Pope Francis has recognized a second miracle by Mother Teresa, clearing the path for her sainthood. The Vatican is expected to canonize the popular nun by September next year.
Celebrated for her charity work with the poor people of Kolkata, India, Mother Teresa was expected to be canonized on September 4, 2016, the Catholic newspaper “Avvenire” reported. The beloved nun’s sainthood was imminent after the Vatican recognized that she had cured a Brazilian man suffering from multiple brain tumors in 2008.“I was informed by Rome that Pope Francis has recognized a second miracle to Mother Teresa,” Archbishop of Kolkata Thomas D’Souza told journalists.
The Catholic Church needs to recognize at least two miracles before it can grant sainthood. In 2002, the Vatican officially approved the first miracle Mother Teresa carried out in 1998, one year after her death. The miracle involved the healing of a Bengali woman, Monika Besra, who was suffering from an abdominal tumor. In 2003, Pope John Paul II beatified the nun in a ceremony attended by 300,000 followers.
Mother Teresa knew poverty from childhood on. She was born in 1910 in Albania and baptized Gonxha Agnes, the Vatican said. When she was 8, her father died, leaving the family without a main bread winner. At age 18, sure she wanted to become a missionary, she joined an Irish convent, where she received the name Sister Mary Teresa. Months later, she left for India, landing in Kalkota in January 1929, where she taught at St. Mary’s School for girls. There she took her Final Profession of Vows and became Mother Teresa.
Nearly 20 years later, during a train ride in India, she felt a calling from Jesus to care for the poor, her Vatican biography said. She established Missionaries of Charity to serve the poorest of all. In 1948, she donned her iconic white sari with blue trim for the first time and walked out of her convent to start her life caring for them.
In 1979, she received the Nobel Peace Prize, which drew the attention of the media to the demur nun in blue and white.
By the time of her death, 4,000 Mother Teresa’s Sisters worked under her at 610 foundations in 123 countries. Before she died, Mother Teresa met one last time with Pope John Paul II then returned to Kalkota to spend her final days with people close to her. She died on September 5, 1997 and was given a state funeral by the government of India.
Pope John Paul II waved the requirement of waiting five years after a person’s death to pursue the path to sainthood and opened Mother Teresa’s Cause of Canonization less than two years after her death.
The Left, naturally, despises her and the late British gadfly, Christopher Hitchens, even wrote a book denouncing her as “a religious fundamentalist, a political operative, a primitive sermonizer, and an accomplice of worldly secular powers. Her mission has always been of this kind. The irony is that she has never been able to induce anybody to believe her. It is past time that she was duly honored and taken at her word.”
I wonder who’s laughing now.
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