US to honour Mother Teresa with stamp

by D.S.Rajput | December 31, 2009 at 01:21 am

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New Delhi: United State of America honour Mother Teresa with stamp on her birth centanary. "With this stamp, the US Postal Service recognizes Mother Teresa, who received the Nobel peace prize in 1979 for her humanitarian work," the US Postal Service said as it released the list of new postages to be issued in 2010. "Noted for her compassion toward the poor and suffering, Mother Teresa, a diminutive Roman Catholic nun and honorary US citizen, served the sick and destitute of India and the world for nearly 50 years." The stamp honouring Mother Teresa is expected to be issued on August 26, her 100th birth anniversary. In 1996, the then president Bill Clinton and the US Congress awarded Mother Teresa honorary US citizenship. As of February 2009, the honour has only been bestowed on five others. Winston Churchill received it in 1963, Raoul Wallenberg in 1981, William Penn and Hannah Callowhill Penn in 1984, and the Marquis de Lafayette in 2002.

Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Macedonia, on August 26, 1910. Her family was of Albanian descent. At the age of twelve, she felt strongly the call of God. She knew she had to be a missionary to spread the love of Christ. At the age of eighteen she left her parental home in Skopje and joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India. After a few months' training in Dublin she was sent to India, where on May 24, 1931, she took her initial vows as a nun. From 1931 to 1948 Mother Teresa taught at St. Mary's High School in Calcutta, but the suffering and poverty she glimpsed outside the convent walls made such a deep impression on her that in 1948 she received permission from her superiors to leave the convent school and devote herself to working among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta. Although she had no funds, she depended on Divine Providence, and started an open-air school for slum children. Soon she was joined by voluntary helpers, and financial support was also forthcoming. This made it possible for her to extend the scope of her work.

On October 7, 1950, Mother Teresa received permission from the Holy See to start her own order, "The Missionaries of Charity", whose primary task was to love and care for those persons nobody was prepared to look after. In 1965 the Society became an International Religious Family by a decree of Pope Paul VI.