`Greatest evil is the lack of love and charity'

Mother Teresa of Calcutta is to retire as head of the order she founded, the Missionaries of Charity. We look back at her life and work for the marginalised worldwide.
MOTHER Teresa, foundress of the Missionaries of Charity and winner of the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, has been widely acclaimed as a living saint.
The tiny, wizened nun in her familiar white and blue sari has travelled the world to deliver a single message: that love and caring are the most important things in the world.
The Vatican announced on April 11 that Pope John Paul II had accepted Mother Teresa's resignation as head of the Missionaries of Charity because of her health. Last December, doctors in India implanted a pacemaker in the nun after she had suffered months of heart trouble.
The order's general chapter will meet on September 8 to select a new leader.
"The biggest disease today," Mother Teresa once said, "is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for and deserted by everybody. The greatest evil is the lack of love and charity, the terrible indifference towards one's neighbour who lives at the roadside, assaulted by exploitation, corruption, poverty and disease."
A favourite motto she has lived and preached has been, "do small things with great a love".
But the "small things" she has done so captivated the world that she has been showered with honorary degrees and other awards, almost universally praised by the media and sought out by popes, presidents, philanthropists and other figures of wealth and influence.
Despite calls on her time from all over the globe to found new convents, speak at international gatherings or receive some new honour for her work, she always returned to India to be with those she loved most — the lonely, abandoned, homeless, disease-ravaged, dying, "poorest of the poor" in Calcutta's streets.
During a month long tour of the United States in 1982, she was asked at a press conference about the popular conviction that she was already a saint.
"Please, let me die first," she answered.
When Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, on December 10, 1979, she accepted it "in the name of the hungry, of the naked, of the homeless, of the blind, of the lepers, of all those who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society." In her acceptance speech, she condemned abortion as the greatest destroyer of man in the world. "To me, the nations who have legalised abortion are the poorest nations," she said. "They are afraid of the unborn child, and the child must die."
Sometimes criticised for not using her considerable influence to attack systemic evils such as the arms race or organised exploitation and injustice, she responded that that was not her mission, but one that belonged to others, especially to the Catholic laity. "Once you get
involved in politics, you stop being all things to all men," she said in an interview in 1982. "We must encourage the lay people to stand for justice, for truth" in the political arena.
Often when criticised about her approach to social issues, Mother Teresa told of a man who suggested she could do more for the world by teaching people how to fish rather than by giving them fish. "The people I serve are helpless," she said she told him. "They cannot stand. They cannot hold the rod. I will give them the food and then send them to you, so you can teach them how to fish."
In recent years, she began work with acquired immune deficiency syndrome sufferers. She opened shelters in New York and Washington for people with AIDS.
She founded houses in Cuba and the Soviet Union countries at the time not generally open to foreign church workers.
Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta in 1950. The order has about 1,900 sisters working in more than 400 houses in 92 countries. In 1963 Mother Teresa co-founded the Missionary Brothers of Charity with an Australian, Fr Andrew Travers-Ball, who left the Jesuits to join in her work.
In 1969, in response to growing interest of lay-persons who wanted to be associated with her work, an informally structured, ecumenical International Association of CoWorkers of Mother Teresa was formed with the approval of Pope Paul VI. The several hundred thousand co-workers pay no dues and do not engage in fund raising, but support the Missionaries of Charity by their work in prayer and sacrifice and by their service to the poor.
Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu to Albanian parents in Skopje in what is now Yugoslavia on August 27, 1910. She had a sister, Aga, and a brother, Lazar. Her father was a grocer, but the family's background was more peasant than merchant. Lazar said their mother's example was a determining factor in Agnes' vocation. "Already when she was a little child she used to assist the poor by taking food to them every day like our mother," he said.
When Agnes was nine, he said, "she was plump, round, tidy, sensible and a little too serious for her age. Of the three of us, she alone did not steal the jam."
As a student at a public school in Skopje, she was a member of a Catholic sodality with a special interest in foreign missions.
"At the age of 12, I first knew I had a vocation to help the poor," she once said. "I wanted to be a missionary."
At 15 Agnes was inspired to work in India by reports sent home by Yugoslavian Jesuit missionaries in Bengal. At 18 she left home to join the Irish branch of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, known as the Loreto Sisters. After training at their institutions in Dublin and in Darjeeling, India, she made her first vows as a nun in 1928 and Far final vows nine years later.
