Vatican set to canonise Mother Teresa

Pope Francis recognized a miracle attributed to Mother Teresa of Calcutta, making it the second she has made 11 years after her death. Her canonisation in Rome is expected to again draw large crowds for what will likely be one of the highlights of the special Jubilee year.

Catholic nuns from the order of the Missionaries of Charity gather under a picture of Mother Teresa during the tenth anniversary of her death in Kolkata, India, in this September 5, 2007.

Sand artist Sudarsan Pattnaik creates a sand sculpture of Mother Teresa at Rourkela Steel City in Sundargarh district on Friday.

“Now, there is a case in Brazil where a man has been healed miraculously as a result of her earlier prayers”, said Sunita Kumar, Missionaries of Charity spokesperson. By Dec. 9, 2008, he was in a coma and dying, suffering from an accumulation of fluid around the brain.

He asked the doctor: “What I am doing here?”

On 10 September this year, the medical commission voted unanimously that his cure was inexplicable in the light of current medical knowledge.

Mother Teresa, who died in 1997, was born in August 1910 to Albanian parents in what is now Skopje in Macedonia. Months later, she left for India, landing in the city then known as Calcutta in January 1929, where she taught at St. Mary’s School for girls. The organisation has more than 4500 religious sisters in 500 institutions operating in some 100 countries.

The festival will feature some iconic cinema based on Mother Teresa such as “Something Beautiful for God”, the 1969 BBC documentary said to be the first film on her work, “Mother Teresa and Her World” (1979), the second film on her by Japanese filmmaker Shigeki Chiba as well as “Mother Teresa” Aby Asisters Ann and Jeanette Petrie, said Lucas.

She also helped rescue children trapped on the frontlines during the Siege of Beirut, as well as working with the hungry in Ethiopia, Chernobyl radiation victims and natural disaster victims in Armenia.

Mother Teresa had formerly been beatified – a term that describes the Church’s acknowledgement of a man’s entry into paradise as well as step one in the canonization procedure – in 2003 by Pope John Paul II for performing one miracle: the healing of an Indian girl’s tumour through divine intervention.