Mother Teresa

Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta is the patroness of charitable workers and of missionaries because her whole life was the service of “the poorest of the poor”: she left her teaching convent at a call within a call to gather the dying off the streets of Calcutta and give them, in their last hours, the tenderness the world had denied them. Those who labor in works of mercy take her as their model and intercessor. She is the patroness above all of the Missionaries of Charity, the order she founded, and is invoked for the dying whom she served and — because her own letters revealed decades of interior darkness in which she still served — for those who suffer spiritual dryness. She was named a patron of World Youth Day for her witness to the young of self-giving love.