While teaching and serving as a principal at Loreto House, a fashionable girls' college in Calcutta, she was depressed by the destitute and dying on the city's streets, the homeless street urchins, the ostracised sick people lying prey to rats and other vermin in streets and alleys.
In 1946, she received a "call within a call", as she described it.
"The message was clear. I was to leave the convent and help the poor, while living among them," she said.
Two years later, the Vatican gave her permission to leave the Loreto Sisters and follow her new calling under the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Calcutta. After three months of medical training under the American Medical Missionary Sisters in Patna, India, Mother Teresa went into the Calcutta slums to bring children cut off from education into her first school. Soon volunteers, many of them her former students, came to join her.
In 1950 the Missionaries of Charity became a diocesan religious community, and 15 years later the Vatican recognised it as a pontifical congregation, directly under Vatican jurisdiction.
In 1952, Mother Teresa opened the Nirmal Hriday (Pure Heart) Home for Dying Destitutes in a dormitory formerly a hostel attached to a Hindu temple dedicated to the god Kali — donated by the city of Calcutta. Although some of those taken in survive, the primary function of the home is, as one Missionary of Charity explained, to be "a shelter where the dying poor may die in dignity." Tens of thousands of people have been cared for in the home since it opened.
The Missionaries of Charity began caring for leprosy patients in 1957. When Pope Paul VI visited Bombay, India, in 1964, he gave Mother Teresa a white ceremonial Lincoln Continental given to him by people in the United States. She raffled off the car and raised enough money to finance a centre for leprosy victims in west Bengal.
Twenty-one years later, when President Ronald Reagan presented her with the presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House, he called her a "heroine of our times" and noted that the plaque honouring her described her as the "saint of the gutters". He also joked that Mother Teresa might be the first award recipient to take the plaque and melt it down to get money for the poor.
Mother Teresa's attitude toward money was that "God will provide." "Money — I never think of it," she once said. "It always comes. The Lord sends it. We do his work; heprovides the means. If he does not give us the means, that shows he does not want the work. So why worry?"
Once the chairman of a large industrial company offered Mother Teresa a property that became her home for the dying destitute in Bombay. He asked her how her work was financed, and she asked him what made him come to her with his offer.
"I felt an urge inside me," he answered. "Well", she said, "other people like you come to see me, and they say the same. That is my budget."
In 1982, when Israeli troops were holding Beirut, Lebanon, under siege in an effort to root out the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Mother Teresa visited a community of her nuns at Spring School, a home for the aged in east Beirut. It was her first visit in a war zone.
Meeting with Red Cross officials about relief needs, she asked what their most serious
problem was. They took her to a nearby mental hospital that had just been bombed, requiring immediate evacuation of 37 mentally and physically handicapped children. "I'll take them," she said.
"What stunned everyone was her energy and efficiency," a Red Cross official involved in the evacuation said afterward. "She saw the problem, fell to her knees and prayed for a few seconds, and then she was rattling off a list of supplies she needed — nappies, plastic pants, chamber pots. We didn't expect a saint to be so efficient."
In recent years, Mother Teresa often appeared high on lists of the world's most admired women. But she and her work were not widely known until 1968, when Malcolm Muggeridge produced the television documentary on her, "Something Beautiful for God." His documentary and 1971 book by the same title were the first major popular work on Mother Teresa,
When Muggeridge and his wife Kitty, became Catholics in November 1982, he attributed his conversion largely to Mother Teresa. "Words cannot convey how beholden I am to her," he wrote in The Times. "She has given me a whole new vision of what being a Christian means: of the amazing power of love, and how in one dedicated soul, it can burgeon to cover the whole world."
Popes, rarely known to praise still-living individuals for sanctity, have not hesitated to hold Mother Teresa up as a symbol of what it means to be a Christian.
Awarding her the first Pope John XXIII Peace Prize in 1971, Pope Paul VI proclaimed her "an example and symbol of the discovery of the secret of peace . that man is our brother."-'
"We hold up to the admiration of all this intrepid messenger of the love of Christ," Pope Paul said when he announced that she would be the first recipient of the award.