Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born on August 26, 1910, in Skopje, in what was then the Kosovo Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire — present-day North Macedonia. She was the youngest of three children of Nikollë Bojaxhiu, an Albanian merchant and local political activist, and Dranafile Bernai. Her father died suddenly when she was eight, under circumstances that left the family in difficult financial circumstances, and her mother's response — gathering the family and maintaining their faith and their generosity toward the poor of Skopje despite their own reduced means — left a lasting impression on her daughter's sense of what was required of a person of faith. She was drawn to missionary work from her early teens through the activities of the Jesuit Society of Jesus's Yugoslav mission, and at eighteen she left home to join the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland, never returning to see her mother again.
After training in Dublin and initial vows in Darjeeling, India, she taught geography and catechism at St. Mary's High School in Calcutta, becoming headmistress in 1944. Her second calling came on September 10, 1946 — a date she called 'Inspiration Day' — during a train journey to Darjeeling, where she experienced what she later described as a direct instruction from God to leave the convent and serve the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta. She spent two years seeking Vatican permission for this unprecedented step — a nun leaving her convent to live and work in the streets — and in 1948 she emerged from the Loreto convent in a white sari with a blue border and walked into the Calcutta slums to begin what became the Missionaries of Charity.
Her first years in the streets of Calcutta were extraordinarily difficult — without funding, without institutional support, frequently cold and hungry herself. She opened a school in the slums with five children and a stick for writing in the dirt. Gradually, former students, other nuns, and eventually international donors began to support the work. Kalighat, the Home for the Dying, opened in 1952: a place where people dying on the streets of Calcutta — previously collected and left to die in alleyways — could end their lives in dignity, cared for, clean, and accompanied. By the time she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, the Missionaries of Charity operated 610 missions in 123 countries. She asked that the Nobel Prize banquet be cancelled and the $192,000 in costs be donated instead to Calcutta's poor.
Mother Teresa's INFJ quality is visible in the completeness of her alignment between inner vision and outer life — a total congruence between what she believed reality demanded and what she actually did, sustained over five decades without deviation. Her private letters, published posthumously, revealed that she experienced real spiritual darkness throughout most of her adult life — a sense of God's absence that she found devastating but interpreted as sharing in the suffering of the poor she served rather than as evidence of God's non-existence. The INFJ's characteristic quality is the depth of the inner life that drives the external mission, and Mother Teresa's inner life was a battlefield of extraordinary difficulty that produced an external service of extraordinary beauty. She was canonized by Pope Francis on September 4, 2016.
