Love in Action · Week 1 · Grades 9–12
Guided Notes: St. Teresa of Calcutta
- Name
- Date
- Class
Follow along as your teacher presents. Fill in each section when its slide is on the screen.
St. Teresa of Calcutta
Formation of a missionary
Anjezë Gonxha Bojaxhiu, called Agnes, was born on August 26, blank 1, in Skopje, now in North Macedonia. Her family was Albanian and Catholic. Her father died when she was about eight, and her mother, raising three children alone, still invited poor people to the family table.
At 18 she joined the blank 2 of Loreto in Ireland and never saw her mother or sister again. In blank 3 she arrived in India, taking the name Teresa after St. Thérèse of Lisieux. For almost 20 years she taught geography and history at a girls' school in Calcutta, now Kolkata, and became its principal. She was happy, and terrible poverty lay just outside the walls.
A call within a call
On September 10, 1946, on a train to the mountains, Sister Teresa felt blank 4 speaking to her. She named it a “call within a call”: leave the school and live among the poorest. She asked permission, and in 1948 she was allowed to go.
She put on a cheap white blank 5 with a blue border, took a short nursing course, became a citizen of India and walked into the slums alone. In 1950 the Church approved the Missionaries of Charity. Its sisters promised “wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor,” and the work grew. A Home for the Dying opened in 1952, a home for orphans in 1955, and later a village for people with blank 6. By her death there were about 4,000 sisters in over 120 countries.
From Skopje to sainthood
Write what happened in each year.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1910 | Write your answer |
| 1929 | Write your answer |
| 1946 | Write your answer |
| 1950 | Write your answer |
| 1979 | Write your answer |
| 1997 | Write your answer |
| 2003 | Write your answer |
| 2016 | Write your answer |
The secret in her letters
The world saw a small woman, only about five feet tall, who met blank 7 and kings and always went back to the poor. When she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, she asked that the money for the award dinner be given to the poor.
After she died, her letters revealed what almost no one knew. For most of her life she did not feel God's blank 8. She felt alone and in the dark. She kept praying and serving anyway, out of love.
She said she was caring for blank 9 “in his distressing disguise.” She saw him in the dying even when she could not feel him in prayer.
Apply it
A friend says, “I don't feel anything when I pray, so I must not have real faith.” Which reply best fits Mother Teresa's life? Circle one.
- A Real faith always comes with a strong sense of God's presence
- B You should stop praying until the feeling comes back to you
- C Faith can be a faithful choice to love, even without feeling
- D Feelings are the best evidence of how holy a person really is
Why is that the right answer?
How the Church named her a saint
Write one detail for each card.
| Card | The detail |
|---|---|
| Servant of God | Write your answer |
| Venerable | Write your answer |
| Blessed | Write your answer |
| Saint | Write your answer |
Apply it
A student shares posts about poverty every day but ignores a lonely classmate at the next desk. What would Mother Teresa's witness most challenge? Circle one.
- A Caring about people who live far away
- B Missing the person right in front of them
- C Using a phone to learn about the world
- D Speaking in public about human suffering
Why is that the right answer?
Virtues Mother Teresa lived
For each virtue, write how the saint lived it and one way you can practice it.
| Virtue | How the saint lived it | How I can practice it |
|---|---|---|
| Charity | Write your answer | Write your answer |
| Faith | Write your answer | Write your answer |
| Poverty of spirit | Write your answer | Write your answer |
Take a side
Is caring for one person at a time an adequate Christian response to poverty, or does love demand changing the systems that keep people poor? Mother Teresa said, “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
My side: ☐ One person at a time is the heart of it ☐ Love must also change systems
- She picked up the dying one by one, and her sisters now work in more than 130 countries.
- A dying person on the street cannot wait for a policy to change.
- If the causes of poverty stay the same, the streets fill again.
- Her Nobel Peace Prize gave her a world stage. What is a platform for?
- Online, is sharing a cause a real act of love, or a substitute for one?
- Must a Christian choose, or do charity and justice need each other?
My strongest reason, with evidence from the slides:
The best argument for the other side, and my response:
Let us pray
“Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.”
Matthew 25:40
Lord Jesus, you come to us in the poor, the sick and the forgotten.
When prayer feels dark, keep us faithful.
Teach us to do small things with great love.
St. Teresa of Calcutta, pray for us.
Amen.
My own prayer or intention:
Well done
Mother Teresa once described herself this way: “By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world.”
One thing I learned today:
One question I still have:
How could the example of St. Teresa of Calcutta shape the way I live, online and offline?
Challenge: This week, do one concrete act of service for one real person and tell no one, online or off. Then notice what it is like to love without an audience.