A Prize for Mother Teresa

On his trip to India in 1964, Pope Paul VI gave her his white Lincoln Continental, which she raffled off to help the poor. In 1968. Paul called her from India to found a home for the poor, staffed mostly by Indian nuns, in Rome itself. Last week the Pontiff named Albanian-born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu --Mother Teresa of the Missionaries of Charity--the first winner of the $25,000 John XXIII Peace Prize.

Like other gifts to Mother Teresa, the money will go quickly to benefit the "poorest of the poor," to whom she has devoted her life. After two decades as a teaching nun in India, she received permission in 1948 to leave her order and work among Calcutta's impoverished masses. She set up outdoor schools and a dispensary and soon had a band of dedicated followers, who were officially recognized by the Vatican in 1950 as a new religious community. In 1952, the Missionaries of Charity --dressed in simple white, blue-bordered saris--won permission from Calcutta's authorities to set up a home for the dying destitute in a pilgrim hostel at the gate of a temple of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction.

Today the order numbers more than 600 nuns, most of them Indians. They operate 26 centers for the poor in Calcutta alone, 70 more in other cities in India, and homes in Ceylon, Tanzania, Jordan, Venezuela, Great Britain and Australia--as well as the one in Rome. As for Mother Teresa herself, who at 60 is back in India and is an Indian citizen, she still spends much of her time working the orders regular 16-hour day among the dying at the gate of the temple of Kali.

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