Despite the highly secularised and anti-theistic forces dominating the modern era, one of the most instantly and globally recognised women of our times is Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

Since her canonisation in 2016, Mother Teresa’s universal feast day has been celebrated on September 5 each year. There is a sense of “planting seeds” for the Thomas More Centre when Mother Teresa visited Australia in 1973 (The Eucharistic Congress) when she spoke on the same platform with B.A. Santamaria.

Briefly, the woman the world continues to call uniquely and simply “mother” was born in 1910 in Skopje of Albanian parents in an area that is today North Macedonia. She was born and baptised as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu.

In 1928 she felt called to join the Loreto Sisters and left for Ireland to join them, very shortly afterwards leaving for Calcutta (today’s Kolkata) in India to become a teacher as Sister Teresa.

Overwhelmed by the magnitude of suffering and utter destitution she encountered in India, Teresa began to sense what she called a “call within a call” to provide some other kind of presence in the streets of Calcutta.

Against the astronomically difficult logistical and organisational challenges she faced, Teresa founded her Missionaries of Charity order in 1948. By 1950 Pope Pius XII had taken her congregation under his own care as a Pontifical Congregation.

From these early years, Mother Teresa opened centres and homes for the poverty-stricken and abandoned dying, for orphans, for children and she also opened a centre for lepers. She became an Indian citizen and adopted for her missionaries the distinctive white sari and veil with the blue band. She also adopted for herself and her sisters a life of abject simplicity and the decision to take up residence in the slums and outskirts where the beloved poor and hopeless lived.

Around this contemplative and tiny tornado, she gathered volunteers, institutional and government support, the funds of humanitarians, world leaders and the attention of the whole world.

The tiny woman commanded the respect and awe of many of the most prominent and leading figures of her time. Notable amongst these was the highly influential British journalist, one-time agnostic and member of the socialist “royalty”, Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990).

Muggeridge had converted to Christianity in the 1960s and condemned the damage caused by what he dubbed the “pill and pot” of the sexual revolution.

Muggeridge became something of a lay Christian preacher. When he met Mother Teresa and along with her influence, he became a Catholic and he deepened his convictions about the damage to the West, caused by what John Paul II would later call “the culture of death”.

Muggeridge’s book about Mother Teresa was Something Beautiful for God (1971). It is widely recognised as bringing Mother Teresa to the attention of many people in the West.

Mother Teresa is remembered by many millions more than the world’s Catholic and Christian believers. She received the Nobel Prize (1979) for her extraordinary humanitarian work, the Order of Merit from Queen Elizabeth II, the Medal of Freedom from the U.S. and several of the highest awards in India.

Despite this acclaim, the secularist forces were deeply offended by her frankness and her visionary statements about practices that were championed by the West. For instance, when she received her Nobel Prize she condemned the spiritual and cultural harm of abortion and said: "If you hear of some woman who does not want to keep her child and wants to have an abortion, try to persuade her to bring him to me. I will love that child, seeing in him the sign of God's love."

She called abortion the great destroyer of peace in the world. She often spoke of the massive “spiritual poverty” in the West because of the loneliness and the culture of despair that inhabited people’s hearts there.

What vexed so many of the secular critics was that Mother Teresa refused to separate the usual “social justice” agenda items (peace, justice, social reform) from her strong defence of the dignity and preciousness of human life. In this she became an influential teacher for the reintegration of Catholic social teaching.

In one of the important books about her spirituality and life, I Loved Jesus in the Night (2008), the Irish Dominican Fr Paul Murray writes of his first meeting with Mother Teresa.

He writes of her overpowering yet simple words, which “were somehow the expression of her own being” and of the radiant joy that shone from her. Fr Paul writes, “I wondered if I had ever, in my whole life, met anyone so radiant.”

Her life, her presence and her life’s mission were starkly in contrast to the materialism, neurotic purposeless and manic consumerism of the affluent West.

Yet, there are many ways in which she entered into the dark heart of post-Christian experience while she was alive. It was as if her solidarity with others extended so far, she took on the soul-furniture of the atheists and ideologues who hated her. It was revealed after she died that, since the 1950s, she had experienced what was for her a baffling loss of sense of presence or interest in God. She described being afflicted with the idea that “heaven was empty and (yet I had) a torturing longing for God”.

In 1964 in her private papers, she wrote what people have found to be shocking words:

“To live by faith but not to believe. To spend myself and yet to be in total darkness.”

Such barrenness and aridity did Teresa experience for so long, that Fr Murray likens her writing to that of other mystics such as St John of the Cross – calling her the “little saint of darkness”, even though the joy shining out of her through this time stunned people.

In her own words, she shows that her “intent” on God remained in spite of it all:

“The desert lays bare our heart; It sweeps away our pretexts, our alibis, our false images of God: It reduces us to the essential.”

Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre