Contribution--Mother Teresa

CONTRIBUTION:

· On October 7, 1950, Mother Teresa received permission to start her own order “The Missionaries of Charity”, whose primary task was to love and care for those people who had no one to look after them.

· The order provides food for the needy and operates hospitals, schools, orphanages, youth centers, and shelters for lepers and the dying poor. It now has branches in 50 Indian cities and a number of countries in African, Asia, and Latin America.

· In 1952 Mother Teresa opened the “Nirmal Hriday (Pure Heart) Home for Dying Destitutes” in Calcutta. She and her fellow nuns gathered dying Indians off the streets of Calcutta and brought them to this home to care for them during their last days.

· Mother Teresa also organized schools and orphanages for the poor. The Brothers of Charity—the male companion to the Sisters of Charity—was formed in the mid 1960s to run homes for the dying.

· The leper colony Mother Teresa founded with the winnings from her 1971 Pope Paul XXIII Peace Prize has offered a place for outcasts to find acceptance.

· When she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, she convinced the committee to cancel the official banquet and used that money to buy meals for 15,000 poor.

· In 1980, one of her first visits as a Nobel Laureate was to Skopje where Mother Teresa was declared a “distinguished citizen of Skopje.” This was in part because a few months earlier, she had opened a house for elderly homeless people—the first time her Order had been able to operate in a communist country.

· In 1985, she opened the first church-sponsored hospice for patients with AIDS in New York City.

· Accomplishments noted in the last two decades of her active life:

o At the start of the 1980s the Missionaries of Charity boasted 140 slum schools, a daily feeding program for nearly 50,000 people at 304 centers, 70 homes protecting 4,000 children, about 1,000 adoptions a year were arranged, 12,000 poor women were taught to earn their living, and many more.

ACCOLADES:

· For her work among the people of India, the Indian government gave her the Padmashree ("Magnificent Lotus") Award in September of 1962.

· By September of 1970 Mother Teresa received the Good Samaritan Award in Boston, and accepted an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters at a degree ceremony in Washington (the first of many honorary degrees to be conferred on her in the coming years.

· In 1971 she received the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize.

· In 1972 the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding.

· In April 1973 Mother Teresa traveled to London to receive the first Templeton Award for Progress in Religion.

· In October of 1979 the Nobel Committee pronounced Mother Teresa as that year’s recipient of the Peace Prize. She received the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting peace and brotherhood among the nations.

· In 1985 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President
Ronald Reagan.