Who was St. Teresa of Calcutta?
She was born Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu on August 26, 1910, in Skopje, the youngest child of Nikola and Drane Bojaxhiu, an Albanian family. Her father died suddenly when she was about eight, and her mother raised the children through the financial trouble that followed. In September 1928, at eighteen, she left home to join the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland, took the name Sister Mary Teresa, and arrived in Calcutta on January 6, 1929. She made first vows in May 1931 and final vows on May 24, 1937; from then on she was called Mother Teresa. For nearly twenty years she taught at a Loreto school, and in 1944 she became principal of St. Mary's School.
On September 10, 1946, on the train from Calcutta to Darjeeling for her annual retreat, she received what she always called "a call within a call." The Vatican's account of her life says that in the weeks and months that followed she heard Jesus ask her to leave Loreto and serve him among the poorest of the poor: "Come be My light," and "I cannot go alone." Nearly two years of testing by her superiors followed. On August 17, 1948, she put on the white sari with the blue border for the first time, and on December 21 she went into the slums. On October 7, 1950, the Missionaries of Charity were established in the Archdiocese of Calcutta; Pope Paul VI granted the congregation his Decree of Praise in February 1965. Brothers (1963), contemplative Sisters (1976), contemplative Brothers (1979) and Fathers (1984) followed. By the year she died there were nearly 4,000 Sisters in 610 foundations in 123 countries.
India gave her the Padmashri award in 1962, and in 1979 she received the Nobel Peace Prize. Her biography, published by the Holy See and by her congregation, says she received such honors "for the glory of God and in the name of the poor." Pope John Paul II visited the house in Calcutta where she welcomed the dying. She died in Calcutta on September 5, 1997, received a state funeral from the Government of India, and was buried at the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity. John Paul II beatified her on October 19, 2003, and Pope Francis canonized her in St. Peter's Square on September 4, 2016, during the Jubilee of Mercy. He said that day that her holiness is "so near to us, so tender and so fruitful" that people would go on calling her simply Mother Teresa.
Why Catholics pray to St. Teresa of Calcutta for loneliness and spiritual darkness
Two things about her life explain why people in trouble turn to her.
The first was public. She spent almost fifty years with people nobody else wanted. Pope Francis, canonizing her, said she "bowed down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity," and called her a "tireless worker of mercy." Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the postulator of her cause, recalls that she would say "the greatest poverty in the world today is to be unloved, unwanted, uncared for." Someone who feels forgotten, or who is nursing a dying parent at home, is praying to a saint who knew that poverty from the inside.
The second was hidden until after her death. The Vatican's biography, published for her beatification, says that from about the time she began her work for the poor until the end of her life she lived with "a deep, painful and abiding feeling of being separated from God, even rejected by Him." She called it "the darkness," and even those closest to her did not know. A letter she wrote in 1960 to Fr. Joseph Neuner about it is now the second reading in the Office of Readings for her memorial. Cardinal Arthur Roche, prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship, speaks of "the darkness of God's absence" through which she lived for many years and which she offered to God with joy, and Fr. Kolodiejchuk says she "was joyful in the midst of that painful experience."
So she is a saint for the person who prays and feels nothing, who has not sensed God's presence in months and wonders whether faith has quietly left. She did not stop. A Catholic asks her for the one thing she kept when feeling was gone: fidelity.
How to pray to St. Teresa of Calcutta
Her memorial is September 5, the day she died; since the decree of December 24, 2024, it is an Optional Memorial on the General Roman Calendar. The nine days before it, August 27 to September 4, are the natural time for a novena, and the Mother Teresa Center publishes a nine-day novena to her on its prayers page. Her tomb is at the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata.
Say the prayer below slowly, once. Then tell her plainly what the darkness is like, or who it is you are caring for. Keep doing what she did when she felt far from God: pray anyway, go to Mass and Confession, and do the next small act of love for the person in front of you. If the darkness has the shape of depression rather than dryness, with sleep, appetite or the will to live affected, see a doctor as well as a priest; prayer to her is not a substitute for treatment, and if you are thinking of harming yourself tonight, call emergency services or, in the United States, 988. If you are caring for a dying parent, ask the parish about the Anointing of the Sick, and ask the doctor or a hospice for help.
Canonizing her, Pope Francis asked the crowd to carry her smile in their hearts and give it to those they meet, especially those who suffer. That is a prayer anyone can finish today.