Mother Teresa was born in 1910 in today’s North Macedonia and joined an Irish convent at 18. After being sent to India, she taught in Calcutta and witnessed sick and orphaned people abandoned on the streets. In 1948 she resolved to “serve the poorest of the poor” and opened a simple shelter where those dying on the pavement could be cared for with dignity. The Missionaries of Charity, founded in 1950, soon expanded worldwide and now offers free food, shelter, and medical care in more than 100 countries. Although her motivation was rooted in Catholic teaching, she placed human dignity above religious or national boundaries. She was praised for treating malnourished people and patients with leprosy or AIDS—conditions often burdened by prejudice—with equal compassion. When she received the Nobel Prize, she asked to cancel the banquet and donate its cost to the poor. Her stance became a model of “peace through direct action,” strongly influencing the growth of volunteerism and NGOs.

In Catholic tradition charity (caritas) is a core virtue, yet Mother Teresa’s systematic application of it to the urban extreme poor was unprecedented. She focused on Calcutta’s lowest strata, including Dalits and pavement dwellers, people effectively excluded from public health and welfare systems. The Missionaries of Charity combined two hours of daily prayer with five hours of direct service, operating on minimal budgets and local sourcing, a model of sustainable grassroots action. Although financially dependent on global donations, the order cultivated trust through a concept of reciprocity: donors give material aid while the sisters offer “spiritual riches” through prayer. Her work is regarded as an early example of palliative and hospice care in resource-limited settings, highlighting the feasibility of compassionate end-of-life support without advanced technology. Nevertheless, critics pointed to hygiene shortcomings and the limited use of analgesics, sparking debates about ethics and quality control in nonprofit medical care. The “compassionate gaze” she personified is cited in studies of soft power and peacebuilding within international relations. Scholars have examined how individual acts of care can ripple outward to reduce social conflict, using her influence as a case study. In her Nobel lecture she stated that a heart without love is more frightening than nuclear weapons, thus extending the Nobel Committee’s focus on arms reduction to an ethical dimension. Mother Teresa’s legacy continues to provide cross-disciplinary research topics in public health, religious studies, development studies, and international politics.

Mother Teresa’s work is analyzed as a field-oriented welfare model within modern Catholic religious orders. The Missionaries of Charity operated a high-coverage strategy that traded risk management for immediate impact, prioritizing rapid service over replicability. Her “spirituality of care” resonates with Fueguer’s spirituality of accompaniment and John Paul II’s encyclical “Sollicitudo Rei Socialis,” and is re-interpreted in practical theology. Development-studies literature cites it as a pre-MDG example of non-state service delivery, providing empirical evidence for complementary governance in low-capacity state environments. From a medical-anthropological perspective, it is discussed as a prototype of “ritualized dying” that merges Calcutta’s indigenous views of death with hospice rites, explored via ethnography. Yet her advocacy of the “virtue of poverty” is criticized in post-colonial theory as a “politics of salvation,” inviting polysemic interpretations. Recent quantitative studies comparing infant mortality trends in slum areas covered by the Missionaries of Charity versus controls report statistically significant improvement, though sustainability remains questioned. Considering the late-Cold-War context of rising humanitarian discourse, the Nobel Committee’s selection indicates a shift from arms reduction toward “ethical peacebuilding.” Her public image is a media-constructed “narrative of sanctity”; framing-theory analyses show Western journalism’s tendency to exoticize poverty. Overall, the Mother Teresa case serves as a keystone for interdisciplinary research intersecting religion, welfare, and international politics.