Saint thread time!!

St. Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa), whose feast day is today, is one of the most amazing saints ever and I'm going to tell you why!

St. Teresa of Calcutta: A thread

Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in 1910 in Macedonia, but her family was Albanian. For much of her childhood and adolescence, she was raised by her single mother. Her father passed away when she was 8. During her teenage years, she was very active in her parish...

...and eventually she discerned a call to the religious life. When she was 18, she left home and entered the Loreto Convent in Dublin. St. Therese of Lisieux was her patron saint, so she received Mary Teresa as her new religious name. In 1929, the Loreto order assigned her...

...to their convent in Calcutta, India. She made her final vows in 1937 and was called Mother Teresa after that. During her time at the Lareto convent in Calcutta, she taught at a school. One day, Mother Teresa was riding on a train to Darjeeling when she heard what she said...

...was her "call within a call" from God to serve the poorest of the poor in the streets of India. She left her Lareto convent to establish the order she founded, the Missionaries of Charity. The order became official in 1950. The Missionaries of Charity did not provide...

...health care in the traditional sense, but rather served the dying poor to allow them to die with dignity instead of on the streets. The order also founded orphanages and clinics to help AIDS patients. The Missionaries of Charity serve the poor and marginalized all over the...

...world! In addition to her love for the poor, she also had a deep love for the Eucharist. She said that she gained her strength to do her work from Mass and her holy hour in front of the Blessed Sacrament every morning.

Mother Teresa had a special fourth vow to refuse Jesus nothing, and her life goal was to quench His thirst for our love through her service to the poor. A remarkable thing about Mother Teresa's life was that she underwent "the dark night of the soul". For almost 50 years, she...

...couldn't feel God's love and she didn't feel close to Him at all, despite her deep prayer life. However, she never gave up and she always believed that God loved her and was with her, even if she couldn't feel it. Mother Teresa had a unique union with God through this...

...desolation. During her persistence in the spiritual life, she also never stopped working. Even into her old age she continued to serve and travel, spreading messages of Jesus' love and the dignity of human life. She died in 1997, only a short time after returning from a...

...visit to Rome to see the pope (Pope St. John Paul II!!). There is so much more about the life of this great saint than I can cover in this thread, so go research her!! She truly is an amazing example of holiness in modern times!

Source: http://catholic.org