Last Friday, we celebrated World Humanitarian Day! To continue to honour and discuss the work of people helping people, we're looking at one of history's most famous humanitarians: Mother Theresa.
Mother Theresa (1910-1997) was an Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun who founded and ran the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic congregation of women dedicated to poverty in India.
She was born and raised in modern-day Skopje, North Macedonia, and then moved to Ireland and India, where she remained for most of her life. She taught for 17 years at a Catholic school in Kolkata, then in 1946, moved to the slums and founded a missionary Catholic religious congregation. Her order established Nirmal Hriday (“Place for the Pure of Heart”), a hospice for the terminally ill to die with dignity. The congregation also opened numerous centres serving the blind, the aged, and the disabled, including soup kitchens, dispensaries, mobile clinics, children's and family counselling programmes, orphanages and schools.
A controversial figure during her life and after her death, Mother Theresa received honours including the 1962 Ramon Magsaysay Peace Prize and the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. She was canonised in the Roman Catholic church on 4 September 2016, and the anniversary of her death (5 September) is her feast day.
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