Mother Teresa of Calcutta to be made Roman Catholic saint: Vatican

Mother Teresa, seen here giving her blessing to a child in 1993, will be made a saint, after Pope Francis issued a decree recognizing a second miracle attributed to her.

Italian media have speculated that Francis will canonize Mother Teresa the first week of September, during his Holy Year of Mercy.

She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and received strong support from Pope John Paul II, who gave her permission to open a soup kitchen inside Vatican City State.

Mother Teresa was beatified – the first step towards sainthood – in 2003.

The miracle involved the healing of a Brazilian man with several brain tumours in 2008, the Vatican said.

She said that a second miracle had been confirmed by the Church adding that such miracles were known to happen even after the death of a saint.

It was not clear if the ceremony would take place in Rome or India.

She was born Anjë zë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu to an ethnic Albanian family in Skopje, in what is today the Republic of Macedonia.

In Calcutta, she founded the Missionaries of Charity to look after the poorest of the poor.

To become a saint in the Catholic Church, a person must have lived a virtuous and holy life, and two miracles need to be attributed to the candidate’s intercession with God.

Members of the Missionaries of Charity, who worked closely with Mother Teresa, expressed their joy at the announcement, saying the nun was an extraordinary woman who believed hard work was the best way to serve God.

“We are all absolutely delighted about the news”, Sister Ita of the Missionaries of Charity told NBC News from its headquarters in the center of the city.

For all the reverence with which her name and memory are treated, Mother Teresa was not without her critics. In that case, the Vatican said an Indian woman’s prayers to the nun rid her of an incurable tumor.

In relation to the report on the website, a Vatican spokesman had said he had no information about the report.

“I admired her strength, the decisiveness of her interventions”, the pope is reported to have recalled.

One of her most vocal detractors was the British-born author Christopher Hitchens.

Kosovo, meanwhile, named the main street in its capital Pristina in her honor.