Mother Teresa Won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and the Bharat Ratna in 1980, and the Order She Founded in Calcutta in 1950 Had 754 Missions in 138 Countries by 2025

Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje on 26 August 1910, reached Calcutta as a Loreto nun on 6 January 1929 and founded the Missionaries of Charity there on 7 October 1950. India’s Padma Shri list of 1962 carried her name, the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave her the Peace Prize in 1979, and the Government of India conferred the Bharat Ratna in 1980. Pope Francis canonised her on 4 September 2016. In 2025 the order’s own website lists 5,076 sisters in 754 missions in 138 countries.

She died in Calcutta on 5 September 1997, aged 87. She described herself this way, in words the Vatican’s biography quotes: “By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun.”

A Loreto teacher who reached Calcutta in January 1929

According to the Nobel Foundation she was born in Uskup, then in the Ottoman Empire and now Skopje in North Macedonia, to a family of Albanian descent. Aged 18, she left home in September 1928 to join the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish order with missions in India, the Holy See’s biography says. That December she sailed for India, and the biography gives her arrival in Calcutta as 6 January 1929.

Her order’s own account adds two years of novitiate (the training period before a nun’s first vows) in Darjeeling. First vows followed in May 1931, with an assignment to the Loreto community at Entally in Calcutta, where she taught at St Mary’s school for girls. Final vows came on 24 May 1937, and from then she was called Mother Teresa. By 1944 she was the school’s principal.

The train to Darjeeling and the white sari of 1948

On 10 September 1946, on the train from Calcutta to Darjeeling for her annual retreat, she received what she called a “call within a call”, the Holy See’s biography says. In her account, Christ asked her to found a community devoted to the poorest of the poor. Per the order’s history, she put this to her spiritual director and to Archbishop Ferdinand Perier of Calcutta, and nearly two years of testing and discernment passed before she had permission to begin.

Wearing a white sari with a blue border for the first time, she walked out of the Loreto convent gates on 17 August 1948, according to the Holy See. A short medical course with the Medical Mission Sisters in Patna came next, and in December she returned to Calcutta and lodged with the Little Sisters of the Poor. On 21 December she went into the slums for the first time. With no funds, the Nobel Foundation’s biography says, she started an open-air school for slum children. The order’s account names the Motijhil slums as the site of her first slum school and dispensary.

Former pupils joined her. Twelve young women, most of them her old students, followed her, the order’s history says, and Calcutta soon knew them as the “running congregation”.

7 October 1950 and the homes that followed

7 October 1950 is the day, the Missionaries of Charity say, that Archbishop Perier erected the congregation (set it up formally) in the Archdiocese of Calcutta. The Holy See’s biography and the Nobel Foundation’s biography give the same date, and President Pranab Mukherjee’s 2016 message gives the year 1950. In the Nobel Committee chairman’s 1979 presentation speech, the order’s recognition is dated to 1948, the year she left the convent. The sources differ here, and 1950 is the date the order and the Vatican record for the formal founding.

That speech also names the fourth vow the sisters take on top of the usual three: “to give wholehearted, free service to the very poorest”.

The order’s history sets out the next steps:

• 1952: Nirmal Hriday, the first home for the dying destitute, opened. The Ministry of External Affairs’ brief on the Holy See places it at Kalighat.
• 1955: Shishu Bhavan, the first home for abandoned children.
• 1957: the first mobile leprosy clinic.
• 1959: the first mission outside Calcutta, in Ranchi.
• 1965: the first mission abroad, in Cocorote, Venezuela.

Britannica adds Shanti Nagar, a colony for people with leprosy built near Asansol. Pope Paul VI granted the order a Decree of Praise in February 1965, and from 1980 Mother Teresa opened houses in almost all the communist countries, including the Soviet Union, Albania and Cuba, the Holy See’s biography records. Co-Workers, the lay helpers who work alongside the order, became an international association on 29 March 1969, per the Nobel Foundation’s biography, which puts their number at over one million in more than 40 countries by the 1990s.

Oslo in December 1979

The 1979 Peace Prize went to Mother Teresa alone, the Nobel Foundation records, “for her work for bringing help to suffering humanity”. She gave her acceptance speech on 10 December 1979 in the Aula of the University of Oslo and her Nobel lecture the next day.

John Sanness, the committee’s chairman, told the audience that the committee had attached decisive importance to the spirit of the work, not to statistics. Even so, the speech gave the scale: the order had opened in twenty new countries in recent years, its main emphasis remained India and Bangladesh, and several million people had benefited from its work. Her first reaction to the news, Sanness said, was: “I accept the prize in the name of the poor.”

