The Most Terrible Poverty - Mother Teresa

1910–97

Mother Teresa of Calcutta was of course not always Mother Teresa of Calcutta. As a child growing up in a devout Catholic family in Skopje, Macedonia, her name was Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. After her father died when Agnes was eight years old, her mother continued to raise her with a deep faith and a deep commitment to charity. Her mother encouraged her to always share with others—especially meals.

At age eighteen, Agnes went to Ireland to join the Loreto Sisters of Dublin, taking the name Sister Mary Teresa (after Thérèse of Lisieux, a patron saint of missions). In 1931, she was sent to Calcutta to teach at a school for some of the city’s poorest girls. It wasn’t until she made her final vows in 1937 that she became known as Mother Teresa.

A decade later, she left the Calcutta school to go into the poorest areas of the city to care for the unloved. Sensing a special calling from God to work with people who had no one to care for them, she believed that loneliness and being unloved were the most terrible poverty, and it was a type of poverty felt all over the world.

“The greatest disease in the West . . . is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for,” she wrote in A Simple Path. “We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love.”

We know that God is love and that there is nothing in the world that can separate us from his love (see Romans 8:31-38). That doesn’t mean we don’t feel unloved and lonely at times, and this feeling can be very difficult to endure. To whom can you reach out today to help relieve some of the terrible poverty of loneliness and let them know that they are loved by both God and you?

I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.

John 13:34-35