Mother Theresa was was an Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun and missionary.
She was born in Skopje (now the capital of North Macedonia), then part of the Kosovo Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire.
After living in Skopje for eighteen years, she moved to Ireland and then to India, where she lived for most of her life.
Before Mother Teresa became known throughout the world for her humanitarian work, she was Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, a young girl trying to decide what to do after she felt God calling her to live a holy life.
Bojaxhiu was born on August 26, 1910 in Skopje, Macedonia to a devout Catholic family of Albanian descent.
She learned generosity from her mother, Drana Bojaxhiu, who reportedly invited the city’s poor to dine with the family for dinner.
The young girl started feeling a calling to live as a Catholic nun when she was just 12 years old.
When she was 18, Bojaxhiu traveled to Ireland to join a religious congregation known as the Sisters of Loreto and took on the name of Sister Mary Teresa.
She moved to India in 1929, serving as a teacher, and later a principal, at a high school for girls in Calcutta.
On May 24, 1937 she took her final vows, the last step needed for her to become a full-fledged religious sister.
As was the custom for the sisters in her order, she took on the title “Mother” to mark the occasion.
In 1946, Mother Teresa felt drawn to leave the high school and work in Calcutta’s slums.
In 1950, she founded a new religious congregation for Catholic nuns, the Missionaries of Charity.
From its humble beginnings as a charity that ran an open-air school for the poor, the Missionaries of Charity has since grown to become a global organization, with thousands of volunteers working in over 130 countries.
Mother Teresa won numerous awards and honors for her work, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.
She died on September 5, 1997 at the age of 87.
She was officially declared a Catholic saint on September 4, 2016 during a ceremony at the Vatican.
Criticisms
According to a paper by Canadian academics Serge Larivée, Geneviève Chénard and Carole Sénéchal, Teresa’s clinics received millions of dollars in donations but lacked medical care, systematic diagnosis, necessary nutrition and sufficient analgesics for those in pain; in the opinion of the three academics, “Mother Teresa believed the sick must suffer like Christ on the cross”.
It was said that the additional money might have transformed the health of the city’s poor by creating advanced palliative care facilities.
One of Teresa’s most outspoken critics was English journalist, literary critic and antitheist Christopher Hitchens, host of the documentary Hell’s Angel (1994) and author of the essay The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995) who wrote in a 2003 article:
“This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor.
[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor.
She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God.
She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”
He accused her of hypocrisy for choosing advanced treatment for her heart condition.
Hitchens said that “her intention was not to help people”, and that she lied to donors about how their contributions were used.
“It was by talking to her that I discovered, and she assured me, that she wasn’t working to alleviate poverty”, he said, “She was working to expand the number of Catholics. She said, ‘I’m not a social worker. I don’t do it for this reason. I do it for Christ. I do it for the church.'”
Although Hitchens thought he was the only witness called by the Vatican, Aroup Chatterjee (author of Mother Teresa: The Untold Story) was also called to present evidence opposing Teresa’s beatification and canonisation; the Vatican had abolished the traditional “devil’s advocate”, which served a similar purpose.
Source: huffpost.com
