Mother Teresa: Caring for the World's Poor

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Modern Peacemakers
Mother
Teresa
Caring for the World’s Poor

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MODERN PEACEMAKERS
Kofi Annan: Guiding the United Nations
Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams:
Partners for Peace in Northern Ireland
Shirin Ebadi: Champion for Human Rights in Iran
Henry Kissinger: Ending the Vietnam War
Aung San Suu Kyi: Activist for Democracy in Myanmar
Nelson Mandela: Ending Apartheid in South Africa
Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin:
Negotiating Peace in the Middle East
Oscar Arias Sánchez: Bringing Peace to
Central America
Mother Teresa: Caring for the World’s Poor
Rigoberta Menchú Tum: Activist for Indigenous
Rights in Guatemala
Desmond Tutu: Fighting Apartheid
Elie Wiesel: Messenger for Peace

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Modern Peacemakers
Mother
Teresa
Caring for the World’s Poor
Louise Chipley Slavicek

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Mother Teresa
Copyright © 2007 by Infobase Publishing
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An imprint of Infobase Publishing
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ISBN-10: 0-7910-9433-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9433-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Slavicek, Louise Chipley, 1956–
Mother Teresa : caring for the world’s poor / Louise Chipley Slavicek.
p. cm.
—
(Modern
Peacemakers)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-9433-2 (hardcover)
1. Teresea, Mother, 1910–1997. 2. Missionaries of Charity—Biography. 3. Nuns—
India—Biography. I. Title. II. Series.
BX4406.5.Z8S59 2007
271'.97—dc22
[B]
2006028383
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 “The Saint of the Gutters”
1
2 Growing Up in a Divided Land
7
3 The Sisters of Loreto
23
4 “A Call Within a Call”
38
5 Becoming an International Figure
57
6 “A Pencil in God’s Hand”
76
Appendix
94
Chronology
100
Notes
102
Bibliography
104
Further
Reading
106
Index
108

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CHAPTER 1
“The Saint of
the Gutters”
On a rainy Saturday afternoon in September 1997, thousands
of mourners—rich and poor, Hindus, Muslims, and Chris-
tians alike—lined the streets of Calcutta to watch the city’s
most famous resident—Mother Teresa—come home for the last time.
As a mark of the esteem in which it held the tiny nun, the Indian
government had given Mother Teresa its highest honor: a state
funeral. All over the nation, flags flew at half-mast, and in Calcutta
a three-hour-long Mass was held in the city’s gigantic Netaji Indoor
Stadium. This service, for the woman popularly known as the Saint
of the Gutters, was attended by presidents, prime ministers, queens,
and about 15,000 other guests from around the world.
After the Mass, the funeral procession slowly wound its way
through many of the same streets where Mother Teresa had once
ministered to the homeless and hungry, finally ending at Acharya
Jagdish Chandra Bose Road and the Missionaries of Charity mother
house. There, at the headquarters of the religious order she had
founded nearly a half century earlier, the 87-year-old missionary
1

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2
Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa, shown above in this photograph from 1980, was
famous for her missions of charity for the poor and disenfranchised
in India and around the globe.

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“The Saint of the Gutters”
3
and humanitarian received a private burial, while the crowd that
had gathered outside prayed and wept. As Mother Teresa’s coffin
was placed in the crypt, military honor guards fired a 21-gun
salute—an odd tribute for the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who
objected to war and violence in any form.
Mother Teresa was born in Eastern Europe to Albanian par-
ents, shortly before the outbreak of World War I. She first came
to India as a missionary nun with the Catholic Loreto Order,
when she was still a teenager. For nearly two decades, she lived
a secluded and relatively comfortable life, teaching geography
to middle- and upper-class Indian girls in the vast Loreto com-
pound in Calcutta. On her few forays out of the gated complex,
Teresa was stunned by the desperate poverty in the squalid neigh-
borhoods that lay just beyond the convent walls.
In 1946, while traveling to the Loreto convent in Darjeeling,
India, Mother Teresa’s life changed forever. She heard God call-
ing her to work and live among the destitute and forgotten men,
women, and children who inhabited Calcutta’s teeming slums. It
took nearly two years for Mother Teresa to secure the Catholic
Church’s permission to abandon her cloistered lifestyle as a Loreto
Sister and begin her mission of mercy in the streets of India’s
most populated city. In 1950, the Vatican officially recognized the
small band of women—many of them former pupils—who had
gathered around Mother Teresa as a new order: the Missionaries
of Charity. For the next 47 years, Mother Teresa, assisted by her
sari-clad Sisters, founded scores of schools, medical dispensaries,
orphanages, and homes for the dying. They worked first in Cal-
cutta, then throughout India, and by the late 1960s, in cities and
towns all over the world. In the process, Mother Teresa became
an international celebrity, a symbol of compassion and hope for
people of all religious and ethnic backgrounds.
In recognition of her tireless efforts on behalf of the world’s
needy and unwanted, Mother Teresa received numerous honors
during her lifetime, none as prestigious as the Nobel Peace Prize,
granted by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in 1979. It may seem

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