Mother Teresa

Agnes Goanna Bauxite was born on August 26, 1910 in Skopje, Macedonia. Her parents’ names were Nikolas and Droned Boo]axis, and she was the youngest of three children. Agnes was interested in helping people at a very young age. She became a member of a youth group in her parish called Stolidity. While she was a member of this youth group, she became interested in missionaries.

She Joined a community known for their missionary work in India named the Sisters f Loretta at the age of 17. This is where she took her vows, and she chose the name Teresa after Saint There’s of Leslies. Soon after, Sister Teresa began teaching at SST. Marry High School in Calcutta. In 1944 she became the principle of the high school. Sister Teresa became very ill and was not able to teach anymore, she was sent to Adrenaline for rest and recuperation. On the way to Adrenaline, she received a call that said, “She was to leave the convent and work with the poor, living among them. Mother Teresa started teaching at a school in the slums. She also learned basic declined skills and treated people that could not afford doctors or medicine. Mother Teresa and some of her pupils went around poor neighborhoods and looked for dying children, men and women on the side of the streets who were rejected by local hospitals and brought them to a room that she rented out, and gave them the opportunity to die knowing that someone cared. The group of people that did this with mother Teresa was known as the Missionaries of Charity. The Missionaries of Charity started to branch throughout the world.

The society became an International Religious Family by a decree of Pope Paul VI. In the asses Malcolm Muggier wrote and produced a documentary called “Something Beautiful for God”. This book brought a wider public attention to the life of Mother Teresa. In 1979, Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, “for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress, which also constitutes a threat to peace. ” Mother Teresa did not attend the banquet but, but asked that the $192,000 be given to the poor. She also was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest U. S. Civilian award.

She also received the honorary U. S. Citizenship. Mother Teresa never tried to convert the people she helped to the Catholic faith, but she still had strict a Catholic faith. She was strict on abortion, the death penalty, and divorce. On February 3, 1994 at a National Prayer Breakfast, sponsored by the U. S. Senate and House of Representatives, in Washington DC, Mother Teresa spoke about family life and abortion. She said, “Please don’t kill the child. I want the child. Give the child to me. The last two decades of her life she spent traveling with different branches of the Missionaries of Charity helping the poor.

During this time she mad multiple illnesses. In Rome is 1983, while visiting Pope John Paul II, she suffered a heart attack. While she was in Mexico she suffered from pneumonia, soon after she suffered from further heart problems. Due to all of her health issues she offered to resign from her head of Missionaries of Charity position, but the order of the sisters, a secret ballet, voted for her to stay. In April 1996, Mother Teresa fell and broke her collar bone, in August she suffered from malaria and failure of the left heart ventricle. After her heart surgery her health began to decline again.

She believed that she was under attack by the devil so she had a priest perform an exorcism on her. On March 13, 1997 she finally resigned from her head of Missionaries of Charity position. She died on September 5, 1997. If Mother Teresa had never come to be most people would not be affected, however it would have made a difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of lives that she impacted thought her life.

Mother Teresa was born on 26 August 1910, but she considered 27 August, the day she was baptized, to be her “true birthday”. She was born in Skopje, now capital of the Republic of Macedonia, but at the time part of the Ottoman Empire. On 10 September 1946, Teresa experienced what she later described as “the call within the call” while travelling by train to the Loreto convent in Darjeeling from Calcutta for her annual retreat. “I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them.

It was an order. To fail would have been to break the faith. ” She began her missionary work with the poor in 1948, replacing her traditional Loreto habit with a simple white cotton sari decorated with a blue border. Mother Teresa adopted Indian citizenship, spent a few months in Patna to receive a basic medical training in the Holy Family Hospital and then ventured out into the slums. Initially she started a school in Motijhil (Calcutta); soon she started tending to the needs of the destitute and starving.

In the beginning of 1949 she was joined in her effort by a group of young women and laid the foundations to create a new religious community helping the “poorest among the poor”. In 1982, at the height of the Siege of Beirut, Mother Teresa rescued 37 children trapped in a front line hospital by brokering a temporary cease-fire between the Israeli army and Palestinian guerrillas. Accompanied by Red Cross workers, she travelled through the war zone to the devastated hospital to evacuate the young patients By 1996, she was operating 517 missions in more than 100 countries.

Over the years, Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity grew from twelve to thousands serving the “poorest of the poor” in 450 centres around the world. Mother Teresa suffered a heart attack in Rome in 1983, while visiting Pope John Paul II. After a second attack in 1989, she received an artificial pacemaker. In 1991, after a battle with pneumonia while in Mexico, she suffered further heart problems. She offered to resign her position as head of the Missionaries of Charity, but the sisters of the order, in a secret ballot, voted for her to stay. Mother Teresa agreed to continue her work as head of the order.

In April 1996, Mother Teresa fell and broke her collar bone. In August she suffered from malaria and failure of the left heart ventricle. She had heart surgery but it was clear that her health was declining. The Archbishop of Calcutta, Henry Sebastian D’Souza, said he ordered a priest to perform an exorcism on Mother Teresa with her permission when she was first hospitalised with cardiac problems because he thought she may be under attack by the devil. On 13 March 1997, she stepped down from the head of Missionaries of Charity. She died on 5 September 1997.