Mother Teresa To Be Canonized After Pope’s Approval
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Just two decades after her death, Pope Francis has signed off on the miracle needed to make Mother Teresa a saint, giving the nun who cared for the poorest of the poor one of the Catholic Church’s highest honors. On Friday the Vatican said that Francis approved a decree attributing a miracle to Mother Teresa’s intercession during an audience with the head of the Vatican’s saint-making office on Thursday, his 79th birthday.
As of right now, no date was set for the canonization. However Italian media have speculated that the ceremony will take place in the first week of September, to coincide with the anniversary of her death, and during Francis’ Holy Year of Mercy.
Mother Teresa, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, died on Sept. 5, 1997, at age 87. At the time, her Missionaries of Charity order had nearly 4,000 nuns and ran roughly 600 orphanages, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and clinics around the world.
During his September 2014 visit to Albania, Francis recounted that he had met Mother Teresa, an ethnic Albanian, when they attended a 1994 bishop synod at the Vatican together. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, later recounted “Bergoglio had Mother Teresa behind him, nearby, and he heard her intervene often with great strength, without letting herself in any way be intimidated by this assembly of bishops. And from that he developed a great esteem for her, as a strong woman, a woman able to give courageous testimony.”
She joined the Loreto order of nuns in 1928 and in 1946, while traveling by train from Calcutta to Darjeeling, was inspired to found the Missionaries of Charity order. The order was established four years later and has since opened more than 130 houses worldwide to provide comfort and care for the needy, sick and “poorest of the poor.”
Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her work with Calcutta’s destitute and ill work which continued even after she herself took sick. Mother Teresa said in 1977 “The poor give us much more than we give them. They’re such strong people, living day to day with no food. And they never curse, never complain.”
St. John Paul II, one of Mother Teresa’s greatest champions, waived the normal five-year waiting period for her beatification process to begin and launched it a year after she died, convinced of her saintliness and apparently intent on at least beatifying her in his lifetime. He bestowed that honor on her in 2003 in a Vatican ceremony.
According to a report in Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference the miracle needed for her canonization concerns the inexplicable cure in 2008 of a man in Brazil with multiple brain abscesses who, within a day of being in a coma, was cured. The report said the Vatican ascertained that his wife’s prayers for Mother Teresa’s intercession were responsible.
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