: to leave the convent and serve the poorest of the poor. In 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity, whose sisters cared for the dying, the orphaned, and those with leprosy. The order grew from a handful of members into a worldwide congregation running hundreds of homes, hospices, and schools.

Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, accepting it in the name of the hungry, the naked, and the homeless. She died in Kolkata in 1997 and was canonized by Pope Francis in 2016 as Saint Teresa of Calcutta. Her legacy lives on in the quiet daily work of her order and in the belief that no act of kindness is too small.