The Vatican said Pope Francis approved a decree attributing a miracle to Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s intercession during an audience on Thursday, which was his 79th birthday.
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The miracle that the Vatican took note of before deciding to award sainthood to Mother Teresa involved the curing of a serious brain infection in a Brazilian man, said Father Brain Kolodiejchiuk, a Missionaries of Charity Father who worked very closely with the nun for 20 years.
Mother Teresa who dedicated all her life for the service of the poor and sick, would be conferred sainthood next year, the Vatican announced.
Pope Francis opened the door for sainthood when he officially recognized a second miracle the church believed to have come from her intercession with God.
The miracle needed for her canonisation concerned 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, according to a report in Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference.
Of Albanian background, she was born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu at Skopje, Macedonia, in 1910.
Sunita Kumar, another spokesperson of the organisation, who had a long association with Mother Teresa, said it was a great moment for MC and Kolkata. Damian said members of his parish always knew in their hearts that Mother Teresa was a saint. The family said they prayed to Blessed Teresa and, when the man was taken in for an operation, the surgeon found him in the operating room, awake and alert.
She founded the Missionaries of Charity order of nuns there.
Mother Teresa is in the spotlight today after Pope Francis gave his approval to make her a saint. That date celebrates the Jubilee of workers and volunteers of mercy and comes the day before the 19th anniversary of her death, September 5, 1997.
The canonization of a saint is a solemn act by which the Pope, the supreme authority in the Catholic Church, declares that a person practiced heroic virtue and lived in fidelity to God’s grace is with God in heaven and is to be venerated throughout the whole Church.
The canonization process started in 1999, when Pope John Paul II made a decision to waive the five-year cooling-off period usually required after a would-be saint’s death.
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Other prelates expressed hope that through this development, Filipinos will find inspiration in the life of the would-be saint, particularly her love for the poor.
