Person · Catholic nun & missionary
Teresa of Calcutta
An Albanian-born Loreto nun who taught at Entally, left the convent in 1948 to work in the Calcutta slums, and founded the Missionaries of Charity there in 1950. The order now runs houses in well over a hundred countries, all of them governed from the same Calcutta street.
- Date
- 1910–1997
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Her hospices and her position on suffering, conversion and medical care have been seriously criticised, notably by Aroup Chatterjee and Christopher Hitchens.
Connections (3)
- Samadhi atMother House, Kolkata
Teresa left the Loreto convent at Entally in 1948, began work in the Motijhil slum, and by 1953 had the order settled at 54A A.J.C. Bose Road, where it has stayed. The Mother House is both the headquarters of a religious order operating in more than a hundred countries and an ordinary Calcutta building on a busy road; she is buried in a plain slab on the ground floor, in the room where the sisters pray.
- AnalogueAlphonsa Muttathupadathu
The two Indian Catholic canonisations of the 2000s are exact opposites. Alphonsa was Indian by birth and utterly local — a Syro-Malabar sister who barely left her district and whose cult grew from below. Teresa was foreign-born, took Indian citizenship, and built an international order out of Calcutta whose fame was made by broadcast and by the 1979 Nobel. One is a village tomb that became a shrine, the other an address that became a headquarters.
- Life routeKolkata: Fort William & the Maidan
Teresa's Calcutta was the city left by the 1943 famine, Direct Action Day in 1946 and the refugee influx of 1947 — a colonial capital that had lost its capital status in 1911 and then absorbed millions of people the state could not house. The Missionaries of Charity grew directly out of that specific emergency, which is why the order's founding address is a street in Calcutta rather than anywhere in Europe.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Mother Teresa”. The Positio for the cause of canonisation, Congregation for the Causes of Saints; Aroup Chatterjee, Mother Teresa: The Untold Story (for the criticism).
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