Little Sister of the Poor

Kenneth L. Woodward

With a will of iron and a heart of love, Mother Teresa served the dying and desperate in India and around the world.

When she died last week in Calcutta—just days after her 87th birthday—she was known the world over as Mother Teresa. Thin and bent, she had been hospitalized with numerous illnesses over the last two years. That night, after finishing dinner and her prayers, Mother Teresa complained of a pain in her back. "I cannot breathe," she told a doctor summoned to her side. Moments later, she died. Shortly after, her nuns tolled a huge metal bell and some 4,000 people gathered in the rain outside—among them many of the street people she had served for so long. Inside, Mother Teresa's body was washed, dressed and laid on a bed of ice. One by one the nuns filed past, touching her bare feet in a traditional Indian gesture of respect.

Widely regarded as a living saint, Mother Teresa was perhaps the most admired woman in the world. When she appeared at the side of John Paul II, it was the pope who stood in the tiny nun's shadow. Although she was a Roman Catholic, her simplicity and true concern for the dying, the abandoned and the outcast transcended the boundaries of religion and nationality. "By blood and origin I am Albanian," she once said of herself. "My citizenship is Indian. I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world."

When Sister Teresa first came to India, she taught slum children in Calcutta whose parents were too poor to send them to school. The children called her Mother Teresa, and that is who she became. One day, as she later recalled, she found a woman "half eaten by rats" lying in the street. She sat with her, stroking her head, until the woman died. With that experience a new vocation—and a new religious order—was born. She decided that her goal would be to minister to the "unwanted, unloved and uncared for" who filled the streets and slums of her adopted city. And to that end, she gathered a small group of nuns around her.

Mother Teresa's first clinic was in an old hostel that had once served pilgrims to the temple of Kali, the Hindu goddess of death. She and her nuns converted it into a shelter where the desperate people they found abandoned on the streets of Calcutta could die in peace.

The clinic's neighbors objected to the moans and smells, and they complained to the civil authorities. But when a police commissioner arrived to close down the clinic, he was so stunned by the horror and misery that he said he would stop Mother Teresa only when the neighbors persuaded their wives and sisters to take over the work the nuns had started. None came forward.

Building shelters for the dying was Mother Teresa's signature service. Poverty was her chosen way of life. When Pope Paul VI gave her an expensive car that he had used during a visit to Calcutta in 1964, she sold it—without ever stepping inside—and used the money to build a clinic in West Bengal.

Today, Mother Teresa's order numbers more than 4,500 nuns, with 550 centers in 126 countries. Their range of concerns has also expanded to include AIDS patients, drug addicts and victims of domestic violence. Led by Mother Teresa, the sisters have fed the hungry in Ethiopia, treated radiation victims at Chernobyl and helped families made homeless by an earthquake in America.

None of this was achieved through prayer alone. Mother Teresa possessed iron resolve and her tireless efforts to gain support for her clinics proved nearly irresistible. Church authorities and civil authorities gave way to her arguments; chiefs of state who wanted to be identified with her work paid her visits and even begged her to establish clinics in their countries. She accepted celebrity as the price of expanding her missionary outreach.

As her fame grew, so did her honors. Among the most significant were the Bharat Ratna, or Jewel of India—that country's highest civilian award—and the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. At her request, the Nobel committee skipped the usual lavish dinner for the prizewinner, and gave the money to the poor.

But Mother Teresa also had her critics. Advocates of women's rights protested her steady fight against both abortion and birth control. There were medical authorities who said her work let governments ignore their responsibilities toward the poorest members of society. Even the Catholic Church was sometimes uneasy about her independent ways. But to the millions of Indians who called her Mother, and to the millions more who deeply admired her countless acts of mercy, Mother Teresa lit a path to saintliness and invited others to follow it.