TIRANA, August 26/ATA/- Today marks the 109th birth anniversary of Mother Teresa, born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, honoured in the Roman Catholic Church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, and an Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun and missionary.
Born in a family of ethnic Albanians in Skopje in 1910, Teresa left her home at the age of 18 and later joined the ‘Sisters of Loreto’ located in Irelands’s Rathfarnham.
She moved to India in the late 1920s and taught history and geography for 15 years at Calcutta’s St Mary’s High School.
In 1948, Teresa decided to leave the church and adopted a lifestyle in slums to aid the poor and the needy in the city.
In 1950, she laid the foundation stone of the Roman Catholic religious congregation which is now popularly known as the Missionaries of Charity.
Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, but she refused to accept it and urged the jury to contribute the prize money of $192,000 to help the poor people of India.
In 1950, she founded the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic religious congregation that had over 4,500 nuns and was active in 133 countries in 2012. The congregation manages homes for people who are dying of HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis.//a.i/
