Second miracle by the Mother recognized by the Pope, who may visit India.
By Dileep Thekkethil
Mother Teresa, who dedicated her life for helping the poor and the deprived in India, will be declared a saint by Pope Francis, the Roman Catholic Church in the Vatican has announced.
The Albanian-origin Mother Teresa, who founded the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic religious congregation, worked among the poor and dying of India and became the first non-Indian to be awarded the Padma Shri in 1962.
According to an Italian Catholic newspaper, Pope Francis will announce Mother Teresa’s sainthood in September 2016, which coincides with her 19th death anniversary.
The Pope, on the eve of his 79th birthday on Thursday, approved the decree that the Catholic nun had performed a miracle 11 years after her death, confirmed a statement from Vatican.
Earlier, in 2003, Mother Teresa was beatified as Blessed Teresa of Calcutta for healing the tumor of an Indian woman through her divine intervention.
Sister Ita of the Missionaries of Charity was quoted by NBC News, “We are all absolutely delighted about the news. We are very happy to hear about the canonization and we look forward to hearing more details in due course.”
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.
“The patient’s wife continuously sought the intercession of the Blessed Mother Teresa for her husband,” he said in a statement explaining the event.
He also added that “The unidentified man was in a coma and about to undergo an emergency operation when a neurosurgeon “returned to the operating room and found the patient inexplicably awake and without pain.”
The father went on the testify that the patient was not only relieved of the life threatening disease but also went on to have two children after that when the whole of medical science said he had lost his sterility due to the high dose of medicine administered.
Mother Teresa who died on Sept. 5, 1997, aged 87 had also faced criticism for the methods adopted in providing health care and also for her rejection of contraception and medicine.
Francis had announced six new saints in 2014 — two Indians and four Italians, acknowledging their “creative” commitment to helping the poor and downtrodden. One exception to Mother Teresa’s sainthood compared to other is that her rise to sainthood will be celebrated in more than four countries as she was born in Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, to ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, and she lived most of her life in India.