The Nobel Prizes: I Accept in the Name of the Poor

Until 1946 she was a Roman Catholic teaching nun in India, devout, dynamic, but apparently otherwise unexceptional. Then, on a train ride to Darjeeling, she felt the touch of a divine command. Its message: she must quit her cloistered existence and plunge into Calcutta’s clamorous slums to care for “the poorest of the poor.”

She did just that, leaving the genteel girls’ school where she had been teaching to create a new order among the poor of India’s most desolate city.

The Missionaries of Charity have since grown into a worldwide order numbering more than 1,800 nuns, 250 brothers and thousands of lay “co-workers” who serve the sick, the lonely, the destitute and the dying in 30 countries.

Last week Mother Teresa of Calcutta, 69, was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize for Peace.

Tiny, gray-eyed, her face deeply seamed with the passing years, Mother Teresa received the news with characteristic lack of fuss in the Missionaries of Charity motherhouse in Calcutta. She has won an array of international honors, and though this one carried the biggest stipend so far—$190,000—she took it in stride. “Personally, I am unworthy,” she said in her first response to the award.

“I accept in the name of the poor, because I believe that by giving me the prize they’ve recognized the presence of the poor in the world.” The new Nobel prizewinner will use the money to build more hospices, “especially for the lepers.”

Mother Teresa was born in 1910 to Albanian parents and baptized Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in what is now Skoplje, Yugoslavia. Even at the age of twelve she wanted to “go out and give the love of Christ.” By the time she was 18, Agnes had joined the Irish branch of Loreto nuns who were working in Calcutta, where she soon began teaching geography at St. Mary’s High School.

When the church granted her permission to lay aside her Loreto habit and take up the blue-edged, coarse cotton white sari that became the uniform of the Missionaries of Charity, young women from St. Mary’s soon joined her.

For every kind of tragedy in the overcrowded city, Mother Teresa and her nuns managed to create a measure of consolation. They collected abandoned babies from gutters and garbage heaps and tried to nurse them back to health. They brought in the dying so they might die under care and among friends. Eventually the order built leprosariums, children’s homes, havens for women, the handicapped and the old. The deepest consolation offered, though, was something that went beyond physical care. “For me each one is an individual,” Mother Teresa once explained. “I can give my whole heart to that person for that moment in an exchange of love. It is not social work. We must love each other. It involves emotional involvement, making people feel they are wanted.”

If the peace she tries to bring passes everyday understanding, the universal and uncontroversial appeal of this year’s prizewinner brought almost audible sighs of joy and relief in Oslo, where the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee sits. Peace prizes all too often go to worldly statesmen who arrange temporary accommodations between bellicose neighbors. When U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and North Viet Nam Negotiator Le Due Tho won the Peace Prize in 1973 for their joint work on a Viet Nam peace agreement, the award stirred outrage throughout Norway and beyond. Last year Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Premier Menachem Begin won the prize for their Middle East peace efforts, and though Begin went alone to Oslo, security became such a problem that the award ceremonies were moved from their usual site, at Oslo University, to the Akershus, a high-walled medieval fortress. This year, with President Jimmy Carter a candidate because of his Camp David initiatives, Norwegians had visions of bomb searches, hovering helicopters and machine gun-toting guards. Mother Teresa will not need them.