25th Anniversary of the Death of Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa holding a child in her arms and looking upon it with a mother's gaze — an image meant to embody the love, dedication, and devotion with which she alleviated the suffering of the poorest of the poor. The designer's abbreviation 'O. ROSSI' appears at the lower left. Along the upper edge, the commemorative inscription 'MADRE TERESA DI CALCUTTA'; along the lower edge, the issuing state 'CITTA' DEL VATICANO'; to the left, the years '1997' and '2022' and the Rome Mint mark 'R'.

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, born in 1910 in Üsküb, in present-day North Macedonia, joined the Sisters of Loreto at the age of 18 and came to India in 1929. For twenty years she taught at a school in Calcutta before leaving the order in 1948, with explicit papal permission, to work alone among the city's poorest. In the slums of Calcutta, she founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950, which by the time of her death had grown to more than 4,000 sisters in over 100 countries. Her work focused on the dying, the homeless, orphans and those suffering from leprosy — people no longer reached by any other institutional structure.

Mother Teresa became internationally known through the Nobel Peace Prize, which she accepted in 1979, viewing it not as a personal honour but as recognition of the dignity of the poor. The revelation of what are now called her "dark nights" — decades of spiritual dryness, known only posthumously through her letters — has considerably nuanced the theological reception of her life. She died on 5 September 1997 in Calcutta; John Paul II beatified her as early as 2003, and Francis canonised her in 2016. In 2022, the Vatican marked the 25th anniversary of the nun's death with a 2-euro commemorative coin; she is still regarded today as one of the defining examples of charitable work in the 20th century.