Mother Teresa, 87 friend to destitute, dies in CAlcutta - Mother Teresa: A Supplement - Obituary

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 19, 1997 by Eileen Egan

To Mother Teresa only one thing mattered: holiness. Only one thing was necessary: salvation. Her life was modeled on the life of Jesus. Simply that.

She saw each person of whatever creed as a repository of the divine. She treated each one as if she were meeting her Savior.

Until her death Sept. 5, she was one of the millions of inhabitants of Calcutta, where uncounted thousands lived, brought children into the world, suffered and died on the streets. In the end, her work, which began so quietly on those streets, caused the name of the city to become attached almost like a surname to her own.

Her name at birth, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, revealed her Albanian origin. Her birthplace, Skopje, was part of the Ottoman Empire when she was born in 1910. The town was a meeting place of diverse cultures and religions, with scores of minarets marking a strong Islamic presence. The impress of Byzantium was notable in richly decorated Orthodox churches. Roman Catholics were a small minority with a strong sense of identity.

She was born Aug. 26, the youngest of three children, but preferred to use Aug. 27 because she was baptized that day. Her father, Nikola, a building contractor and wholesale importer of food products, earned a comfortable living. Her mother, Dranafile Bernai, came from the Venetian region, but was also of Albanian origin.

The family lived in a spacious house among fruit trees and flowers. Dranafile's religious devotion went beyond attending daily Mass. She never turned away the needy who came to her door.

Agnes Gonxha attended the first four years of school at Sacred Heart Church, where instruction was in Albanian. Her older brother Lazar said, "Gonxha means a flower, and we thought of her as a rosebud. As a child, she was plump, round and tidy. She was sensible and a little too serious for her age."

Pivotal to the life of Agnes Gonxha, and to her emergence as Mother Teresa, was an organization introduced into Sacred Heart Parish by the Jesuit pastor Fr. Jambrenkovic, the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The sodality brought to young people the words of St. Ignatius Loyola, "What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What will I do for Christ?"

One of the aims of the sodality was to involve young people in serving Christ in his poor. They also learned about the lives of saints and missionaries. One of the missions of special interest was in the Indian state of Bengal. Agnes Gonxha became engrossed in the work of the mission. By the age of 18, she was burning to go to Bengal.

Jesuit priests from Calcutta, capital of Bengal, told her the Irish Province of the Sisters of Loreto, the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, had long been active in that area. She should apply to the mother superior of Loreto in Paris and, if accepted, go to Dublin to begin her novitiate.

Following six weeks in Dublin, she arrived in Calcutta Jan. 6, 1929, 88 years after the first Loreto sisters debarked there, the pioneers of a congregation that made a deep impression in Bengal. The Loreto pattern was to found a boarding school for paying students at the same time as they opened a school for the poor, or a home for orphans or destitute widows.

Agnes Gonxha went to the novitiate in Darjeeling, situated at an altitude of 7,000 feet in the Himalayan foothills. Sealed off from the fashionable life of British colonials, she joined the other novices in a rigid course of religious training. All training was in English and she was soon introduced to Bengali and Hindi.

At mealtime one of the sisters would read aloud, sometimes from the rule of Loreto, and often from the lives of saints. Agnes Gonxha learned about a Carmelite nun declared a saint in 1925, Therese of Lisieux. When the young woman from Albania made her vows in 1931, she took Therese as her patron.

In order to avoid confusion with a fellow novice, Sr. Therese Breen, Agnes Gonxha spelled her new name in the Spanish way. Mother Teresa after explained that her patron was "not the big St. Teresa of Avila, but the little one." St. Therese was the saint of "the little way," of total, childlike surrender to God.

Sr. Teresa, leaving the crystal mountain air of Darjeeling, went down by train to steaming Calcutta, where opulence flourished not far from the most degrading poverty. She found herself in the city's eastern district, in a large compound called Loreto Entally. She taught geography and later history in a large school for 500 paying pupils and later taught and became headmistress of the nearby school for 300 poor students.

Over the wall from the Loreto Entally was a slum, one of Calcutta's "bustees" that kept spreading with its monstrous deprivation. It was called Moti Jihl, Pearl Lake, from a black sump at its center. A group of pupils of Loreto belonged to the same society that claimed Mother Teresa as a teenager, the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The students visited the poor in hospitals and helped families in Moti Jihl. Mother Teresa motivated them, but could not accompany them, since the Loreto sisters at that time were an enclosed order.