Seventy-five years ago today, Mother Teresa of Calcutta founded the Missionaries of Charity.
S eventy-five years ago today, Mother Teresa of Calcutta founded the Missionaries of Charity, a religious and charitable organization that now serves the poorest of the poor in places like Gaza, Ukraine, Haiti, Syria, and South Sudan. The MCs still follow her austere lifestyle and receive no salary or pension. They neither fundraise nor charge for their care, following Mother Teresa’s challenge to “prefer the insecurity of Divine Providence.”
This tradition of courageous self-sacrifice traces back to the 1940s and an unexamined period in Mother Teresa’s life. She was an obscure member of the Sisters of Loreto, teaching on their compound in Calcutta. The world was at war, and India ached for independence from British rule. Tensions between Hindus and Muslims were escalating in the region, and a famine in the Bengal province had killed millions and triggered a massive migration into the city. Japanese military forces were advancing up the Malayan Peninsula, and an attack on Indian soil seemed imminent. In 1942, the British requisitioned the Loreto compound and nearly every Loreto sister evacuated.
But not Mother Teresa. She stayed to take custody of hundreds of her students who had nowhere to go, renting space to house and school them. At one point, the demands on her were so great that she nearly died of exhaustion. The end of the war brought no relief, as hostilities between Hindus and Muslims erupted, leaving thousands dead. Mother Teresa ventured out alone to secure food for her hungry and frightened charges.
After the riots, in September 1946, Mother Teresa was sent to Darjeeling to rest. But on that fateful train ride, she had a mystical experience of God telling her to leave the Loreto Sisters and start a new congregation to serve in Calcutta’s worst ghettoes. “The message was quite clear,” she explained to a friend. “I was to leave the convent and work with the poor while living among them. It was an order. I knew where I belonged, but I did not know how to get there.”
She returned from Darjeeling weeks later and confided in a priest friend who identified the multiple ecclesial authorities she would have to convince, including at the Vatican. Her Loreto superior misinterpreted these long parlor discussions as inappropriately intimate and sent Mother Teresa to another convent for six months.
While she was away, she had visions of Jesus, Mary, and the poor urging her to start her MC ministry. Within two months of her return to Calcutta, the partitioning of Bengal began. An estimated 10–15 million people were uprooted from their homes and instantly impoverished. Calcutta, once the proud capital of India, became a hellscape.
It took two agonizing years for Mother Teresa to secure the permissions she needed to begin her work in the slums. With those finally in hand, she left Loreto and on December 21, 1948, wearing her trademark blue-striped cotton sari, began her outreach to the destitute. She had no followers, convent, or money, and faced social opprobrium as a white-skinned European woman in a patriarchal country that had tired of its Christian rulers. It was a seemingly impossible task.
Those first months, she had to beg for food and scavenge for medicines and supplies for the dying. In her journals, she described bouts of loneliness and tears, and bone weariness from walking. But she also wrote that she discovered “many joys in the slums.” Calcutta’s poor unleashed in her a cheerfulness and apostolic zeal. “It is strange,” she wrote, “how the thirst for souls increases the closer I come with them.”
In February 1949, a Catholic family gave her a room to use as a convent, and by May, she was able to recruit three former Loreto students to join her in the work. A fourth stayed only eleven days, and in Mother’s words, “left on account of the hard life which she could not manage.” The MC way of living — simple food, a thin mat for sleeping, punishing work, and a rigorous prayer schedule — was not for everyone.
By October 1950, Mother Teresa had twelve sisters and a well-deserved reputation as “the walking angel of the poor.” Calcutta’s Archbishop Ferdinand Perrier, S.J., once a skeptic, officially established the MCs in his archdiocese. The MCs grew quickly, and by 1975, she had 1,000 sisters. Mother Teresa later won a Nobel Peace Prize, and after her death was recognized by the Catholic Church as a saint.
Today, there are over 5,500 MC sisters, priests, and brothers operating over 750 homes in 138 countries, including 40 in the U.S. and Canada. They, too, have had their share of trials. Eight in Yemen were martyred by Islamic terrorists, scores narrowly survived deadly earthquakes in Haiti and floods in Bangladesh, and more than 30 died during the Covid pandemic.
Their loving service has transformed countless lives. They have found the joy that comes from preferring the insecurity of Divine Providence.