Word: teresas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...those who believed and perhaps even for those who merely admired her, Mother Teresa was a living saint, drawing both rich and poor to her side and to the message of God. She could, wrote Malcolm Muggeridge in his 1971 book Something Beautiful for God, "hear in the cry of every abandoned child the cry of the Bethlehem child; recognize in every leper's stumps the hands which once touched sightless eyes and made them...
Saints--like princesses popularly invested with the image of goodness--are even more powerful in death. Those who loved Mother Teresa have long been murmuring hopeful prayers for her official canonization in the Roman Catholic Church she served so faithfully. That may not be imminent, but for many, there can be no doubting it, no devil able to advocate otherwise. Already, her humble ways and the grand religious enterprise she founded are worthy of veneration and emulation...
...woman who became Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on Aug. 26, 1910, the daughter of a prosperous, ethnic Albanian business contractor in Skopje, now the capital of Macedonia. When she was seven, her father Nicholas died during what may have been a Balkan ethnic brawl. She would always be silent about her early life, but she told Muggeridge she had a vocation to serve the poor from the time she was 12. At 18, Agnes joined Ireland's Sisters of Loreto and took the name Teresa in honor of the French saint Therese of Lisieux, renowned...
After a brief period in Rathfarnham, where she learned English at the order's abbey, Sister Teresa sailed for India. She spent the next 17 years as a teacher and then principal of a Calcutta high school for privileged Bengali girls. It was on Sept. 10, 1946, during a train ride to Darjeeling for a religious retreat, that Teresa received a "call within a call" in which she felt God directed her to the slums. "The message was quite clear," she told colleagues. "I was to leave the convent and help the poor whilst living among them...
...years later, after her adopted homeland won independence, Teresa received permission from Rome to strike out on her own. Attracting a dozen disciples, she started what she called her "little society." The nuns crept along the harsh streets of Calcutta in search of mankind's most miserable; the sisters had to beg for their own support, even their daily meals. "There were times during the first three or four months," says Teresa's biographer, Navin Chawla, "when she'd be humiliated, and tears would be streaming down her cheeks. [She] told herself, 'I'll teach myself to beg, no matter...