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Article: From 1997: Mother Teresa, Hope of the Despairing, Dies at 87

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Mother Teresa, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning nun renowned for her lifelong ministry to the world's poorest and sickest, died in Calcutta at age 87. Her global charitable order, the Missionaries of Charity, provided extensive care across over 90 countries, though her work also attracted some criticism. She was widely honored as a symbol of compassion and service.

Main Topics Covered:
The death and legacy of Mother Teresa
Her founding and leadership of the Missionaries of Charity
The global scope and nature of her humanitarian work
The recognition and criticism she received

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/world/asia/mother-teresa-dead.html

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NYT > World News

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2026-03-06 17:01

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2026-03-06 15:00

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2026-03-06 15:01

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Women’s History Month
From 1997: Mother Teresa, Hope of the Despairing, Dies at 87
She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for providing care and comfort to the impoverished.
This obituary was originally published on Sept. 6, 1997. It is being republished for a package for Women’s History Month.
Mother Teresa, the Roman Catholic nun who won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize for her work among the poorest of the world’s poor, died yesterday in Calcutta, India, where she had lived since her work with the destitute began five decades ago. She was 87.
Mother Teresa was hospitalized several times last year with heart, lung, kidney and other problems, and also suffered ill health in earlier years. Her physician in Rome, Vincenzo Bilotta, said she suffered cardiac arrest during the evening at her convent in Calcutta, The Associated Press reported.
As her health deteriorated over the past year, Mother Teresa stepped aside and her order, the Missionaries of Charity, chose a new leader, Sister Nirmala, in March.
Mother Teresa, an ethnic Albanian born in what is now Macedonia, was revered in India, where she worked for 68 years and became a citizen.
She also came to be honored around the world for the compassionate, effective way she set up and oversaw projects to provide care and comfort to the very poor and the very sick, orphans, lepers and the dying.
Traveling widely even in her later years, she became known to millions as a slight, brown-eyed figure — she was only 5 feet tall — smiling and dressed in the plain white sari with blue trim of her order.
Her work was considered by some a rebuke to widespread feelings of personal powerlessness in middle-class and wealthy societies. In 1968, Pope Paul VI praised her as an “intrepid messenger of the love of Christ.”
The Nobel Committee said its award to her in 1979 was “for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress in the world, which also constitute a threat to peace.” Informed of the honor, she said simply, “I am unworthy.”
But she came in for criticism, too. A British television documentary in 1994 contended that perceptions of her were colored by “hyperbole and credulity.”
Mother Teresa, who had been a school administrator in a suburb of Calcutta, began working in the slums of that poverty-ridden and densely populated city in 1948. She had received what she described as a divine “call within a call” two years earlier while riding on a train. “The message was quite clear,” she recalled. “I was to help the poor while living among them. It was an order.”
In 1950 she established the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, becoming its Superior General. She went on to organize far-flung programs for the impoverished, eventually reaching more than 90 countries.
Her chief task, as she defined it, was to provide “free service to the poor and the unwanted, irrespective of caste, creed, nationality or race.”
In predominantly Hindu India, she made sure that the priests of her order gave last rites, the Roman Catholic sacrament for the dying, only on request, and that they dealt with the dead according to the practices of the individual’s own religion. For the living, Mother Teresa set up orphanages, schools in slums and Pure Heart Homes for sick and dying homeless people.
Over the years, her work expanded. She set up mobile health clinics, centers for the malnourished, rehabilitation hospices for lepers, homes for alcoholics and drug addicts, and shelters for the homeless. Her centers in the United States included the Gift of Love Hospice for 15 men with AIDS, at 657 Washington Street, in Greenwich Village.
The number of sisters in her religious order, only 62 in 1957, grew enormously. By the time Mother Teresa won the Nobel Prize, her order had attracted 1,800 nuns and 120,000 lay workers, running more than 80 centers in India and more than 100 others in other parts of the world. The order’s patients included 53,000 lepers.
By 1988, her order was operating 600 mobile health clinics where almost four million people received treatment. That year Mother Teresa visited South Africa, which was still under apartheid rule, to set up a hostel in a black township. By early 1992, experts on Catholic welfare work reported, members of her order — 4,000 nuns and novices, 400 priests and brothers and hundreds of thousands of lay volunteers — worked at 450 sites worldwide, including in Albania and Iraq.
