HUMBLE FROM THE START; CALL TO SERVE CAME LONG BEFORE THE WEST'S ACCLAIM.

Byline: Joseph A. Gambardello Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Something happened on Sept. 10, 1946, on the railroad to Darjeeling that would propel a 36-year-old sister of the Irish order of Loreto into a spotlight that would make her the most famous nun of the century.

As the woman the world came to know as Mother Teresa recounted later, she received ``the call within the call,'' a summons from God that would lead her to work and live with the poorest of the poor and to establish her own religious order.

Clearly fame was not in the spiritual equation, but it found her, for good works of her sort are hard to hide.

It started in the back streets of Calcutta, where the downtrodden were astonished to find a European woman in a cheap white and blue sari who spoke Bengali and wanted to help them.

Her name and deeds spread by word of mouth, and the poor sought her out. In 1949, a young Bengali woman - a former student from Sister Teresa's teaching days in the Loreto order - came and asked to join. The woman took the name Agnes, which was Sister Teresa's baptismal name, and became the first to follow.

In 1950, with a dozen sisters now working with her, Sister Teresa petitioned the Vatican for recognition of a new order. On Oct. 7, the Feast of the Holy Rosary, it was granted. Sister Teresa became Mother Teresa of the Missionaries of Charity.

In the years that followed, the order's work spread beyond India to other impoverished countries. But her fame remained limited to the Third World, where her constituency was to be found, and in religious circles, where her work was admired for its Christlike embracing of the poor.

It was the time of the Cold War, and the attention of the West was elsewhere.

In 1964, Pope Paul VI signaled that here was a woman of spiritual substance when he gave her the white limousine he used during his trip to India for her to use in her work. She auctioned it off.

Still, her name did not spread far. In a short profile of her on becoming the first recipient of the John XXIII Award in 1970, the New York Times said Mother Teresa was ``little known in the Western world.''

Malcolm Muggeridge would change that. Muggeridge was a British journalist and critic who had been a socialist and converted to Catholicism.

After hearing stories of the diminutive nun who braved pestilence and death in the name of Christ, he went to India in 1969 and produced a documentary about her work. Two years later, he featured her in a book called ``Something Beautiful for God: Mother Teresa of Calcutta.''

The title came from an expression she often used: ``Now let us do something beautiful for God.''

The documentary and book introduced her to the West, where the media reign, and recognition quickly followed in the form of profiles and prizes.

There was a Kennedy International Prize in 1971; the Nehru Award for international understanding in 1972; the first Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, set up by John Templeton because the Nobels did not recognize religion, in 1973; and the Albert Schweitzer International Prize in 1975.

She was first nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1973, and on Oct. 17, 1979, she won it. Her fame was sealed, and ever after she had the secular title Nobel Peace Prize winner appended to her religious title of mother.

She had become a truly international figure, and it led her to meet with despots and democratic leaders to further her work. She attended the international women's conferences in Nairobi (1985) and Beijing (1995), bringing her unhesitatingly anti-abortion message to settings where most participants staunchly supported abortion rights.

Fame is not without cost, usually exacted in the currency of criticism.

There were those in the church who faulted Mother Teresa for not using her influence to strengthen the position and role of women in the church, although she herself never indicated she felt such changes were needed. In and out of the church, she was taken to task for not addressing the institutional causes of poverty, even though she never saw her mission beyond helping one person at a time.

Why, many wondered, did she not speak out for birth control, which could help reduce the numbers of the downtrodden? But she never revealed herself to be anything but a true daughter of the church.

Some even accused her of giving poor medical care to her charges, of allowing despots and criminals to burnish their images and of hoarding money donated to her.

``I don't have time to worry about all these issues,'' she once said. ``There are too many things to do in my everyday work.''

In the end, there are few who can argue that Mother Teresa used her fame for herself. She saw it, instead, as a tool to provide comfort for the least of her brethren.

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Photo

Photo: Pope John Paul II welcomes Mother Teresa inside the ``popemobile'' during a 1986 visit to Calcutta.

Associated Press