Beatified 19 October 2003; canonized 4 September 2016. Nobel Peace Prize 1979.
A modern figure with her own letters, press, medical journals and named doctors. The key medical files remain unavailable.
Her letters from the 1930s and 1940s, and press in her lifetime (written 50 years before their death)
Paper trail
Where they came from
Skopje, North Macedonia (then Uskub, Ottoman Empire) (documented)
Calcutta (Kolkata), India, and worldwide
Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity, Kolkata; still visited.
Albanian Catholic family, youngest of the children of Nikola and Drane. Her father's sudden death brought hardship.
Loreto sisters; teaching in Calcutta. Followers point to 10 September 1946 as the turning point.
Her father's death in childhood, the poverty of Calcutta, and the long inner darkness.
Calcutta church authorities first; Malcolm Muggeridge's 1969 film spread her fame, per Larivee and colleagues. The Nobel Prize followed.
Life
Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born in Skopje, then in the Ottoman Empire, the youngest child of Nikola and Drane Bojaxhiu. Her father died suddenly when she was about eight. She joined the Sisters of Loreto and went to India, where she taught in Calcutta.
On 10 September 1946, on a train to Darjeeling, she reported what she called a call within a call: Jesus asking her to serve the poorest. On 7 October 1950 the Missionaries of Charity were established in the Archdiocese of Calcutta. Branches of brothers, contemplatives and fathers followed from 1963 to 1984.
She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and worldwide fame, along with criticism of her medical care, finances and politics. Letters published in 2007 showed nearly fifty years of inner darkness that she had asked to have destroyed.
She died on 5 September 1997 and received an Indian state funeral. The five-year wait for her cause was waived. A cure reported by Monica Besra in 1998 was accepted for beatification. Besra's doctors said medicine cured her.
Images
No image of Monica Besra is used.
Reported events
The cure of Monica Besra
Monica Besra, a Santhal woman of West Bengal, said an abdominal mass vanished after sisters placed a medal on her on 5 September 1998. The Vatican accepted this as the miracle for beatification.
the locket gave me complete relief from the pain
Reported by Besra; Missionaries of Charity; Vatican medical panel; opposed by Drs Mustafi and Biswas, husband Seiku Murmu, ministers Mishra and De. Recorded From 2002 in press; Vatican process 1999-2002.
The sharpest conflict in this file. Besra credits the medallion. Time reported her husband crediting doctors. Dr Tarun Biswas said he treated her for tubercular meningitis from June 1998. Dr Ranjan Mustafi said the mass was a TB-related cyst that responded to medicine, and told SBS he never received the bishop's invitation to testify. Superintendent Manzar Murshed told Outlook that church authorities pressed for records, and Time reported that hospital officials said they were pressured to call the cure miraculous. Besra told Time a Sister Betta took her records; the sister gave no comment. Father Kolodiejchuk, the postulator, is reported in search results as saying Rome's doctors found no medical explanation; We could not open that article. The Vatican's file remains closed.
The conflicting statements are well reported and named. Scored is a mass vanishing after the medal: her own doctors credit months of TB treatment, and the records are missing or closed. Reviewer's judgment, not a calculation.
Sources: What's Mother Teresa Got to Do with It?; Curious Curing; Serious doubts over alleged miracle cloud Mother Teresa's canonisation; Sainthood of Mother Teresa: Some Rejoice, Others Raise Eyebrows; Miracle that made Mother Teresa a saint
The Santos brain lesions cure
A Brazilian man, reported as an engineer of Santos, was said to be healed of brain lesions on 9 December 2008. The miracle was recognised on 17 December 2015.
Reported by Reports citing Avvenire; Holy See. Recorded 2015.
Only press summaries were read. No independent doctors have spoken in the sources we saw.
The Holy See recognised the cure, but only press summaries were read and no independent doctor has spoken. The dossier is closed. Known here only through a summary, so lowered by about 10. Reviewer's judgment, not a calculation.
Sources: Mother Teresa; Homily at the canonization of Mother Teresa
The call on the train
She said Jesus asked her in 1946 to serve the poorest, and letters record interior words in the following months.
Reported by Herself, in letters published in 2007, summarised by the Holy See. Recorded 1946-47 letters, printed 2007.
The letters exist and her sincerity is not seriously in doubt. They cannot show more than what she experienced.
Event scored: the inner call as an experience. Her letters of 1946 and 1947 survive, and they cannot show more than what she experienced. Known here only through a summary, so lowered by about 10. Reviewer's judgment, not a calculation.
Sources: Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997), biography; Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta
Disputes
- Robin Fox, editor of The Lancet, wrote in 1994 that medical care at the Calcutta home was haphazard, with no strong analgesics and few investigations, while acknowledging cleanliness and compassion.
- Larivee, Chenard and Senechal (2013) argue that her image was built by media and that her missions gave poor care and opaque accounts. This is a review of published writing, not new fieldwork.
- Christopher Hitchens and Aroup Chatterjee made sustained attacks on her views on suffering and her fundraising.
- She accepted honours from the Duvaliers in Haiti and wrote to the judge in Charles Keating's trial seeking clemency (reported in Wikipedia).
- Critics also object to her views on suffering and contraception, per Wikipedia's summary of Hitchens.
Still unknown
- What the Balurghat records show. Time reported them missing in 2002. Hospital or Missionaries of Charity files may contain copies.
- The Vatican's positio and the panel's report under Prof. Cortesini, closed in the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.
- Her foundation's accounts, largely private.
Records
Sources
primary
contemporary
scholarly
reference