The President of India had said of her in 1972, he added: “Mother Teresa is one of those liberated souls who have transcended all barriers presented by race, religion, and nationality.” The Nobel story of another Calcutta figure is told in Tagore, the Nobel Prize and the returned knighthood.

In the lecture she said the home for the dying in Calcutta had taken in more than 36,000 people from the city’s streets and that more than 18,000 of them had died there. Her plan for the prize, she added, was to try to make a home for many people who had none. Earlier awards, as the Nobel Foundation’s biography lists them, were the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize in 1971 and the Nehru Prize for international understanding in 1972, with the Balzan Prize in 1979 and the Templeton and Magsaysay awards.

Padma Shri, Bharat Ratna and a state funeral

A Gazette of India Extraordinary dated 26 January 1962 lists “Mother Bojaxhiu Mary Teresa, Social Worker, Calcutta” among the Padma Shri awards. The Holy See’s biography counts it as the first of the numerous awards that followed. On the Ministry of Home Affairs’ list of Bharat Ratna recipients she is the 18th name, under 1980. The same list records Satyajit Ray under 1992 and Lata Mangeshkar under 2001, whose career is covered in this profile of the singer.

President Pratibha Patil, at the birth centenary celebrations on 30 August 2010, said Mother Teresa had lived in India for almost seven decades and “became a part of India”. Among the order’s institutions she named were Nirmal Hriday, the hospice at Shanti Nagar and Shishu Bhawan.

A Ministry of External Affairs brief records that Pope John Paul II visited Nirmal Hriday on 3 February 1986, and that Mother Teresa called the visit the happiest day of her life. People of all faiths lined the 10-kilometre route from Dum Dum, the brief says.

Mother Teresa died at the Mother House on 5 September 1997. Her body was taken to St Thomas’ Church, next to the Loreto convent where she had first arrived in 1929, and the order’s account says hundreds of thousands of people paid their respects. On 13 September the Government of India gave her a state funeral, and she was buried at the Mother House.

Blessed in 2003, a saint in 2016

John Paul II allowed the cause for her canonisation to open less than two years after her death, the Holy See’s biography says. On 20 December 2002 he approved the decrees on her virtues and on miracles credited to her. Beatification came on 19 October 2003, before an estimated 325,000 people according to the Ministry of External Affairs’ brief, and Britannica calls it the shortest route to beatification in the Church’s history at that time. Minister of State P.C. Thomas led the Indian delegation.

Pope Francis canonised her at a Mass in St Peter’s Square on 4 September 2016. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj led the 11-member official Indian delegation, the Ministry of External Affairs says, while the chief ministers of West Bengal and Delhi led state delegations and 13 heads of state and government attended. Her holiness, Francis said in his homily, was so close to people that they kept calling her Mother Teresa, and he allowed that they might find it hard to say Saint Teresa.

President Pranab Mukherjee’s message on 3 September 2016 said every citizen of India would take pride in the recognition. At an event in Kolkata on 2 October 2016, Vice President Hamid Ansari said: “For the people of India, she was already a saint.” Ansari also linked her message to that of Mahatma Gandhi, whose birth anniversary fell on the same day.

Questions raised about her work

Her Nobel Foundation summary records that she was also criticised. It names an allegation that dying people in the hospices were refused pain relief while she herself accepted hospital treatment, and her conservative view on abortion. Her Nobel lecture shows the second point in her own words: she called abortion the greatest destroyer of peace.

On 17 September 1994 the Lancet carried a piece by Robin Fox headed “Mother Theresa’s care for the dying”, and printed replies on 15 October 1994, according to PubMed’s records. Tuput could not open the full texts, so this article does not summarise what they argued.

After her death it emerged that she had lived for decades with a painful sense of separation from God, which she called “the darkness”, the Holy See’s biography says. Britannica dates the publication of her letters to 2007.

On 27 December 2021 the Ministry of Home Affairs said it had not approved the renewal of the Missionaries of Charity’s registration under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, citing “adverse inputs”. Vatican News reports that the ministry restored the registration on 7 January 2022.

The order today

When Mother Teresa died in 1997 there were 3,914 sisters in 594 missions in 123 countries, the order’s history page says. The Holy See’s biography gives nearly 4,000 sisters in 610 foundations in 123 countries, and Britannica gives some 4,000 nuns in more than 90 countries. In 2016 Vice President Ansari spoke of more than 5,500 members in 139 countries, while the order’s 2025 figure counts sisters only: 5,076 sisters in 754 missions in 138 countries.