The Turning: The Sisters Who Left · iHeartPodcasts and Rococo Punch

S1: Ep 3 - Mother

May 25, 2021·42 min·3 clips

While projecting complete serenity in public, Mother Teresa privately wrote that she felt no faith, no love, and no sense of God's presence for nearly 50 years.

Before Calcutta, there was grief. The excerpt takes Mother Teresa back to a Catholic childhood shaped by her father's death and by losses that seem to have tightened the family's religious life. She would not speak publicly about that childhood, which leaves a strange quiet around it. What does come through is a young person who later said a religious call reached her when she was 12 years old. Her certainty lands plainly. She tells Malcolm Muggeridge that she never doubted the decision, calling it the will of God and the source of her peace. At 18, she left for religious life. She joined the Loretto sisters, a Roman Catholic order in Ireland known especially for its schools. Her name changed too. Anya's became Sister Mary Teresa, choosing Teresa after Saint Therese, remembered here for small acts of kindness. Then the story moves to Calcutta. The narration places her arrival in a city under British rule, with colonial exploitation on one side and unusual global connections on the other. Shantanu Chakrabarty widens the scene. He describes a busy city where people arrived from many places, where Buddhist revivalism was active, and where film studios gathered. The order put her in school work. With the Loretto sisters, she taught girls and later became headmistress, holding authority before her better-known public life began. In 1937, another title came. After her final vows, Loretto custom made her Mother Teresa, no longer simply Sister Teresa. Then came September 1946. At 36, she was on a train, and the excerpt leaves her just before the moment that would redirect everything after it.

As heard by us

A careful origin story that follows Mother Teresa from loss to calling.

S1: Ep 3 follows Mother Teresa from family loss and religious calling into the life that made her famous. The episode works best when it lets the chronology do the heavy lifting: childhood grief, a teenage call, Calcutta under British rule, then the train ride where the voice…

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Why you'd press play

You want the moment Mother Teresa's life shifts from biography to calling.

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