Aid and Tribute, But No Pity
Mother Teresa often paid tribute to the stricken people she cared for. Speaking to a gathering at the United Nations in 1975, she recalled a woman she had found dying on a Calcutta street.
“I knew she was dying,” she said softly. “After I did what I could, she took my hand, gave me a beautiful smile and thanked me. She gave me more than I gave her.”
Mother Teresa put particular emphasis on giving the deprived and the sick a sensation of dignity through personal contact. “Ours is a humble service,” she said in an interview in 1975. “We try to remain right down on the ground.”
The healing power of forgiveness was among Mother Teresa’s abiding themes. When she visited victims of the chemical-leak disaster in Bhopal in 1984, she said, “Forgiveness offers us a clean heart, and people will be a hundred times better after it.”
But she said pity did not help the poor. They “don’t need pity, they need love and compassion,” she once said, adding, “If you don’t know them, you don’t love them and don’t serve them.”
She said some people used to advise her that her order should have fans in some rooms used by its nuns. “I do not want them to have fans,” she continued. “The poor whom they are to serve have no fans. Most of the girls come from village homes where they had no fans. They should not be more comfortable here than at home.”
In addition to piety, humility and warmth, she displayed strength of will, blunt practicality and organizational talent. The Nobel Committee said it meant to honor her as much for her managerial skills as for her devotion to the poor.
Mother Teresa earned her Nobel Prize despite a political climate in India that was unfavorable to foreign missionaries. In the 1970’s the Government took measures to discourage such work, and by the time she won the prize the number of missionaries in India had shrunk to only a few hundred. It had formerly been 6,000. In 1979 there were about 15 million Christians in the country, 2.4 percent of the population of 630 million.
On certain social questions, Mother Teresa adhered outspokenly to the doctrine of her church. She voiced strong opposition to contraception, abortion and divorce.
In accepting the Nobel Prize, she declared: “To me the nations with legalized abortion are the poorest nations. The greatest destroyer of peace today is the crime against the unborn child.”
Strong Adherence To Church Doctrine
In 1995, along with Hillary Rodham Clinton, she helped dedicate a shelter in Washington for women and newborn infants. The center was meant to discourage abortions by providing quarters for children waiting to be adopted or put in foster homes.
And in February 1996, Senator Bob Dole, campaigning in Iowa for the Republican Presidential nomination, declared that Mother Teresa had called to praise him for helping pass a ban against certain types of late-term abortions.
In 1995, before a referendum in Ireland was narrowly passed to end a constitutional ban on divorce and remarriage, opponents of the law were exasperated when a hand-written letter from Mother Teresa urging a “no” vote was made public.
On another occasion, she contended in effect that women’s place was in the home, “allowing men to do what they are better suited to do.”
Criticism of her came from various quarters. In an interview in 1995 in Calcutta, Debasis Bhattachariya of the Indian Science and Rationalists Association declared, “Mother Teresa is not at all any better than all the other godmen and godwomen, because she helps to place a more kindly mask on the overall exploitation in our society.”
Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair and The Nation, voiced particularly strong criticism of her in a 1995 book, “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice" (Verso). Mr. Hitchens contended that she had “furnished P.R.-type cover for all manner of cultists and shady businessmen.” Her success, he said, “depends on the exploitation of the simple and the humble by the cunning and the single-minded.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s review of the book carried the headline, “A Salvo of Cheap Shots Fired at a Contemporary Saint.”
The 1994 British television documentary that criticized Mother Teresa, titled “Hell’s Angel,” was also written by Mr. Hitchens. Asked about the documentary, Mother Teresa said simply, “Forgive them for they know not what they do.”
In the United States, her views were of such wide interest that “The Simple Path,” a book of her thoughts, experiences and beliefs compiled by Lucinda Vardey, was a best seller for 12 weeks in 1995 and 1996.
She was “an incredible person,” President Clinton said yesterday in Edgartown, Mass., where he was on vacation. The House of Representatives, observed a moment of silence.
Answering the Call To Become a Nun
Mother Teresa was born Agnes Bojaxhiu on either Aug. 26 or 27, 1910, to Albanian parents in Skopje, about 200 miles south of Belgrade. Studded with churches and mosques, the city is today the capital of Macedonia, but was then ruled by Ottoman Turks, before becoming part of Serbia in 1913.
Accounts have differed as to the profession of her father. An authorized biography of her that came out in Britain in 1992 said he was a building contractor. While a schoolgirl, she belonged to a Catholic lay women’s group. At its meetings, letters were read from Balkan Jesuits who had gone as missionaries to Bengal, in eastern India.
