Mother Teresa of Calcutta

She was born on 26 August 1910 in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire, the youngest child of Nikollë and Dranafile Bojaxhiu. Her father, active in Albanian community politics, died in 1919. She was drawn to accounts of missionary work from childhood and had resolved on religious life by the age of twelve.

In 1928, at eighteen, she left home to join the Sisters of Loreto at Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham, Ireland, to learn English. She arrived in India in 1929, took her first religious vows in 1931 and her solemn vows in 1937.

For nearly twenty years she taught at the Loreto convent school in eastern Calcutta, becoming headmistress in 1944. In 1946 she experienced what she described as a 'call within a call' to leave the convent and work among the poorest of the city. She received Vatican permission to begin the new congregation on 7 October 1950, adopting a white sari with blue borders as its habit.

The congregation opened the Kalighat Home for the Dying in 1952, a hospice for people with leprosy at Shanti Nagar, and the Nirmala Shishu Bhavan children's home in 1955. By the time of her death in 1997 the Missionaries of Charity numbered more than 4,000 sisters running 610 missions in 123 countries.

She died in Calcutta on 5 September 1997, aged 87.

Mother Teresa received the Padma Shri and the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding, both in 1962, and the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize in 1971. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and the Bharat Ratna in 1980, was admitted to the Order of Merit in 1983, and was granted honorary United States citizenship in 1996.

She was beatified on 19 October 2003 and canonised on 4 September 2016 by Pope Francis. On 6 September 2017 she was named co-patron of the Archdiocese of Calcutta alongside Saint Francis Xavier.[2][3]