LIFE Mother Teresa

IN LIVING MEMORY, SHE IS A WIZENED, WEATHERED FIGURE DRAPED IN A SIMPLE WHITE sari trimmed in blue, so stooped from long years of hard labor that she seemed smaller than her listed height of five feet. But this was no “little old lady,” no frail object of patronizing sympathy. Far from it. She was rugged, tough as nails, and to the end of her 87 profoundly consequential years on earth in 1997 bore an undimmed glow. That rutted olive-toned face, etched with the sorrows and cares of a suffering humanity, would illuminate in a mesmerizing smile, radiating a spirit, passion, and magnetism that moved nations and generations. She was, of course, Mother Teresa—winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, canonized Saint Teresa of Kolkata in 2016. A Roman Catholic…

LYING HALFWAY BETWEEN BELGRADE AND Athens in a valley along the Vardar River, Skopje is today the capital and largest city of the Republic of North Macedonia. Formerly part of Yugoslavia, in the early decades of the 20th century the country was an ethnic stew and a political hot mess; its ruling governments careened, often violently, from Ottoman Turk to Bulgarian to Serbian. Those conflicts left scars on Skopje’s cobblestone streets, as well as on the populace, a substantial proportion of which lived in financial distress, although there was a thriving middle class. As far as religious affiliations went, Skopje was populated largely by Muslims and Orthodox Christians, as well as a small minority of Roman Catholics of Albanian origin. To one of those Albanian Catholic couples—a prosperous contractor-wholesaler named…

THE POSTWAR ERA IN AND around Kolkata was anything but peaceful. While India worked toward independence from the British Empire, civil strife between Hindus and Muslims stained the city streets with blood, coming to a head on August 16, 1946, which the Muslim League declared Direct Action Day. About 5,000 people died, and the entire city came to a halt. That didn’t stop Mother Teresa, however. When food ran short, she left the safety of the convent walls and braved the chaos and violence in search of enough nourishment for the 300 girls in her charge. “We were not supposed to go out into the streets, but I went anyway,” she told biographer Eileen Egan. “Then I saw the bodies on the streets, stabbed, beaten, lying there in strange positions,…

WITH THE CHILDREN’S HOME AND HOSpice up and running, Mother Teresa garnered increasing support through the 1950s. The number of Missionaries of Charity schools multiplied; by mid-decade, Mother Teresa had homed in on what was arguably Indian society’s most shunned group, whose affliction remains, unfortunately, a synonym for ostracism: leprosy, a.k.a. Hansen’s disease, the bacterial infection that ravages the respiratory and nervous systems, dulls the critical ability to feel pain, and sometimes results in the partial loss of extremities due to ignored and untreated sores and wounds. More than 95 percent of people have natural immunity. Moreover, there were treatments available, notably antibiotics known as sulfones. But leprosy’s outsize reputation dwarfed scientific reality. If Mother Teresa’s original mission had been to serve “the poorest of the poor,” these profoundly afflicted…

THROUGHOUT THE 1970S, ADMIRERS LOBbied for Mother Teresa to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She was nominated for the award several times, with some illustrious supporters—including, in the U.S., Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. What gave the Nobel committee in Oslo pause was the question of whether Mother Teresa had actively helped stop a war, or even led some prominent pacifist movement. Her backers argued that it was through her whole life and body of work, her innumerable small acts of selfless charity—what today might be called her lived experience—that she set an example (indeed, an insurmountably high bar) for all the world. Malcolm Muggeridge, who on one occasion wrote a reply to the committee, stressed that by treating each person with the same care and respect, no matter how low…

ALMOST AS SOON AS MOTHER TERESA LEFT this life, the complex ecclesiastical machinery involved in the creation of Roman Catholic saints kicked into gear. Indeed, Pope John Paul II streamlined the process and put his old friend on the fast track to canonization by waiving the traditional five-year waiting period. Even with the wheels greased, the undertaking would take nearly two decades, extending well beyond the pontiff’s own death in 2005. Task one was the appointment of a postulator, charged with compiling an extensive dossier of the candidate’s life and work, including documents and testimony. The assignment went to Winnipeg-born Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, then Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity Fathers, a branch Mother Teresa had founded in 1984 (he’s now director of the Mother Teresa Center in Rome).…