Sister Nirmala Joshi, Successor to Mother Teresa, Dies at 81
|
Version 0 of 1. Sister Nirmala Joshi, who succeeded Mother Teresa as head of the Roman Catholic order Missionaries of Charity, died Tuesday in Kolkata, India, where the organization is based. She was 81. Her health had been declining, the order said, but it did not specify the cause of death. In its obituary, the Vatican newspaper, l’Osservatore Romano, said she had been elected superior of the order even though she had an incurable form of malaria that gave her constant fevers. Sister Nirmala was selected to lead the charity six months before the death of Mother Teresa, its founder, in 1997. Mother Teresa received the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize for her charity work. “I never try to fill her shoes,” Sister Nirmala said in an interview in 1998. “I have to wear my own small shoes. I don’t have to be Mother Teresa, just Sister Nirmala, and being Sister Nirmala isn’t so difficult. If I had to be Mother Teresa, I would have collapsed.” Sister Nirmala joined the order in 1958 after converting to Catholicism. She helped open the order’s first home outside India, in Venezuela, and helped open and run a house in the South Bronx for contemplative nuns who tended to the spiritual rather than the material needs of the poor. She stepped down as the order’s leader in 2009. Indian politicians praised her work for the poor in Kolkata, in eastern India. “Sister Nirmala’s life was devoted to service, caring for the poor and underprivileged,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a statement. |