1. Women who changed the world
Mother
Teresa
(This is one of a series of assemblies about famous influential women, including women’s rights activists, female poets, musicians, politicians, humanitarians and scientists.)
Mother Teresa was Canonised (made a Saint) on Sunday 4th September 2016.
The pope occasionally makes people saints in a special service in the Vatican City in Rome. It is a not a regular event as those put forward for canonisation have to be researched very carefully before any recommendation is made to the pope. This is often a very long process taking several years.
Today we are thinking about someone who made a BIG difference in the 20th century. She is best known as “Mother Teresa”, but can now be referred to as “Saint Teresa”.
Mother Teresa ( ) was a Roman Catholic nun, who devoted her life to serving the poor and destitute around the world. She spent many years in Calcutta, India where shed founded the Missionaries of Charity, a religious congregation devoted to helping those in great need. In 1979, Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and has become a symbol of charitable selfless work. She was beatified in 2003, the first step on the path to sainthood, within the Catholic church.
a time to reflect
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Mother Teresa was born on August 26, 1910, in Skopje, once capital of the Republic of Macedonia – now part of Yugoslavia. The following day, she was baptized as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. Her parents, Nikola and Dranafile Bojaxhiu, were of Albanian descent; her father was an entrepreneur who worked as a construction contractor and a trader of medicines and other goods.
(Does anyone know why we now call her Mother Teresa?)
The Bojaxhius were a devoutly Catholic family, and Nikola was deeply involved in the local church as well as in city politics as a vocal proponent of Albanian independence.
In 1919, when Agnes was only 8 years old, her father suddenly fell ill and died. After her father's death, Agnes became extraordinarily close to her mother, a pious and compassionate woman who instilled in her daughter a deep commitment to charity.
Although by no means wealthy, Drana Bojaxhiu extended an open invitation to the city's destitute to dine with her family. "My child, never eat a single mouthful unless you are sharing it with others," she told her daughter. When Agnes asked who the people eating with them were, her mother uniformly responded, "Some of them are our relations, but all of them are our people."
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Religious Calling
Religious Calling
Agnes attended a convent-run primary school and then a state-run secondary school. As a girl, she sang in the local Sacred Heart choir and was often asked to sing solos.
The congregation made an annual pilgrimage to the Church of the Black Madonna in Letnice, and it was on one such trip at the age of 12 that she first felt a calling to a religious life. Six years later, in 1928, an 18-year-old Agnes Bojaxhiu decided to become a nun and set off for Ireland to join the Sisters of Loreto in Dublin. It was there that she took the name Sister Mary Teresa after Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.
(Were we right about why she is known as Mother Teresa?)
A year later, Sister Mary Teresa travelled on to Darjeeling, India, as a novice; in May 1931, she made her First Profession of Vows.
Afterward she was sent to Calcutta, where she was assigned to teach at Saint Mary's High School for Girls, a school run by the Loreto Sisters and dedicated to teaching girls from the city's poorest Bengali families. Sister Teresa learned to speak both Bengali and Hindi fluently as she taught geography and history and dedicated herself to alleviating the girls' poverty through education.
On May 24, 1937, she took her Final Profession of Vows to a life of poverty, and obedience. As was the custom for Loreto nuns, she took on the title of "Mother" upon making her final vows and thus became known as Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa continued to teach at Saint Mary's, and in 1944 she became the school's principal/headteacher.
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A New Calling
A New Calling
However, on September 10, 1946, Mother Teresa experienced a second calling, the "call within a call" that would forever transform her life. She was riding in a train from Calcutta to the Himalayan foothills for a retreat when she said Christ spoke to her and told her to abandon teaching to work in the slums of Calcutta aiding the city's poorest and sickest people. 
But since Mother Teresa had taken a vow of obedience, she could not leave her convent without official permission. After nearly a year and a half of lobbying, in January 1948 she finally received approval to pursue this new calling.
That August, donning the blue-and-white sari that she would wear in public for the rest of her life, she left the Loreto convent and wandered out into the city. After six months of basic medical training, she voyaged for the first time into Calcutta's slums with no more specific a goal than to aid "the unwanted, the unloved, the uncared for."
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5. An image of Calcutta in the 1940s.
The Missionaries of Charity
Mother Teresa quickly translated this somewhat vague calling into concrete actions to help the city's poor. She began an open-air school and established a home for the dying destitute in a dilapidated building she convinced the city government to donate to her cause. In October 1950, she founded the Missionaries of Charity, which she founded with only a handful of members—most of them former teachers or pupils from St. Mary's School.
