Reuters Fact Check team say the claim is baseless. Mother Teresa was not Anthony Fauci's mother. Records show that Fauci was born to Stephen and Eugenia Abys Fauci.

A detailed family history featuring photographs, draft cards, and immigration documents for the Fauci family can be found compiled by genealogist Bradley Greenland, visible here

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Dr Gëzim Alpion, who is based in the Department of Social Policy, Sociology and Criminology, writes how Mother Teresa's inability to come to terms with her father's poisoning by Slavic nationalists when she was nine in 1919, her brother's association with Benito Mussolini's Fascist army, and her concern about the safety of her mother and sister in communist Albania post 1945 explain why she never spoke about her private life and family.

Alpion suggests Mother Teresa's ‘dark night of the soul' determined all her decisions, including entering the religious life, choosing India as her destination, leaving the Loreto order, setting up her Missionaries of Charity congregation, and expanding her work outside of India from 1967 onwards.

To illustrate the last point, Alpion claims that her projects in Australia in 1969 began as another desperate attempt to get rid of her spiritual desolation at a time when she was realising that this was an incurable condition.

Dr Gëzim Alpion says: "Mother Teresa entered the religious life and chose India as her destination not simply or primarily to serve the poor but in the hope that, through them, she would discover the elusive God as well as to get rid of her dark night of the soul.

Her devotion to the poor was unwavering and genuine to the end.

The poor, the members of her religious congregation, and her volunteers, however, were ‘tools' that she employed to cleanse her own ‘dark night of the soul'."

"Contrary to the claims made by her hagiographers, Mother Teresa's spiritual aridity did not begin in the wake of the foundation of her congregation in 1950 but during 1919 to 1922 by which time she lost her father and eight close relatives.

The ever presence of death in her early years had a lifelong traumatic impact on her spirituality and relationship with family members, her nation and especially vulnerable people. Mother Teresa was never cured of her doubts about God; nonetheless, she always held sacred the dignity of every human being."

Some of these findings are included in Alpion's latest study titled ‘Why are modern celebrity icons absent in celebrity studies?', which has just been published in Celebrity Studies Journal (Routledge). Alpion finds the sidelining of spiritual personalities in celebrity studies a bizarre situation given that the proliferation and ubiquity of celebrity culture have led some scholars to approach this modern phenomenon as a form of religion as well as because, like everything else, religion has been affected by celebrity culture.

In this study Alpion announces for the first time the existence of a hitherto unknown member of Mother Teresa's family in Australia, a first cousin who was adopted by the nun's mother as an orphan at the age of six, something he initially discovered during a visit to Melbourne in 2011.

Since then Alpion has been using the information from this and other new sources to write the study, provisionally titled Rooting Mother Teresa: The Saint and Her Nation, a monograph which will be published by the end of 2019. Next year, Alpion will complete a book about Mother Teresa's forgotten sister in Australia.

In his acclaimed 2007 monograph Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity? Alpion argued for the first time that her spirituality and ministry should be explored in the context of the lifelong impact of her ethnic and familial background, a theme that is central to his aforementioned work in progress.

Mother Teresa, also known in the Roman Catholic Church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, was the Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun and missionary, born in Skopje (now the capital of Macedonia) in 1910, then part of the Kosovo Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. After living in Macedonia for eighteen years she moved to Ireland and then to India, where she lived for most of her life until she died in 1997.

Sources

• First published in Matters India
• Republished with permission.
• Image: Franciscian Media

Nearly 30 years ago, I worked at Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington's emergency food warehouse. Missionaries of Charity sisters caring for HIV/AIDS patients at their Gift of Peace House in Washington, D.C. used to regularly stop by for food assistance.

Since I helped with food distribution, I got to know the sisters. One day while picking up food, one of the sisters said to me, "Mother is coming." I said, "Do you mean Mother Teresa?" She said, "Yes." I excitedly replied, "May I come?" And she said, "yes."

A few days later, standing in front of the Gift of Peace House with about 20 other guests, I saw Mother Teresa get out of a car and walk towards the house. Immediately the sisters affectionately ran to greet her.

Then, as we stood in a circle, Mother Teresa began to walk to each guest silently placing a Miraculous Medal of the Blessed Mother in each of our hands.

I remember she seemed to keep her head humbly bowed as she approached each of us. But when she reached me, I said to her "Namaste" - which is the normal greeting in Hindi.

Lifting up her head, and looking at me somewhat surprised, she greeted me back saying "Namaste."

Then I said to her in Hindi, "Kaise hain?" Inquiring, how are you? And she replied, "Theek" which means OK.

Having exhausted my Hindi vocabulary, my brief encounter with Mother Teresa of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) had ended. But the personal experience of conversing with a living saint continues to spiritually enrich my life to this day.

In a few days, on Sept 4, Pope Francis will canonize Mother Teresa - officially designating her as one of the saints of the Catholic Church.

Imperfect like all of us, yet holier than the vast majority of us, Mother Teresa truly exemplified what it means to pick up one's cross and follow Jesus.

And what a heavy cross she carried. Leaving the comfort of her convent, she ventured out into the slums of Calcutta with practically nothing, to care for the poorest of the poor - the unloved, the starving, the homeless, the stigmatized victims of leprosy, the abandoned and forgotten, the dying and the unborn.

In her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize lecture, Mother Teresa said "I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing … if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you kill me - there is nothing between."

She went on to speak about a man she and her sisters picked up from the gutter. With worms eating away at him, they brought him back to their home and cared for him. He said, "I have lived like an animal in the street, but I am going to die like an angel, loved and cared for."

There is an excellent new DVD titled "The Letters: The Untold Story of Mother Teresa" (see: http://bit.ly/2bv2mpM). This movie will inspire you and me to step out of our comfort zones for the sake of those who suffer, and for the health of our own souls.

Consider the power of this reflection from St. Mother Teresa: "I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us and we change things."

• Tony Magliano is an internationally syndicated social justice and peace columnist. He is available to speak at diocesan or parish gatherings about Catholic social teaching. His keynote address, "Advancing the Kingdom of God in the 21st Century," has been well received by diocesan and parish gatherings from Santa Clara, Calif. to Baltimore, Md. Tony can be reached at tmag@zoominternet.net.