SEEKER OF SOULS

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Two years later, after her adopted homeland won independence, Teresa received permission from Rome to strike out on her own. Attracting a dozen disciples, she started what she called her "little society." The nuns crept along the harsh streets of Calcutta in search of mankind's most miserable; the sisters had to beg for their own support, even their daily meals. "There were times during the first three or four months," says Teresa's biographer, Navin Chawla, "when she'd be humiliated, and tears would be streaming down her cheeks. [She] told herself, 'I'll teach myself to beg, no matter how much abuse and humiliation I have to endure.'"

She soon asked the Vatican if she and her followers could take a vow supplementary to those of poverty, chastity and obedience: "to devote themselves out of abnegation to the care of the poor and needy who, crushed by want and destitution, live in conditions unworthy of human dignity." It took Rome two years to say yes, and in 1950 the Vatican formally established the Missionaries of Charity, commanding members of the order "unremittingly" to seek out the poor, abandoned, sick, infirm and dying. Teresa warned that it was work few persons could endure; each volunteer was told that only a "burning fire" would succeed. With the establishment of the order, Sister Teresa became Mother Teresa, leading a ministry to the destitute, doomed and dying. The order's guiding theme was her own: "Let every action of mine be something beautiful for God."

One of the Missionaries' first projects, in 1952, was to turn a former hostel beside a Hindu temple into a place where the poor of Calcutta, who often died alone in the streets, could spend their last hours in comfort and cleanliness. As a Catholic mission, the sisters faced alienation and neighborhood hostility. The temple priests even asked city authorities to relocate the newly named Nirmal Hriday, or Home for the Dying, hospice. But then one of the Hindu priests was found with advanced stages of tuberculosis after he had been denied a bed in a city hospital, reserved for those who could be cured. And so this representative of the enemies of the Catholic order ended up in a corner of the Nirmal Hriday, tended by Mother Teresa herself. When the priest died, she delivered his body to the temple for Hindu rites. News of this charity filtered out into the city, and Calcutta started its long love affair with the humble sisters.

Muggeridge brought that saintliness to the world's attention in a 1969 BBC documentary. In it, he even claimed to have witnessed a miracle: footage from an area of the Home for the Dying that was deemed too dark to register on celluloid turned out on processed film to be bathed in a "particularly soft light" that Muggeridge likened to love, "luminous, like the halos artists have seen and made visible round the heads of saints." While the episode was celebrated worldwide, cameraman Ken Macmillan had a down-to-earth explanation: he had used a brand-new kind of film from Kodak that was particularly sensitive. Nonetheless, visitors to the hospice noticed a beatific glow that surrounded the sisters ministering to the dying.