Mother Teresa is to be elevated to sainthood in September, Pope Francis announced this morning.
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September 4 is the eve of Teresa’s feast day, marking the anniversary of her death, on September 5, 1997, at the age of 87.
Pope Francis issued the decree setting the date of the late missionary’s canonization at a morning meeting with cardinals in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.
The Albanian nun and missionary was by far the most high-profile of the five candidates for sainthood considered by the Vatican panel on Tuesday.
The pope had cleared the…
Mother Teresa will be officially named a saint on September 4, 2016. She was awarded the Nobel prize for peace in 1979 for her charitable works.
She is revered by many Catholics but has also been attacked as a “religious imperialist” who attempted to foist her beliefs on an impoverished community in which they had no indigenous roots. She has been credited in the church with two miracles, both involving the healing of sick people.
Mother Teresa was beatified, or recognized as entering heaven, in 2003 by Pope John Paul II.
She was originally an Albanian but lived in India for most of her life.
Francis, who regards Teresa as the incarnation of the kind of Church he wants to lead, met the by-then internationally famous nun three years before her death, when he was still a bishop in Argentina.
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In her Nobel acceptance speech she described terminations of pregnancies as “direct murder by the mother herself”.
