Who was Saint Teresa of Calcutta?
More than a hundred years ago, in a city called Skopje, there lived a girl named Agnes. Her mother often welcomed poor people to the family table and taught her children that sharing is a way of loving. Agnes sang in the church choir and heard stories about missionaries in India. When she was eighteen, she said a brave goodbye to her home, joined a community of sisters, learned English in Ireland and sailed to India, where she took a new name: Sister Teresa.
In the big city of Calcutta, Sister Teresa taught geography and history at a school for girls, and in time she became its head. But outside the school walls she saw families who were very poor, and people who were sick and alone. On September 10, 1946, riding a train up into the mountains, she felt Jesus asking her for something new, a call within a call: to serve the poorest of the poor with her own hands. She said yes.
She put on a simple white sari with blue stripes, like the ones poor women wore, and went into the poorest neighborhoods with almost nothing. With no school building, she wrote the alphabet in the dirt with a stick. Some of her old students came to help, and together they began the Missionaries of Charity. People called her Mother Teresa. She and her sisters washed and fed the sick, held babies who had no family and sat beside lonely people, because she said Jesus was hidden in every person. Today her sisters serve in many countries.
When is Saint Teresa of Calcutta’s feast day?
Saint Teresa of Calcutta’s feast day is September 5. It’s the day she went home to God, in 1997. She was declared a saint nineteen years later, on September 4, 2016, the day before.
Clara tells the whole story at bedtime, in the Little Prayer Stories app.Get the app →
