Mother Teresa as a Role Model

Mother Teresa as a Role Model

09/10/2011

The person I see as an excellent role model and exceptional leader is, as we know her today, Mother Teresa. She was born as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on August 26th, 1910 in Uskup; which is now known as Skopie, in the Ottoman Empire; which is now known as the Republic of Macedonia. (Ref. #3) She felt her calling from God at a young age and made the decision to dedicate her life to fulfilling that calling by doing an outstanding amount of charity work and helping poverty stricken people. I see Mother Teresa as a role model because she has a tremendous amount of faith, she is a very courageous and determined woman, she gave up all of the things that we consider “important” in modern day society in order to fulfill her goals, and she was always a very caring and kind to everybody that she came into contact with.

By the age of 12, Agnes had felt a strong calling from God to be a missionary and spread His word and show people the extents on His love and what it can do. At the age of 18, she left home to become a Roman Catholic nun and joined the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland. After a few months of training with the sisters, she was sent to their division in India. On May 24th of 1931, Agnes took her initial vows as a nun and was from then on known as Mother Teresa. She went on to teach at St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta from 1931-1948, where she eventually became principal. She got permission from the Vatican in 1948 to leave the school and devote herself to working with some of the poorest, suffering people in the slums of Calcutta. She went into this with no money, completely relying on her faith and Devine Providence. On October 7th, 1950 she received permission from the Holy See to start her own order called “The Missionaries of Charity”. Their primary ideals were “to love and care for those persons nobody was prepared to look after”. (Ref. #3) In 1965, the Society was recognized as an International Religious Family by a...