Mother Teresa: Essay, Article, Short Note, Biography, Speech

Mother Teresa: Essay, Article, Short Note, Biography, Speech

Introduction (Biography of Mother Teresa)

Recently being instated with the honor of sainthood, Mother Teresa is one personality, who is known worldwide for her kindness and generosity. Her work has been recognized and appreciated by people from across the globe.

Mother Teresa was born on the 27^th of August 1910, in Yugoslavia. Named as Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, at birth, she was an Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun and missionary, who dedicated her life to serving the less fortunate. After living in Macedonia for the first 18 years of her life, she then moved to Ireland and late to India. In 1950, Mother Teresa founded the ‘Missionaries of Charity”, which is a Roman Catholic religious congregation that manages homes for people dying of HIV, AIDS, leprosy, and tuberculosis; along with a whole set of other functions.

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Early life of Mother Teresa (Story of Mother Teresa)

Mother Teresa was the youngest in her family and had always been fascinated by the stories of the missionaries and the nuns who roamed the countryside. By the age of 12, it is said that she was pretty much sure that she wanted to devote her life to religion and serving those with not enough opportunities. Agnes, left her home at the age of 18, to join the Sisters of Loreto, in Ireland, where she along with the religious lifestyle also learned English.  She arrived in India, in the year of 1929 and began her work in Darjeeling. Having gradually learned Bengali, she taught at a school nearby. She took her first religious vows in 1931 and chose to take on the name Teresa, after the patron saint of missionaries.   She served at the school for nearly twenty years, and was later appointed as its headmistress in 1944. But she was increasingly getting disturbed by the widespread poverty in Calcutta and the Hindu-Muslim violence that later started.  Although a sincere Christian, the lessons of Shri. Ramakrishna and Mahatma Gandhi had left an extraordinary impact on her life and teaching vocation.

Awards and Achievements of Mother Teresa

By the 1970s, she had become globally extremely popular as a philanthropic and supporter of the poor and defenceless. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and furthermore won India’s most astounding non-military personnel award, the Bharat Ratna, in 1980 for her compassionate work. Mother Teresa’s ‘Missionaries of Charity’ kept on extending, and at the time of her demise, it was successfully working on 610 missions spread across 123 nations. In 2010 on the 100th commemoration of her introduction to the world, she was respected far and wide, and her work adulated by the then, Indian President Pratibha Patil.

When presented with the Nobel Prize, she very politely said, “I am not worthy of it. I accept the award in the name of the poor, because I believe, by giving me the prize, they have recognized the presence of the poor in the world.”

The honours that have been bestowed on her and all the ones that she deserves for her work, are too many to count here. But she is far above these materialistic honours, they can’t even come close to actually rewarding her for all that she has done for the world.

Criticisms

A paper by Candian academics, Serge Larivée, Geneviève Chénard and Carole Sénéchal, Teresa’s clinic received millions as funds, but none of it was used in bettering the medical facilities available to the suffering victims.  These also include complaints by different people and gatherings, including Christopher Hitchens, Michael Parenti, Aroup Chatterjee, Vishva Hindu Parishad, against her hidden motive behind her work, being to convert the masses to Christianity. She was also criticised for her strong position against the use of contraception and abortion.

Death of Mother Teresa

It was in 1983, that her health started deteriorating and she had her first heart attack at Rome. This was closely followed by another. She then faced a bout of Pneumonia which further aggravated her heart problems and in April 1996, she fell- breaking her collarbone. On the 13^th of March, 1997 Teresa resigned as head of the Missionaries of Charity, and she died later that year on the 5^th of September. Teresa was made to lay in repose at St Thomas, Calcutta, for a week before her burial. She was among those few to have received a state funeral from the Indian government as a token of gratitude for her services to the poor of all religions in the country. Teresa’s death was mourned in the secular and religious communities all across the world.

Conclusion (Essay on Mother Teressa)

She is the genuine indication of God and has all of his virtues like thoughtfulness, commitment, benefit, love, pardoning and so on. She has been a living blessing and a Holy messenger to every one she has benefitted all these years and have done more than her share to lessen the torment inflicted on mankind. She has identified herself completely with the poor people, the destitute, the sick, the diminishing and the vulnerable. Her empathy knows no qualification, no limits. Mother Teresa could be named as one of the purest souls to have graced the planet, with no other intention that to better the world. This can be understood through her statement-

“By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus”