Missionaries of Charity celebrate 75 years in service to ‘discarded of society’

Today the order founded by St Teresa of Calcutta has 754 homes in 138 countries, with 5,766 nuns and 390 brothers.

The Missionaries of Charity founded by Mother Teresa celebrated their platinum jubilee, marking 75 years in service to the least.

The order celebrated the anniversary on 7 October, the date in 1950 when the Vatican gave approval for the Albanian-born Loreto Sister Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu to found her own congregation.

Jubilee celebrations began with a Mass at the site in the Motijheel slums of Calcutta (now Kolkata), where Mother Teresa began her mission to serve the “poorest of the poor”. The building now serves at the Mother House and headquarters of the global Missionaries of Charity (MC) congregation.

Archbishop Elias Frank of Calcutta celebrated the Mass in the tomb chapel, where Mother Teresa is buried. Clergy, MC Religious and lay volunteers attended.

The parliamentarian Derek O’Brien unveiled a statue of the “saint of the gutters” outside the Mother House, depicting Mother Teresa holding the hand of a little girl running towards her.

O’Brien was instrumental in efforts to claim the order’s legal title to the site, where congregation had been working since 1948 when Mother Teresa first rented rooms there. The Bengal government granted the MC congregation the property in March this year.

Sr Teresa, as she was, first came to Kolkata as a Loreto postulant in 1929 and made her profession of vows there in 1931. After teaching at St Mary’s Loreto School for 17 years, in 1946 she received what she later described as “a call within a call” to work among the poorest of the poor, the dying and the destitute. In August 1948, she left the Loreto congregation for her new mission. 

“Small things done with great love will change the world,” she later said, reflecting on her work with the poor and marginalised – particularly the dying who had been discarded by society.

Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in 1979.  She died on 5 September 1997, aged 87, and was canonised 19 years later.

Her order, meanwhile, recognisable in their blue-bordered white sarees, had spread across the world, responding to wars and natural calamities. Today there are 754 MC homes in 138 countries, with 5,766 nuns and 390 brothers.

“Mother [Teresa] has been the force behind our growth,” said Sr Mary Joseph Michael, MC superior general.

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The ongoing enigma of the ‘saint of the gutters’

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