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The saints

St. Teresa of Calcutta

The tiny nun who picked up the dying from the streets of Calcutta, and felt nothing in prayer for decades.

Feast: 5 September (date from the Roman Martyrology; not on the universal calendar) · 1910 to 1997 · The modern era · Skopje and Kolkata (Calcutta), India

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Photograph of St. Teresa of Calcutta smiling, in her white sari with blue stripes.

Túrelio, 1986. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 de.

Home / The saints / St. Teresa of Calcutta

A train to Darjeeling, 1946

In 1946 a Loreto sister teaching in Calcutta took a train ride and heard what she called a call within a call.1

Jesus was asking her to serve the poorest of the poor, and live among them.1

Two years later she traded her habit for a cheap white sari with blue stripes and walked into the slums.

Patronage No official patronage we can cite yet. The Church remembers her as the founder of the Missionaries of Charity.

01St. Teresa of Calcutta

Something beautiful for God

She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950, and her sisters opened homes for the dying, orphans and lepers.1

She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.1

02St. Teresa of Calcutta

The darkness

Her letters, published after her death, showed she felt God’s absence in prayer for almost fifty years, and kept going anyway.1

She died in 1997 and was canonized in 2016.1

Live it this week

Sit with someone dying or alone

Mother Teresa said the worst poverty is being unwanted. This week, visit someone in a nursing home, hospital or at home who rarely gets visitors, and just sit with them for half an hour.

Notes

How we know · 1 source for this page
  1. Franciscan Media, Saint of the Day: “Saint Teresa of Calcutta”. franciscanmedia.org. franciscanmedia.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.