Mother Teresa is Headed to Sainthood

Francis, who has made concern for the poor a major plank of his papacy, was keen to make Mother Teresa a saint during the Church’s current Holy Year, or Jubilee, in which Catholics are called on to emphasise the need for mercy and compassion in the world.

It said Friday that Francis approved a decree attributing a miracle to Mother Teresa’s intercession during an audience Thursday, his 79th birthday. The miracle involved the healing of a Brazilian man with multiple brain tumours in 2008.

She died on September 5, 1997, at age 87.

She was beatified – the first step towards sainthood – in 2003 and is expected to be canonised in either Rome or India.

The Macedonian nun won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 after founding the Missionaries of Charity to help the impoverished living on the streets of the Indian city Calcutta.

Kumar, who worked closely with Mother Teresa, said the late nun was an extraordinary woman who believed hard work was the best way to serve God.

Sister Ita of the Missionaries of Charity was quoted by NBC News, “We are all absolutely delighted about the news”.

Almost 20 years later, during a train ride in India, she felt a calling from Jesus to care for the poor, her Vatican biography said.

The date for the canonization ceremony has not been officially stated, but CNS said Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Vatican office that organizes the Holy Year of Mercy events, declared it would be September 4, 2016.

The Vatican later attributed the cure to the fervent prayers to Mother Teresa’s intercession by the man’s wife, who precisely at the time of his scheduled surgery was at her parish church, praying alongside her pastor. She set up her Missionaries of Charity, an order of nuns dedicated to care of the “poorest of the poor”, in Kolkata (Calcutta), in 1950 and made her headquarters in the Indian city for almost half a century.

The order she started-the Missionaries of Charity-continues its outreach to the “poorest of the poor”.

Known as the “saint of the gutters”, the Nobel Laureate was born to Albanian parents in what is now Skopje in Macedonia.

Now, in what is considered her second miracle, Mother Teresa is being credited with the healing of a man in Brazil who was suffering from a brain infection.

“It’s an eerie feeling to know someone that was your friend is now a saint in heaven”, Fr. Joseph Brennan says. According to Besra, the tumor was cured by a locket containing Mother Teresa’s image. Famously, the Catholic known also known for her role in helping to feed the hungry and end poverty, said that abortion “is the greatest threat to peace”.