Mother Teresa moves closer to sainthood
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis has signed off on the miracle needed to make Mother Teresa a saint, giving the nun who cared for the poorest of the poor one of the Catholic Church’s highest honors just two decades after her death.
The Vatican said that Francis approved a decree attributing a miracle to Mother Teresa’s intercession. No date was set for the canonization, but Italian media has speculated that the ceremony will take place in the first week of September — to coincide with the anniversary of her death, and during Francis’ Holy Year of Mercy.
“This is fantastic news. We are very happy,” said Sunita Kumar, a spokesman for the Missionaries of Charity in the eastern city of Kolkata (earlier called Calcutta), where Mother Teresa lived and worked.
Mother Teresa died on Sept. 5, 1997, at age 87. At the time, her Missionaries of Charity order had nearly 4,000 nuns and ran roughly 600 orphanages, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and clinics around the world.
Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on Aug. 26, 1910, in Macedonia. She joined the Loreto order of nuns in 1928 and in 1946, while traveling by train from Calcutta to Darjeeling, was inspired to found the Missionaries of Charity order.
The order was established four years later and has since opened more than 130 houses worldwide to provide comfort and care for the needy, sick and “poorest of the poor.”
Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her work with Calcutta’s destitute and ill — work which continued even after she herself took sick.
The miracle needed for her canonization concerns the inexplicable cure in 2008 of a man in Brazil with multiple brain abscesses who, within a day of being in a coma, was cured, according to a report in Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference. The Vatican ascertained that his wife’s prayers for Mother Teresa’s intercession were responsible, the report said.
