Mother Teresa to be declared saint next year

“Today (Friday) we received an official confirmation from the Vatican about the second miracle being recognised by the Pope … and Mother will be accorded sainthood in 2016”, said Sunita Kumar, spokesperson of Missionaries of Charity which was founded by Mother Teresa.

The second miracle – mandatory for her canonisation – related to the curing of a Brazilian man with a brain illness.

Her Missionaries of Charity helped the poor on the streets of the city, now known as Kolkata.

Mother Teresa was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu of Albanian parents in Macedonia in 1910 in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire.

MICHEL SCOTTO/AFP/Getty Images Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II pictured together in February 1986.

Her missionary order in Kolkata – formerly known as Calcutta – said it was “thrilled” and grateful to the pope.

Pope John Paul II waved the requirement of waiting five years after a person’s death to pursue the path to sainthood and opened Mother Teresa’s Cause of Canonization less than two years after her death.

In 2002, the Vatican officially recognised a miracle she was said to have carried out after her death, namely the 1998 healing of a Bengali tribal woman, Monika Besra, who was suffering from an abdominal tumour.

“She dedicated all her life working for the poor, particularly in Kolkata”.

“The poor give us much more than we give them”, Mother Teresa said in 1977. Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

But for all the reverence with which her name and memory are treated, Mother Teresa was not without her critics. “Everyone was accepted and there was no obstruction in her work”, she told Reuters.

The pontiff met the late nun in Rome in 1994 when he was a bishop, and joked a year ago that while he admired her strength, he “would have been scared if she had been my mother superior”.

Mother Teresa, who died in 1997 at the age of 87, become an global icon of charity in the 20th century but has also been criticized for trying to convert people to Christianity.

Albania, which still claims her remains, named the airport, a square and a hospital in the capital Tirana after her, has made October 19, the day she was beatified, a national public holiday.

During the beatification process, the Vatican called on Hitchens to play the ancient role of “devil’s advocate” and present arguments against her being blessed.