Mother Teresa (Saint Teresa of Calcutta)

Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born into an ethnic Albanian Catholic family in Skopje (now North Macedonia). Joining the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland at age eighteen, she took her religious vows and traveled to Calcutta, India, in 1929, teaching geography at St. Mary's High School for nearly two decades. On 10 September 1946, while traveling by train from Calcutta to Darjeeling for her annual retreat, she experienced what she described as a 'call within a call': an unmistakable instruction from God to leave the convent school and live among the destitute and dying in the slums.

Receiving Vatican permission in 1948, she adopted Indian citizenship, donned her trademark white cotton sari bordered with three blue stripes, and underwent six months of basic medical training with the Medical Mission Sisters in Patna. Moving into the squalor of Motijhil slum, she gathered street children to teach them hygiene and basic literacy. In October 1950, she formally founded the congregation of the Missionaries of Charity.

In 1952, she opened Kalighat, the Home for the Dying Destitute (Nirmal Hriday), converting an abandoned Hindu temple rest house into a haven where people dying in the streets could spend their final hours in dignity and unconditional love. She followed with Shanti Nagar, a colony for leprosy sufferers, and Nirmala Shishu Bhavan for abandoned infants. By her death in 1997, the Missionaries of Charity numbered more than 4,000 sisters operating 610 foundations in 123 nations. Awarded the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, she famously refused the ceremonial banquet, requesting that the funds be donated directly to the poor of Calcutta.