Mother Teresa’s personal ‘credo’ found in letter on antiques show
A PERSONAL “credo” crafted by Mother Teresa, which was previously unknown, has been discovered by an expert on Antiques Roadshow and valued at 25 times more than her previous letters.
The handwritten statement, which was titled “Our Plan and Scope”, was found in a cache of letters taken to the BBC show.
It includes a call by Mother Teresa for nuns to “devote themselves heart and soul and exclusively to the destitute”. The document has been valued at £5,000.
The letters and statement were written by Mother Teresa from 1949 to 1957 to Jenny Christiansen, a member of the Women’s Voluntary Service who was living in Calcutta at the time, and describe how the Albanian nun began her work in the slums.
On last night’s edition of Antiques Roadshow, manuscripts expert Clive Farahar told Mrs Christiansen’s granddaughter, who brought in the letters, that the “credo” was so important that it would be worth 25 times as much as a Mother Teresa signature would usually fetch at auction.
The detail in the other letters, he said, would make them worth £1,000.
Given that Mother Teresa was canonised by Pope Francis in 2016, the “credo” and the letters in her own hand would now be recognised by the Catholic Church as relics.
The Christiansen family’s collection, shown on the programme, also includes photographs of the two women together. Jenny Christiansen’s granddaughter explained to The Daily Telegraph: “Several of them relate to ongoing charity work by the Bengal Presidency Council of Women of which my grandmother was appointed their health convener to deal directly with Mother Teresa and her work in the bustees [Calcutta slums], the largest of which was Motijhil.”
In her “credo”, the then Sister Teresa writes of the order of nuns she founded in 1949: “The aim of the Missionary Sisters of Charity is to devote themselves heart and soul and exclusively to the material and spiritual welfare of all destitute people – the helpless, poor, neglected, the sick and lepers.”
Mother Teresa, who was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu into a Kosovar Albanian family in Skopje, had first arrived in India in 1929 working as a teacher and headmistress.