St. Teresa of Calcutta

An Albanian from Skopje who taught for twenty years with the Loreto Sisters in Calcutta before, in 1946, hearing Christ's “I thirst” as a call to serve the poorest of the poor. She took Indian citizenship and the white sari, opened a home for the dying in 1952, and founded the Missionaries of Charity, who keep a daily hour of adoration and serve Christ “in the distressing disguise of the poor.” She used the Nobel lecture to call abortion the greatest destroyer of peace, taught natural family planning, campaigned against divorce in Ireland, and wrote to Presidents Bush and Saddam Hussein in 1991 begging them not to go to war; her letters, published after her death, show she lived nearly fifty years without felt consolation.

Why he matters: The best-known Catholic of the late twentieth century, she made the works of mercy visible to the whole world and held them together with an uncompromising defence of the unborn.