Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa was an ethnic Albanian Catholic nun who spent almost her whole adult life in India, where in 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity, a religious order devoted to serving the destitute, the sick and the dying. Her work in the slums of Calcutta made her one of the most admired people of the 20th century; she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and was declared a saint by the Catholic Church in 2016. She was also the subject of sustained criticism, over the standard of care in her homes, her uncompromising opposition to abortion and contraception, and her dealings with dictators and fraudsters.

She was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu on 26 August 1910 in Skopje, then a town in the Ottoman Empire and today the capital of North Macedonia. Her parents were Catholic Albanians with roots in what is now Kosovo and Albania. Her father, a businessman active in Albanian nationalist politics, died suddenly in 1919, possibly poisoned, when she was eight. Her mother brought up the three children in a devout household, and by her early teens Gonxhe had decided she wanted to be a missionary.

In 1928, at 18, she left home to join the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish order with missions in India, and went first to Loreto Abbey at Rathfarnham, near Dublin, to learn English. She never saw her mother or sister again. They later moved to Tirana, and under Albania's communist dictatorship she was refused permission to visit them before they died.

She arrived in India in 1929 and began her novitiate at Darjeeling, in the Himalayan foothills, learning Bengali. She took her first vows in 1931, choosing the name Teresa after Thérèse of Lisieux, the patron saint of missionaries. For nearly two decades she taught at the Loreto school at Entally in Kolkata, then Calcutta, becoming its headmistress in 1944. She took her final vows in 1937 and with them the title Mother, as was Loreto custom.

Calcutta in the 1940s was a city of extreme hardship. The Bengal famine of 1943 killed millions in the province, and in August 1946 communal riots between Hindus and Muslims left thousands dead in the city, part of the violence surrounding the Partition of India. On 10 September 1946, on a train journey to Darjeeling, she experienced what she later called a call within the call: to leave the convent and live among the poorest people, serving them directly.

With church permission she left Loreto in 1948, took a short course in basic medical care in Patna, exchanged her habit for a cheap white cotton sari with a blue border, and became an Indian citizen. She started by teaching slum children in the open air and begging for food and supplies. Former pupils joined her, and on 7 October 1950 the Vatican recognised her small group as a new congregation, the Missionaries of Charity. In addition to the usual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, its sisters vowed to give wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor.

In 1952, with help from the city authorities, she opened Nirmal Hriday, a home for the dying, in a disused building beside the Kali temple at Kalighat. People picked up from the streets were washed, fed and allowed to die with care, and according to the rites of their own faith. A children's home followed in 1955, along with leprosy clinics and later a settlement for people with leprosy. The order spread across India and, from 1965, abroad, beginning in Venezuela. By the time of her death it had several thousand sisters and hundreds of houses in more than 100 countries, running hospices, orphanages, soup kitchens and homes for people with AIDS.

A 1969 BBC documentary by the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God, made her internationally famous. India gave her the Padma Shri in 1962, the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding in 1969 and its highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1980. In 1979 she won the Nobel Peace Prize, and asked that the money for the customary banquet be given to the poor instead. Her Nobel lecture included a strong attack on abortion, which she called the greatest destroyer of peace. She travelled widely, to famine in Ethiopia, the aftermath of the 1988 Armenian earthquake and the Chernobyl region, and in 1982 she negotiated a brief ceasefire in Beirut to evacuate children from a hospital. In 1991 she was at last able to visit Albania. She had a close relationship with Pope John Paul II.

Criticism grew from the 1990s. In 1994 Robin Fox, editor of The Lancet, visited the Calcutta home for the dying and reported that doctors rarely attended, that diagnosis was haphazard and that strong painkillers were not available. Former volunteers described the reuse of needles and poor hygiene, and the Calcutta-born doctor Aroup Chatterjee argued that she exaggerated her work and presented a distorted picture of the city. The British journalist Christopher Hitchens, in a 1994 documentary and a 1995 book, accused her of valuing suffering over its relief and of using donations to spread her religious views rather than to improve facilities, although the order's finances were never made public. A 2013 study by Canadian academics repeated several of these points.

She was also criticised for accepting an award from the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti in 1981 and praising the regime, for taking money from the American financier Charles Keating, later convicted of fraud, and writing to his judge asking for leniency, and for defending her confessor, the Jesuit priest Donald McGuire, against sexual abuse allegations in 1994; he was later convicted of abusing children. Some Hindu nationalist groups have accused her of seeking conversions, a charge her defenders reject.

Supporters reply that her homes were never meant to be hospitals but places of shelter for people whom hospitals had turned away, that she worked where few others would, and that her order has since improved its medical practice. Her letters, published in 2007, revealed that for most of her working life she felt an absence of God, a spiritual darkness that admirers see as evidence of extraordinary perseverance.

Her health declined from the 1980s, with heart attacks in 1983 and 1989. She stepped down as head of the order in March 1997 and died in Calcutta on 5 September 1997, aged 87. India gave her a state funeral. The Catholic Church fast-tracked her cause: John Paul II beatified her in 2003, and Pope Francis canonised her as Saint Teresa of Calcutta on 4 September 2016, after the church accepted two healings as miracles, a judgement that some of the doctors involved disputed. She remains, for many, a model of selfless charity, and for others a symbol of charity that addressed suffering without challenging its causes.