As the ranks of her congregation swelled and donations poured in from around India and across the globe, the scope of Mother Teresa's charitable activities expanded rapidly.
Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, she established a leper colony, an orphanage, a nursing home, a family clinic and a string of mobile health clinics.
In 1971, Mother Teresa traveled to New York City to open her first American-based house of charity, and in the summer of 1982, she secretly went to Beirut, Lebanon, where she crossed between Christian East Beirut and Muslim West Beirut to aid children of both faiths. In 1985, Mother Teresa returned to New York and spoke at the 40th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly.
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6. International Charity
and Recognition
International Charity and Recognition
In February 1965, Pope Paul VI bestowed the Decree of Praise upon the Missionaries of Charity, which prompted Mother Teresa to begin expanding internationally.
By the time of her death in 1997, the Missionaries of Charity numbered more than 4,000—in addition to thousands more lay volunteers—with 610 foundations in 123 countries around the world.
The Decree of Praise was just the beginning, as Mother Teresa received various honours for her tireless and effective charity.
She was awarded the Jewel of India, Bharat Ratna, the highest honour bestowed on Indian civilians, as well as the now-defunct Soviet Union's Gold Medal of the Soviet Peace Committee. And in 1979, Mother Teresa won her highest honour when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her work "in bringing help to suffering humanity."
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Controversy
Not everyone has approved of the rules of Mother Teresa’s congregation of nuns.
The nuns were expected to live like the poor around them,
nuns were forbidden even a chilled juice on a sweltering summer’s day,
they were often expect not to wear shoes on baking roads and paths
They only have 3 sari’s – one to wear, one to mend, one to wash.
(She was also criticised over her view of abortion.)
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"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."
Death and Legacy
After several years of deteriorating health, in which she suffered from heart, lung and kidney problems, Mother Teresa died on September 5, 1997, at the age of 87. In 2002, the Vatican recognized a miracle involving an Indian woman named Monica Besra, who said she was cured of an abdominal tumor through Mother Teresa's intercession on the one year anniversary of her death in She was beatified as "Blessed Teresa of Calcutta" on October 19, 2003 in a ceremony led by Pope John Paul II. 
However, despite the enormous scale of her charitable activities and the millions of lives she touched, to her dying day she held only the most humble conception of her own achievements. Summing up her life in characteristically modest fashion, Mother Teresa said,
"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."
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On December 17, 2015, Pope Francis issued a decree that recognized a second miracle attributed to Mother Teresa, clearing the way for her to be canonized as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. The second miracle involved the healing of Marcilio Andrino, a Brazilian man who was diagnosed with a viral brain infection and lapsed into a coma. His wife, family and friends prayed to Mother Teresa, and when the man was brought to the operating room for emergency surgery, he woke up without pain and cured of his symptoms, according to a statement from the Missionaries of Charity Father. 
Mother Teresa was canonised as a saint on September 4, 2016, a day before the 19th anniversary of her death. Pope Francis lead the canonisation service, which was held in front of St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City and witnessed by millions via TV.
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(Do sing this prayer if your school knows it or play a recording of it for the children as the musical setting enhances its power.)
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11. “It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing
“It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing. It is not how much we give, but how much love we put in the giving.”
– Mother Teresa
There are very many famous sayings by Mother Teresa of which this is one.
(Suggestion: develop this further for your school environment.)
(You could use the following slides for a moment of reflection or as the children leave the assembly.)

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Mother Teresa was the founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic congregation of women dedicated to helping the poor.
Today we have been hearing about a little of the life and work of Mother Teresa.
Who can tell us some reasons why Mother Teresa has been made a saint?
Who can tell us about some of the work she did?
Who can remember any of the things she said?
(Next are a few more of Mother Teresa’s famous sayings and a list of her achievements.)
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“Love cannot remain by itself — it has no meaning. Love has to be put into action, and that action is service .”
Mother Teresa
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“Not all of us can do great things.
But we can do small things with great love.”
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“The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.”
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Awards Mother Teresa
The first Pope John XXIII Peace Prize. (1971)
Kennedy Prize (1971)
The Nehru Prize –“for promotion of international peace and understanding”(1972)
Albert Schweitzer International Prize (1975),
The Nobel Peace Prize (1979)
States Presidential Medal of Freedom (1985)
Congressional Gold Medal (1994)
Honorary citizenship of the United States (November 16, 1996),
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