Blessed Teresa: The Nun of Calcutta Is Beatified

On October 19, 2003, St. Peter's Square filled with tens of thousands of people — nuns in blue-bordered white saris among them — as Pope John Paul II raised Mother Teresa of Calcutta to the rank of "Blessed." Just six years after her death, the tiny nun who had devoted her life to the poorest of the poor took the final step before sainthood.

She was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in 1910 in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire. At eighteen she joined the Sisters of Loreto and was sent to teach in Calcutta. But in 1946, on a train ride, she felt what she called "a call within a call" — to leave the convent school and serve the destitute directly. In 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity, and began taking in the dying, the sick, and the abandoned from Calcutta's streets. Her work spread across the world and earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

Beatification — the Church's declaration that a person is in heaven and may be publicly venerated — requires evidence of a miracle worked through the candidate's intercession. The Church credited the sudden healing of Monica Besra, an Indian woman whose abdominal tumor disappeared, to Mother Teresa's intercession. The claim was disputed: Besra's husband and some of her doctors said they believed medical treatment was responsible. The Church did not reopen the case, and the beatification went ahead — a reminder that even sanctity is examined through human disagreement.

The process had moved with unusual speed: the cause for her sainthood was opened in 1999, only two years after her death. Thirteen years later, Pope Francis would complete the journey, canonizing her as Saint Teresa of Calcutta on September 4, 2016.

By the time of her death in 1997, the Missionaries of Charity had grown from a handful of sisters in Calcutta into a worldwide order with houses, clinics, and shelters across the globe. She had become one of the most recognizable figures in the world — a tiny woman in a white sari with a blue border, equally at ease with popes and presidents and the dying poor.

Why it matters: whether one sees her as a saint or simply as a woman of extraordinary compassion, Mother Teresa changed how the world talks about poverty — insisting that the dying deserve dignity, not just charity. The order she founded continues her work around the world.

Photo note: Mother Teresa receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Ronald Reagan at a White House ceremony, with Nancy Reagan at her side. Photograph: White House Photo Office, public domain, via the U.S. National Archives.