For almost 20 years Mother Teresa taught geography at the Loretto School in Calcutta. Her love of maps and charts is still evident in her convents. Each has a map of the world with pins marking locations of her more than 500 "mission houses" around the planet. The Society letterhead has a small world map surrounded by a rosary, because Jesus had told her to bring His light to the poorest of the poor in every nation. A ten foot wide world map dominates the wall of the Motherhouse conference room, in which we have a class each evening in Calcutta this week.
The large world map in the Motherhouse conference room. Two Hindu women presented to us on their work with Mother over the years.
Yesterday we visited her Loretto school, which today still has 300 girls: bright Indian faces in smart red uniforms swelled about every window and door as we walked past, calling out in fits of giggles and laughs. The Loretto schools (there are still two--one in English for the wealthier girls and one in Bengali for the less fortunate daughters of Calcutta) are placed serenely in a large leafy campus in the middle of the city, an oasis of peaceful verdure. For 20 years Mother Teresa enjoyed teaching geography and religion to these eager schoolgirls in their urban paradise.
Eager schoolgirls from Mother Teresa's former school crowd their classroom window as we pass by.
Then one day in 1946--I will offer Mass at the Motherhouse on the 72nd anniversary of this day on Monday, which the sisters call "Inspiration Day"--God asked this simple schoolteacher to leave her idyllic school. He had asked Abraham to leave Ur of the Chaldees, and He had asked His Son to leave heaven, and now he asked this young sister to leave her home for streets teeming with hunger and violence. But Calcutta was only the first step. She would keep going into every country on that big classroom map to establish the most international religious congregation in history.
She left the gates of Entally on a sunny day in 1948 and walked a few blocks, just a stone's throw from the convent's south wall, to a slum built around a fetid swamp called Motijheel. There she began teaching the street children their Bengali letters with a stick in the dirt, and soon opened a school for them, which we visited yesterday as well. Then one day in 1946--I will offer Mass at the Motherhouse on the 72nd anniversary of this day on Monday, which the sisters call "Inspiration Day"--God asked this simple schoolteacher to leave her idyllic school. He had asked Abraham to leave Ur of the Chaldees, and He had asked His Son to leave heaven, and now he asked this young sister to leave her home for streets teeming with hunger and violence. But Calcutta was only the first step. She would keep going into every country on that big classroom map to establish the most international religious congregation in history.
She left the gates of Entally on a sunny day in 1948 and walked a few blocks, just a stone's throw from the convent's south wall, to a slum built around a fetid swamp called Motijheel. There she began teaching the street children their Bengali letters with a stick in the dirt, and soon opened a school for them, which we visited yesterday as well. Then one day in 1946--I will offer Mass at the Motherhouse on the 72nd anniversary of this day on Monday, which the sisters call "Inspiration Day"--God asked this simple schoolteacher to leave her idyllic school. He had asked Abraham to leave Ur of the Chaldees, and He had asked His Son to leave heaven, and now he asked this young sister to leave her home for streets teeming with hunger and violence. But Calcutta was only the first step. She would keep going into every country on that big classroom map to establish the most international religious congregation in history.
A view today of Motijheel, the swampy dump a few blocks from the school where Mother Teresa began her work in 1948.
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