Heritage · Legacy
Mother Teresa Legacy
Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu (1910–1997), Albanian-Indian nun who founded the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, canonized 2016.Written to last.
By Confinity Heritage Editorial · Updated 2026-07-31 · 6-minute readQuiet tools, kept out of the way.
Mother Teresa, born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, was an Albanian-Indian Catholic nun who spent nearly half a century serving destitute and dying people in the Indian city of Calcutta, now Kolkata. In 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity, a religious congregation that grew to work in more than 130 countries. She received the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, and in 2016 the Roman Catholic Church declared her a saint. Her renown is matched by documented criticism of the medical care and finances of her order, and both belong in an honest record.
Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born on 26 August 1910 in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire and today the capital of North Macedonia. She was the youngest child of an ethnic Albanian family. Her father, a merchant, died when she was about eight, and her mother raised the children in a devout Catholic household. She later said she felt drawn to religious life by the age of twelve.
At eighteen she left home to join the Sisters of Loreto, reaching their abbey near Dublin, Ireland, in 1928 to learn English. She traveled to India the following year and took her first vows in 1931, choosing the name Teresa after Thérèse of Lisieux. For nearly two decades she taught at a Loreto convent school in Calcutta, eventually serving as its headmistress.
On a train journey in 1946 she experienced what she called a "call within a call" to leave the convent and live among the poorest of the poor. After training in basic nursing, she began working in Calcutta's slums in 1948. On 7 October 1950 the Holy See granted permission for a new congregation, the Missionaries of Charity, whose members took a vow to give wholehearted free service to the very poorest.
The order opened homes for the dying, orphanages, and clinics for people with leprosy. Its best-known institution, the Home for the Dying near the Kalighat temple, gave destitute people a clean place to spend their final days. Wearing a white sari edged in blue, Teresa became a widely recognized figure, and the congregation spread quickly across India and beyond. By the time of her death it ran hundreds of houses. Today the Missionaries of Charity operate in more than 130 countries.
Public honors gathered across her later life. She received the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize "for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress," and used her acceptance speech to speak against abortion. After her death on 5 September 1997, the Church moved quickly: Pope John Paul II beatified her on 19 October 2003, and Pope Francis canonized her as Saint Teresa of Calcutta on 4 September 2016.
Her work also drew serious criticism. The writer Christopher Hitchens, in his 1994 documentary Hell's Angel and his 1995 book The Missionary Position, argued that she romanticized suffering, accepted donations from dictators and fraudsters, and opposed contraception and abortion in ways that harmed the poor. In 1994 Robin Fox, then editor of The Lancet, visited the Home for the Dying and described its care as "haphazard", noting a shortage of doctors, limited pain relief, and reused needles. A 2013 University of Montreal review questioned the order's hygiene, medical standards, and handling of its large donations. Defenders reply that the homes never claimed to be hospitals and that some critiques rested on selective evidence. Letters published after her death also revealed decades of private doubt about her faith, which many readers found to make her persistence more human rather than less.
Mother Teresa was canonised by Pope Francis on 4 September 2016, nineteen years after her death, before a crowd in St Peter's Square. She had been beatified in 2003 in one of the fastest processes of modern times.
The most revealing thing about her arrived in between. In 2007 a collection of her private correspondence was published as Come Be My Light, against her own explicit instruction that the letters be destroyed. They show that for roughly the last fifty years of her life she felt no presence of God at all, and wrote about it repeatedly to her confessors: a darkness, an emptiness, a smile she described as a mask. She had gone on working anyway. Depending on the reader this is either the collapse of the saint or the whole point of her.
She has also been criticised hard, most publicly by Christopher Hitchens, whose 1994 documentary and 1995 book attacked the quality of medical care in her homes, her acceptance of money from unpleasant donors, and her opposition to contraception and abortion. Some of those criticisms have been supported by later academic work and some have not.
What is not disputed is the scale: the Missionaries of Charity now run several hundred houses in more than a hundred countries.
Mother Teresa is among the most recognized humanitarian figures of the twentieth century, and the argument over her work is part of that record. We keep her page here so that both her service and the documented questions about it stay in view.
Early life
The Missionaries of Charity
Legacy and criticism
The letters, and the argument
What the record holds
References and resources
Timeline
- 1910Born in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire
- 1928Joins the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland, then travels to India
- 1950Founds the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta on 7 October
- 1979Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
- 1997Dies in Calcutta on 5 September
- 2003Beatified by Pope John Paul II on 19 October
- 2016Canonized as Saint Teresa of Calcutta by Pope Francis on 4 September