Mother Teresa's Journey and Service

• The fruit of service is peace.
• Mother Teresa and her Sisters' spirituality centered on Jesus Christ.
• Teresa said her vocation was to belong to Jesus.
• The Missionaries of Charity aspired to be "contemplatives in the heart of the world".
• They were disciplined through prayer to recognize Christ in every person they encountered.
• Teresa absorbed her understanding of herself and her Sisters as contemplatives during her first two decades as a nun.
• This understanding came from the spirituality of the Loreto Sisters.
• The order was officially titled the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (IBVM).
• During Mother Teresa's time, the order was widely known as the Loreto Sisters.
• The Loreto Sisters were named after the shrine in Italy.
• Venerable Mary Ward, the founder, used to pray in Italy.
• Ward was born in Yorkshire in 1585 into a Roman Catholic family.
• It was dangerous to openly practice Catholicism at that time.
• Ward's wealthy grandmother was imprisoned for fourteen years for refusing to renounce her faith.
• Catholic families were driven underground or abroad due to persecution.
• Mary chose to leave England for the Netherlands when she was fifteen to enter a Poor Clare convent.

Funding and First Students

• A priest brought an envelope with fifty rupees for the projects.
• Teresa felt that God had blessed the work.
• It took weeks for Teresa to get her bearings in Motijhil due to the obvious needs.
• She started educating children.
• Educating Children was her primary Loreto ministry for two decades.
• She scratched letters in the dust with a stick to teach her young wards the alphabet.
• She gave children cleaning and treated their scrapes.
• Teresa was offered the second floor of a private home as a convent after being in the slum for three months.
• The home was located on 14 Creek Lane and owned by Alfred Gomes.
• Gomes was a businessman and acquaintance of Fr. Van Exem.
• Mother Teresa moved there joyfully at the end of February 1949.
• The Loreto Sisters gave her a bed, desk, bookshelf, and altar from discarded wooden crates.
• The following month, Teresa's first companion joined her on the feast of St. Joseph the Worker.

The Call Within a Call

• The call was to give up all and surrender to him in the service of the poorest of the poor in the slums"
• The journey from Calcutta to Darjeeling was arduous.
• It began with slogging through jammed streets to get to Calcutta's Howrah Railway Station.
• The train's first stop was Siliguri, over five hundred kilometers away.
• Darjeeling-bound passengers disembarked there and transferred to the "Toy Train".
• The "Toy Train" made the steep sixty-four kilometer climb to Darjeeling on a two-foot-gauge track.
• There was always the chance that mechanical breakdown or heat-buckled rail would cause delays.
• On September 10, the Missionaries of Charity annually celebrate "Inspiration Day".
• Teresa experienced her second calling to serve the poorest of the poor.
• Mother Teresa refused to talk about the experience except that it wasn't a vision or rapture.

Spiritual Recalibration

• Recalibration of one's way of looking at the world is a necessary starting point.
• People must recognize the nature of reality and the humans who inhabit it.
• Silence allows people to shed false understandings of themselves and the world.
• Silence clears a space for the recognition that converts.
• Silence and prayer become the wombs where people are reborn.
• They enlarge the heart until it contains God's gift.
• Silence and prayer nurture abiding and grateful faith.
• People should protect and preserve creation because its divine origin instills in us a desire to steward.
• God's imprint upon humans prompts people to discern the presence of Christ.
• This is the contemplative insight that undergirds the activity of the Missionaries of Charity.
• Seeing God in others is as important as God's presence within oneself.
• Mother Teresa's spirituality focuses on the works of mercy by Missionaries of Charity.
• For Teresa, mercy prepared love for the Christ in those wanting food, medicine, shelter, or love.
• She urged her Sisters "to promote and maintain" during deep prayer.

Ministry Beyond Calcutta

• Places were found to serve as a dormitory and chapel for:
• The ill Homeless
• Orphaned
• No location was ignored if there was genuine need for the Missionaries of Charity.
• Mother Teresa said, "If there are poor on the moon, we shall go there too."
• The Sisters primarily cared for the materially poor in their international ministry. Australian Archbishop James Robert Knox invited them to Melbourne to work with:
• Drug addicts
• Alcoholics
• Troubled teenagers
• Mother Teresa was happy for the opportunity to extend the order' ministry by serving those who suffered from psychological problems.
• She made it clear to anyone asking for help that her Missionaries of Charity weren't case workers or therapists.
• The sisters' labor was always for the love of Christ, not for the sake of the work.
• "We are not simply social workers," she insisted, "but missionaries".
• Not in the sense of seeking converts to Christianity, but caregivers to society's most vulnerable.
• Nakedness is not only for a piece of cloth, but that want of dignity, that beautiful gift of God, the loss of purity of heart, of mind, of body.
• Homelessness is also being rejected, being a 'throw away' of society, unwanted, unloved.
• Mother Teresa was wary of turning the Missionaries into just another altruistic business venture.

Introduction to St Teresa

• Mother Teresa was small, with toes grotesquely misshapen from decades of wearing ill-fitting sandals.
• She's a small woman, barely 4 feet, 11 inches tall.
• Age and labor bent her back, making her even shorter.
• She sometimes looked bent double in the end of her life.
• Teresa's expression is alternatively somber, reflective, contemplative, exhausted, and even angry.
• There are few sepia-colored photos of Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, the girl who grew up to become the saint of the gutters.
• Youthful photos taken in the 1920s reveal Anjezë had thick, dark hair and a high, graceful forehead.
• These features disappear behind the veil when she becomes a nun.
• There's something penetratingly luminous about her eyes.
• They reflect both joy and intolerable suffering, and give a glimpse of God.

Recognitions and Achievements

• Teresa received the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding in 1969.
• She was the fifth recipient of the annual award.
• Previous winners included U Thant, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Yehudi Menuhin.
• Pope Paul VI bestowed the first Pope John XXIII Peace Prize upon her two years later.
• It was named in honor of the pontiff who had written Pacem in Terris and had labored for thawing Cold War tensions.
• The award recognized the peace of compassion the Sisters brought to the world's down-and-outs.
• Teresa won the Bharat Ratna or Jewel of India award in 1980.
• This is the highest honor that an Indian civilian can receive.
• In 1985, she was invited to address the UN General Assembly.
• Secretary General Pérez de Cuéllar told the diplomats Teresa needed no introduction.
• "She is," he said, "The United Nations. She is peace in this world."
• Two years later, the atheist Soviet Union bestowed on her the Gold Medal of the Soviet Peace Committee.
• Teresa and her Sisters received its Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.
• She had been nominated for the award four times.
• Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, backed her candidacy.
• As The World Bank director, McNamara believed the Missionaries of Charity touched the world's poorest people.

Sainthood

• A man in Brazil suffering from cancerous tumors in his brain was healed when his family and priest prayed for Blessed Mother Teresa's intercession
• Shortly before Christmas 2015, Pope Francis accepted the healing as a genuine miracle.
• On September 4, 2016, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta became Saint Teresa.
• Teresa was applauded by millions as the "saint of the gutters".
• She had dedicated her life to alleviating the thirst of the Christs in the world's slums, ghettos, hospitals, hospices, and orphanages.
• For fifty years she helped untold numbers of people find God.
• She accepted the suffering and desolation of Our Lord's passion in order to bring comfort.
• Teresa promised, this self-described "saint of darkness" will continue to do so.

Christopher Hitchens' criticism

• In both a BBC program and book, Hitchens attacked Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity.
• Hitchens claimed she was a "conjurer" and "trickster" whose real aim was to wage a "fundamental religious campaign" of proselytization.
• Hitchens accused the Missionaries of deliberately refusing the people they took in even the most basic medical care.
• Hitchens believed Mother Teresa and her Sisters were more interested in urging clients to die than in helping them to heal and live.
• Their aim "is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection."
• The American financier Charles Keating served a ten-year prison sentence for conning savings and loan investors out of millions of dollars.
• Hitchens was especially critical of her participation in a "Mother Albania" ceremony hosted by the regime.

Anjeze Joins the Order

• Venerable Mary Ward founded the shrine in Italy that the nuns frequently visited and ran several schools in India.
• Anjezë was eager to join the Loreto Sisters and requested admission.
• Anjezë wrote she wanted to become a missionary sister and work for Jesus.
• She didn't have any special conditions and wanted to surrender herself completely to the good God's disposal.
• Anjezë received a positive reply and she was accepted to postulancy.
• On September 26, 1928, one month after her eighteenth birthday, Anjezë boarded a train for Zagreb.
• She travelled with Drana, and Aga from eight hundred kilometers north of Skopje.
• On the basis of their interviews in Paris, both women were accepted as Loreto postulants.
• Before the women could embark for India, they had to be schooled in the spirituality of their order.
• They were to begin tutelage in English, the language not only of the Sisters of Loreto but also of most educated Indians.

Explore the early life and calling of Anjezë (Mother Teresa), including her need to learn English, her journey to India, and her unwavering dedication to serving the poorest of the poor. Understand her canonization and unique approach to alleviating suffering.