“By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus.”
This angle is almost always forgotten, as Gonxhe Bojaxhiu left her home in Skopje (which is today the capital of the Republic of North Macedonia) when she was 18. Today, she’s completely identified with India.
She never imagined that people would regard her as the greatest Albanian since medieval warlord and patriot Skanderbeg (1405–1468). In fact, Alpion discovered that she swore to her mother when she left that “I will never speak in Albanian until we meet again.”
Bojaxhui kept that promise, within the bounds of civility. She never did see her mother again. She had a cousin and adopted sister, Filomena, whom she loved dearly, who migrated to Australia. She visited her in 1969 and insisted on speaking English, even though Filomena had never mastered the language. Even during eight trips to Albania late into her life, she spoke in English.
Alpion unraveled this mystery by reviewing the ceaseless pain of Albanian history and digging into the saint’s background on both sides of her family.
Albanians can’t reminisce about a glorious past as a powerful empire, as other small European countries can –the Bulgarians, the Armenians, the Greeks, or the Lithuanians. Periodic invasions and persecutions by Serbs and Turks have sent waves of Albanian migrants fleeing both east and west. In Syria, there are—or used to be, before the chaos of its barbarous civil war—small communities of ethnic Albanians known as the Arnaut. In Italy, there are enough small villages of Albanian speakers to justify two Byzantine-rite, Albanian-speaking Catholic bishops.
People with Albanian backgrounds have played significant roles in history. Apart from Skanderbeg and Kemal Ataturk, Alpion has made a case for the Corsican adventurer Napoleon Bonaparte. And there have been four Popes from Albania or with Albanian backgrounds, most recently the 18th-century pontiff Clement XI (who was born as Giovanni Francesco Albani).
In recent centuries, Albanian speakers have been crushed between the Orthodox Serbs and Greeks and the Muslim Turks, which accounts for the fact that only about 10 percent of Albanians in Albania and Kosovo currently identify as Roman Catholics. The Serbs wanted the Albanians to become Orthodox and the Turks wanted them to become Muslim. Unfortunately, for centuries the Vatican, which is just across the Adriatic Sea, wasn’t prepared to defend Albanian Catholics, according to Alpion. It had bigger fish to fry—a charm offensive with the Serbs.
Ethnic cleansing and massacres continued into the 20th century. As late as the 1950s, the governments of Yugoslavia and Turkey made a pact that would have allowed the expatriation of 1 million Albanians to Turkey. In the end, about 100,000 were expelled. It was “state-endorsed human trafficking of the population of ... entire regions of an ancient, homogenous nation,” Alpion said.
What does this grim background have to do with Mother Teresa?
Alpion has dug deep into her family history and discovered that it’s blood-stained and nationalistic. He’s the first to publish the sketchy details.
“Land of Albania! ... thou rugged nurse of savage men!” sang the 19th-century English poet Lord Byron. He wasn’t wrong. Bojaxhui’s maternal great-grandfather, Pjeter Bardhi, was murdered in a blood feud. His son, Bojaxhui’s grandfather Ndue, avenged him and was murdered in his turn. Ndue’s son Gjon, Bojoxhui’s uncle, was another victim of the blood feud.
And then there was the ardent nationalism of Bojaxhui’s businessman father, Nikolle. He worked to promote education in Albanian and lobbied to keep Albanian schools from closing under Serb pressure. He even managed to secure funding for existing schools and for opening new ones. He opposed the creation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which scooped up Albanian territory after World War I.
This probably led to his death. In 1919, his business went bankrupt, and not long after, he was poisoned after a political meeting in Belgrade, Serbia. His final hours were agonizing and traumatized the family, including 9-year-old Bojaxhui.
Alpion believes that even Bojaxhui’s name was a nationalist gesture. In Albanian it means “rosebud” or “little flower.” When she was born in 1910, both Slav nationalists and Ottoman authorities frowned upon the use of the Albanian language. Naming their infant daughter Gonxhe was “a small but significant act of defiance,” according to Alpion. And her baptismal name, Agnes, was ostentatiously Roman Catholic.
This dark background was, as they say—or used to say—“character-forming,” for Bojaxhui. But in the wake of World War I, there was more to come. Her mother’s brother Mark, a prosperous businessman, had four children. First, one of the sons died of the Spanish flu, then the heartbroken father. This flu also took another daughter, her husband, and yet another daughter. Finally, Bojaxhui’s grandmother died. Only Filomena, who came to live with Gonxhe and her mother Roza, survived.
Alpion believes that these childhood experiences prepared Bojaxhui for her vocation in the Missionaries of Charity.
“It was during those turbulent formative years in Skopje that Gonxhe’s lifelong gratitude to Jesus began,“ he wrote. ”This was also the moment when she started thinking that the best way to show her thankfulness was to help people in distress. This was one of the reasons why she chose India as her destination when she learned about its poor from Balkan missionaries who had served there.”
All of this new information suggests that Bojaxhui was well-prepared for what Catholic mystics call “the dark night of the soul,” in which she was shaken by doubts about God’s existence and his loving providence throughout her long years as a nun.
No one ever doubted that Bojaxhiu was a remarkable woman. This scrupulously researched study shows that she was even more remarkable than we thought. As Alpion wrote, “Mother Teresa’s life, ministry and legacy show the need to include ‘women’ in Thomas Carlyle’s contention that ’the history of the world is but the Biography of great men.'”
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