Mother Teresa, whom Pope Francis will canonize as a saint on Sunday, is known around the world as an icon of charity, having spent half a century caring for the “poorest of the poor” in India.
She is less well-known as the astute builder of a hugely successful religious order whose strong corporate culture would be the envy of many global firms.
Mother Teresa’s clear vision, personal charisma and sheer force of will—all inseparable from her deep religious commitment—allowed her to succeed where many charitable organizations, both religious and secular, have failed.
Two days before the canonization ceremony, which is expected to draw far more than the 100,000 who have received official tickets, devotees were already gathering in Rome to pay tribute to the late missionary at a series of prayer services and concerts.
Starting the Missionaries of Charity with only 12 followers in 1950, the diminutive nun built a global network whose members today number more than 5,600, running hospices, homeless shelters and homes for the mentally ill and many other services in 139 countries, making it one of the largest women’s religious orders in the Catholic Church. By the 1990s, more than one million volunteers had worked for the Missionaries.
Mother Teresa created “this world-wide missionary order from nothing,” said Jim Towey,a former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives who was her lawyer for the last 12 years of her life. “State governments and not-for-profits have labored in vain trying to address these problems that Mother was able to confront on a bare-bones budget.”
One important source of Mother Teresa’s success was that the practices of the new order served both spiritual and practical purposes at once, said the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk,head of the Missionaries’ small priests’ branch and the official advocate for her canonization.
For instance, the austerity of members’ lives—all their possessions must fit into a small box and visits to relatives are limited to one every 10 years—guards against attachment to earthly goods and relationships, he said. But that also makes it easier to move personnel when needed.
A member must always be ready to “pick up your stuff, put it in your box and off you go,” Fr. Kolodiejchuk said.
The strict uniformity of the nuns’ lives around the globe, with practically identical daily schedules and English as a common language, helps establish a strong, common identity among women who come from a vast range of ethnic backgrounds and social classes, said Mr. Towey, who now serves as president of Ave Maria University in Florida.
At the same time, Mother Teresa encouraged flexibility by periodically reassigning nuns to different beds and rearranging the functions of rooms within a convent. That adaptability enabled members to switch more easily from one activity, such as working with children, to another, such as serving homeless men, Father Kolodiejchuk said.
He also credited the highly centralized organization and regional divisions she had established for the practically “seamless” transition after her death. Her successors—there have been two since then—have all been elected in a vote by members, as in many religious orders.
“Her organizational chart was as simple as her order. It was very easy for the sisters to grasp what the lines of authority were,” Mr. Towey said.
Although they must go through a nine-year trial period before becoming permanent members of the order, the nuns rarely receive specialized professional training, instead learning local languages and other skills on the fly.
“ Coca-Cola pays millions and millions of dollars to figure out how to operate in all the countries of the world and yet Mother invested nothing,” Mr. Towey said.
Mother Teresa shunned fundraising campaigns and financial endowments, a practice her successors have maintained, and mostly relied on individual donations.
“One reason people I think want to give to the Missionaries of Charity is because they know that it’s really being used for the purpose for which it’s given, to the poorest of the poor, and that it’s not spent on luxuries for us,” Father Kolodiejchuk said.
Yet Mother Teresa was unabashed about “begging,” as she described it, said Fr. Kolodiejchuk.
In Kolkata, she made connections with the local Marwari community, Hindu traders and money lenders who make up a disproportionate share of the city’s wealthiest families, said Sunita Kumar, a spokeswoman for the Missionaries of Charity there.
Father Kolodiejchuk said he didn’t know the order’s annual budget, and a sister at the Missionaries of Charity’s Mother House in Kolkata said that it wasn’t the order’s policy to disclose that information.
John Klink, a former official of Catholic Relief Services, the agency of the U.S. Catholic bishops dedicated to overseas emergency and development aid, recalled that Mother Teresa asked him to throw a last-minute reception at his apartment in Yemen so she could press U.S. diplomats for powdered milk for residents at a local home for lepers.
“Mother was very astute politically,” Mr. Towey said. “She had an uncanny understanding of how the world worked. She didn’t read newspapers but she understood power.”
Negotiating with Fidel Castro about sending her nuns to serve in Cuba, she was unfazed by the Communist leader’s claim that his country had no poor people, Mr. Towey recalled. So she changed tack and said she would take care of the elderly instead.
Mother Teresa also had a knack for internal church politics. Relations between autonomous religious orders and the Catholic hierarchy are often tense, but Mother Teresa was assiduous in reaching out to local bishops wherever her missionaries operated, according to Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore.
That harmony paid off: The Archdiocese of Washington once displaced the local headquarters of Catholic Charities to grant her order the use of a diocese-owned building.
Mother Teresa wasn’t shy about using her colossal celebrity to her advantage, directly calling world leaders such as President Ronald Reagan to ask for what she needed. Mr. Towey said President Reagan left instructions that he would meet or speak with her whenever she requested it.
“She knew she was Mother Teresa,” said Father Kolodiejchuk. “She was simple and innocent in a pure way but she wasn’t naive.”
By: Francis X. Rocca (The Wall Street Journal).
Contributing: Daniel Stacey (Kolkata).
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