The term “modern day saint” is hard to get away with. It’s been overused and exaggerated to the point of everyday household ubiquity. Did someone pay for your meal?
Oh, they’re a saint, must be. Did someone hold the door open for you? What a saint! But sainthood is still taken seriously, and its titles are difficult to disperse because of the connotation.
In life or after their death, a Saint is someone recognized as a person of incredible value and importance to the Christian community worldwide. One of those faithful modern Saints was Mother Teresa.
Mother Teresa is the name everyone associates with the goodness of Catholocism through her charity work and is the very image of what a nun is supposed to be. But was she?
We tend to get swept up in the positives of public figures, so it becomes easy to get distracted from the real negatives they create by way of living.
Being a saint means that she was considered a perfect Christian, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she was ideal. Beneath every perfect person at their job is the imperfect human their contemporaries forget about.
10 /10 Young Mother
Teresa was a name she took on much later in life as her “Christian” name. Her birth name was Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu. She was born in what is now known as the capital of North Macedonia to a Kosovar Albanian family.
They were deeply religious, had her baptized, and ever since she was a young girl, she dreamed of being a missionary to foreign lands, which is what she eventually became.
9 /10 Shall Not Covet
One of the first things she did when she was officially commemorated was by taking her religious vows at the age of 27, choosing a new name for herself, by naming herself after a saint of old or after a religious figure from the Bible would cement her place with her faith and her fellow missionaries.
However, the name she wanted, Therese de Lisieux’s name, was already taken by another nun at her mission in India. So she went with the Spanish Teresa to get around it, proving that she had an evil way to her.