At the age of 12 she first felt the desire to become a nun. At 18 she decided to do so and got in touch with the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish Catholic order with missions in Bengal. She joined the order in Rathfarnham, a suburb of Dublin, in 1928. After English lessons there, she spent a more than a year in Darjeeling, north of Calcutta, where the order ran a girls’ school.
She then became a teacher, mainly of geography and also of history and catechism, at St. Mary’s High School, on the grounds of the Entally Convent outside Calcutta. Many of her pupils came from poor families. In time she learned Bengali and Hindi and became the school’s principal.
It was while riding on a train on Sept. 10, 1946, that she received her “call within a call,” she said. She left her school and learned nursing skills from other nuns. Then she began her good works among Calcutta’s poor, feeling uncertainties at first but also happiness as she set about meeting peoples’ needs. “I knew where I belonged,” she recalled, “but I did not know how to get there.”
Before long — in 1950 — she won canonical recognition for her new order, the Missionaries of Charity. The religious sisters who joined took vows of chastity, obedience, poverty and service.
One day in 1952, as her longtime associate Sister Agnes recalled years later, “she found an old woman dying in the streets.”
“We tried to get someone to take her to a hospital,” Sister Agnes said, “but before we could, she died. Mother said there should be a place where people can die with dignity and know that they are wanted.”
And so Mother Teresa set about establishing a home for the dying destitute. She persuaded Calcutta’s municipal authorities to give her a shabby one-story building, which happened to stand next to a complex of Hindu shrines.
In that humble structure, she succeeded in creating a place where those who died would do so with dignity. The space was cleaned. The dying were cared for with compassion. The establishment was called Nirmal Hriday, the place for the pure of heart.
Mother Teresa’s undertakings continued, one after another. There was a home for abandoned children, a leper colony and an old people’s home. She went on to set up welfare institutions ranging from a family clinic, to mobile leprosy clinics, to nurseries for abandoned children.
A Strong Disdain For Mere Money
Her work brought in donations from admirers. She liked to say that money was “really no problem, we depend on divine providence,” and she said simply that her works were underwritten by “cash and kind.”
She recalled that when her order opened a house in New York, “Terence Cardinal Cooke was very anxious that he should give every month a maintenance for the sisters.”
“I didn’t want to hurt him,” she said, “but I didn’t know how to explain to him that our services are purely for the love of God and that we cannot accept maintenance. I expressed it the only way I could: ‘Your Eminence, I don’t think God is going to become bankrupt in New York City!’”
One longtime source of support was Catholic Relief Services, the overseas aid agency of the United States bishops, which operates in scores of countries. Its backing came largely in donations of United States Government surplus food.
In 1971 Mother Teresa’s order opened its first house in the United States, in Harlem. It was soon moved to the Bronx, where, on a visit to the United States in 1980, Mother Teresa helped open a soup kitchen and declared her thanks to the poor people of New York “for allowing themselves to be taken care of” by her order. In 1981, she opened a mission in Newark.
Then in 1982, when she was 72, she worked for a number of days in Beirut, Lebanon, crisscrossing the Green Line that divided Christian East Beirut from Muslim West Beirut. She rescued dozens of mentally ill children from the dangers of warfare in the Muslim part of the city.
One of her biographers, Eileen Egan, reported in a 1985 book, “Such a Vision of the Street: Mother Teresa — the Spirit and the Work,” that a Red Cross official who helped her observed later: “What stunned everyone was her energy. We didn’t expect a saint to be so efficient.”
After suffering heart problems, Mother Teresa sent her resignation as head of her order to Pope John Paul II early in 1990. She said the time had come for “younger hands.” A new head was to be chosen that September. But when the time came she told reporters in Calcutta that God’s will had kept her from stepping down. Catholic clergymen said she had been prevented from doing so when members of the order’s electoral college, gathered from many countries, had been unable to agree on her successor. They re-elected her to her post.
Over the years, she received many awards and honors, including honorary degrees from universities ranging from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome to Harvard. She was awarded the Jewel of India, the country’s highest civilian award. And she was an honorary citizen of Assisi, the hill town in central Italy where Francis of Assisi was born in 1182.
In addition to all her good works, Mother Teresa found time to compose prayers, including this one:
Make us worthy, Lord,
To serve our fellow men
Throughout the world who live and die
In poverty or hunger.
Give them, through our hands
This day their daily bread,
And by our understanding love,
Give peace and joy.
But she could also be briskly prosaic. In an interview in 1994 she said: “I work all day. That is the best way.”
To preserve archival articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
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