On September 5 the Church keeps the optional memorial of St. Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997), the Albanian-Indian nun who founded the Missionaries of Charity and devoted her life to serving "the poorest of the poor." Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje on August 26, 1910, she joined the Sisters of Loreto at eighteen, arrived in India in 1929, and taught for seventeen years at Loreto Convent in Calcutta.
On September 10, 1946, while travelling by train to Darjeeling, she experienced what she called her "call within a call" — a divine command to leave the convent and serve Christ among the destitute. She founded the Missionaries of Charity on October 7, 1950, with twelve initial members, taking a fourth vow of "wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor." The white sari edged with blue stripes became the habit of a congregation that would grow to over 5,750 sisters in 133 countries. In 1952 the Calcutta government gave her an abandoned temple of Kali to establish Nirmal Hriday, the Home for the Dying, where the terminally ill could die with dignity.
She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and died at the Mother House in Kolkata on September 5, 1997. Pope John Paul II beatified her on October 19, 2003, and Pope Francis canonized her on September 4, 2016, during the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy. In February 2025 her feast was inscribed in the General Roman Calendar as an optional memorial for the universal Church.
Her tomb lies on the ground floor of the Mother House at Kolkata — a simple white marble slab inscribed with Christ's words from the Cross: "I thirst." Her private letters, published posthumously as Come Be My Light, revealed decades of interior darkness and spiritual aridity. She is co-patron of the Archdiocese of Calcutta alongside St. Francis Xavier.
