Seventy-five years after Mother Teresa launched her full-time service to the poor in a shelter in the distressed Entally neighborhood of Kolkata, the order she founded, the Missionaries of Charity, has announced that it finally secured ownership of the property.
Although the young Mother Teresa arrived in Kolkata as a Sisters of Loreto missionary in 1928, it was twenty years later when she dedicated herself full-time to the service of the poor and abandoned living in slums around the order’s house in Entally, using a building she came to call the “home of the pure heart,” or Nirmal Hriday.
Although her followers in the Missionaries of Charity have cared for the facility ever since, due to issues related to zoning and occupancy they were only able to secure legal ownership of the property recently. The legal tangles were resolved, according to media reports, on the initiative of a local member of India’s parliament.
“It is a beautiful gesture by the state government to facilitate handing over this place to us,” said Mother Teresa’s successor as superior of the Missionaries of Charity, Sister Mary Joseph Michael.