Mother Teresa of Calcutta to be made saint: Vatican

“The first case of miracle was in Kolkata”, added Sunita Kumar.

It was believed to be the inexplicable healing of a Brazilian man suffering from multiple brain tumours, in 2008.

The Catholic world celebrated an announcement Friday by Pope Francis that Mother Teresa of Calcutta will become a saint.

Mother Teresa is welcomed by aged women lepers on arriving at St. Lazarus Leprosy Village’s church in Shinhung, Korea on January 27, 1985.

After working with the Sisters of Loreto till 1948, she founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1949.

Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985 and, in 1993, she was awarded the Freedom of Dublin.

“We are very happy”.

Nuns from the Missionaries of Charity attend mass to commemorate the 105th birthday of Mother Teresa in Kolkata.

She was born in 1910 in Albania and baptized Gonxha Agnes, the Vatican said. She was born in what is now the the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, to ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, and she lived most of her life in India, where she died and was buried. The surgery did not take place and a day later the man was declared to be symptom-free.

In 2002, the Vatican officially recognised a miracle Mother Teresa 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.

At the time of Mother Teresa’s death in 1997, her Missionaries of Charity had almost 4,000 nuns and ran roughly 600 orphanages, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and clinics around the world. Only five years later, Pope John Paul II approved her beatification, which required one miracle attributed to her.

It is not clear if the ceremony will take place in Rome or if the pope will travel to India to preside.

“We have now received an official confirmation from Vatican that the Mother would be given sainthood”.

The column in Avvenire by Stefania Falasca said the pontiff’s action came three days after a Vatican panel of cardinals and bishops affirmed the judgment of medical experts and theologians who concluded that there was no medical explanation for the apparent cure.

The archbishop will celebrate a Mass of thanksgiving on Friday evening at the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta. “She’s now a full saint in the church, and I hope, still my friend”.

The Mother Teresa International Film Festival (MTIFF) which commemorates special occasions associated with the Nobel laureate will in 2016 present the best and biggest repertoire of films and documentaries made on her to mark the canonisation.