Mother Teresa was born August 26, 1910 in Skopje, the current capital of the Republic of Macedonia, which was part of the Ottoman Empire at the time of her birth and was conquered by the Kingdom of Serbia in 1912, when she was two years old. On August 27, 1910, a date frequently mistaken for her birthday, she was baptized as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. Mother Teresa’s parents, Nikola and Drana Bojaxhiu, were of Albanian descent; her father was an entrepreneur who worked as a construction contractor and a trader of medicines and other goods.
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The Bojaxhius were a devoutly Catholic family, and Nikola Bojaxhiu was deeply involved in the local church as well as in city politics as a vocal proponent of Albanian independence. In 1919, when she was only eight years old, her father suddenly fell ill and died. While the cause of his death remains unknown, many have speculated that political enemies poisoned him. In the aftermath of her father’s death, Mother Teresa 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 counseled 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. ” she 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 chapel of the Madonna of Letnice atop Black Mountain in Skopje, and it was on one such trip at the age of twelve 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 Loreto Sisters of Dublin. It was there that she took the name Sister Mary Teresa after Saint Therese of Lisieux. A year later, she traveled on to Darjeeling, India for the novitiate period; in May 1931, Mary Teresa 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. Mother 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, chastity 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.
