KOLKATA, India — They are known the world over because of the witness of their foundress — and easily spotted, due to their white cotton saree with blue stripes. 

The “Saint of the Gutters” who was honored with more than 700 awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, and canonized in 2016 founded the Missionaries of Charity (MC) congregation 75 years ago on Oct. 7. 

Upon reaching this milestone, the congregation’s superior says the sisters live in the presence of St. Teresa.  

“Yes, Mother is very much with us. … The sisters have her blessings. Her touch is upon us,” Sister Mary Joseph, who was chosen as the third superior general in 2022, told the Register in an interview at the motherhouse in Kolkata of Sept. 5, the feast day of Mother Teresa.  

Looking ahead to the 75th anniversary on the feast of Our Lady of Rosary, Sister Joseph reflected: “I miss the Mother very much because I was with Mother in my young life. Mother instructed [me]. It was a beautiful experience.”  

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, who came to be known as Mother Teresa, was born the third child of Nikola and Dranafile Bojaxhiu in Skopje, the capital of present-day North Macedonia, on Aug. 26, 1910. 

At the age of 18, she joined the Loreto congregation in Ireland, desiring to be a missionary in India. Her vocational dream was born after hearing about the work of Jesuit missionaries through her parish’s Marian sodality. Her journey is chronicled in the book Servant of Love: Mother Teresa and Her Missionaries of Charity, by her spiritual director of many years, Jesuit Father Edward le Joly. 

Sister Teresa reached Kolkata as a Loreto postulant in 1929 and moved to Darjeeling, where she made her profession of vows in 1931. After teaching at St. Mary’s Loreto school for 17 years, she gave up the habit of the Loreto congregation in August 1948 for a new mission: The Vatican permitted her to work outside the convent, acting on her request to pursue her “call within a call” — prompted by a vision during a train journey in 1946. 

With a heart intent upon serving the poor, Sister Teresa concluded medical training at Holy Family Hospital at Patna. When she returned, she opened a dispensary and a makeshift school for the Motijhil slum; lessons were held under a tree using the ground as the blackboard.  

In early 1949, Sister Teresa moved to modest accommodations, and some former students from the Loreto school joined her as Sisters Agnes, Gertrude, Dorothy and Clare. 

A spirit of compassion and service was the sisters’ hallmark. 

Although she had started with only a dozen sisters, when the Missionaries of Charity congregation was officially established on Oct. 7, 1950, the numbers had swelled to 28. The new congregation’s sisters, led by their 40-year-old foundress, moved to the present-day motherhouse in Kolkata. 

While the first India-based MC home outside Kolkata was set up in 1959, the first international center was opened in Venezuela in 1965, after the Vatican granted the MCs pontifical status. 

In 1986, Pope John Paul II visited Nirmal Hriday (“Pure Heart”), the home for the dying that Mother Tersa had set up in 1952. Mother’s care for abandoned impoverished souls catapulted her to international acclaim.  

When 87-year-old Mother Teresa died at the motherhouse on Sept. 5, 1997, the Missionaries of Charity congregation had spread far and wide, with 594 homes with 3,914 nuns serving in 126 countries.  

Presently, the congregation has 754 homes in 138 countries, with 5,076 nuns serving the poorest of the poor, according to a statement the congregation shared with the Register on the occasion of the platinum jubilee. 

“Mother has been the force behind our growth,” explained Sister Joseph, though she admitted that the congregation is feeling the pinch of a widespread drain in vocations worldwide.  

From the congregation’s data, the number of novices was 246 in 1975, rose to 319 in 2000, and has declined to 99 in 2025. 

“There is a problem, but we are not affected as much as many other congregations, due to decline in vocations from reducing family size and secularisation etc,” the MC superior general observed. 

As for the Mother’s “unfulfilled dream” of entering China, Sister Joseph said, “We cannot give up our habit” — the condition the Chinese government has set for the MC nuns to enter the Asian country. 

Added Sister Joseph, who is the first Indian MC superior general, “But hundreds of our lay volunteers who have been trained outside China are already carrying on our work in China.”  

Through it all, St. Teresa’s sisters and those who support them are living out her instruction: “This is what our people need. They need your hands to serve them, and they need your heart to love them.”