Sister Mary Prema Pierick, M.C., is the current (2012) Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity of Calcutta, India, the religious institute founded by the Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta (Kolkata).
She was born Mechthild Pierick on 13 May 1953, in a farming community in Reken, Germany. In 1980, after reading the biography of the foundress, Something Beautiful for God by Malcolm Muggeridge, she went to meet Mother Teresa in Berlin. She felt called to join her work and moved to India to join the Missionaries.
Pierick eventually became the Regional Superior of the institute for the Sisters in Europe. She returned to India to supervise the tertianship program of the institute, the last stage of training before final religious profession. She succeeded Sister Nirmala Joshi as Superior General on 24 March 2009, heading an institute which had over 5,000 members worldwide at that time.
Famous quotes containing the words sister and/or mary:
“Before any woman is a wife, a sister or a mother she is a human being. We ask nothing as women but everything as human beings.”
—Ida C. Hultin, U.S. minister and suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 17, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Flower picking.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 2710, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)