Mother Teresa, in Ill Health, Resigns as Head of Order

Mother Teresa, the frail Roman Catholic nun who won a Nobel Peace Prize for her work among the sick and dying, said Wednesday she is stepping down as head of the religious order she founded in 1950.

“I have been leading the Missionaries of Charity for 40 years,” Mother Teresa said with a smile as she bustled about her home and office near the Calcutta slum where she started her work.

But the 79-year-old nun would not comment further on her decision to step down as the order’s superior general.

In Italy, a Vatican spokesman said Pope John Paul II has accepted Mother Teresa’s resignation. Deputy Vatican spokesman Msgr. Piero Pennacchini said Mother Teresa is retiring for health reasons.

She suffered a heart attack and serious infection last September, and surgeons implanted a permanent pacemaker Dec. 1.

Since then, Mother Teresa has been unable to leave Calcutta to visit missions in other parts of the world. She seldom leaves the second floor of her home, which doubles as the order’s headquarters.

Since its founding, the Missionaries of Charity has spread to 87 countries and is staffed by 3,000 nuns.

Asked who would head the organization, Mother Teresa raised her hand toward the heavens.

“We will act the way he leads us,” she said. A superior general will be elected by the order in September, Pennacchini said. The next superior general is likely to come from the order’s council of six nuns.

Sister Agnes Das, 60, a native of Calcutta and Mother Teresa’s first disciple, is next in command. But news reports say Sister Agnes also is in ill health.

On Wednesday, a crowd of well-wishers went to Mother Teresa’s home, carrying flowers and donations of food for the nuns’ charities.

Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her work caring for people much of the world wanted to forget. Lepers, dying cholera victims, abandoned children--all found shelter in her clinics.

Mother Teresa was born Agness Gonxha Bojaxhiu of Albanian parents in what is now Yugoslavia on Aug. 27, 1910. At 18 she decided she wanted to serve in missions in India and trained in Ireland with the Irish Loreto Sisters--which had missions in India--before arriving in Calcutta on Jan. 6, 1929.

She served as a teaching sister until 1946, when she received permission to start her charity work among the destitute and dying in the slums of Calcutta, the squalid metropolis on India’s eastern coast.