Mother Teresa to be made saint on September 4

Mother Teresa, the nun who dedicated her life to helping the poor of Calcutta (now Kolkata), will be made a saint of the Roman Catholic Church at a ceremony on September 4.

Pope Francis on Tuesday made the announcement at a meeting of Cardinals to give final approval to several sainthood causes.

The announcement was expected after the Pope, in December, approved a second miracle attributed to Mother Teresa’s intercession the final hurdle to make her a saint. The actual date falls on the eve of the 19th anniversary of her death.

Mother Teresa died in 1997. She was beatified in 2003 by the Late Pope John Paul after a miracle of curing a woman of tumor in her stomach was approved by the Vatican.

According to reports, the second miracle attributed to the intercession of Mother Teresa, which was required for her canonisation relates to healing of a man suffering from brain disease.

Mother Teresa was born of Albanian parents in Macedonia in 1910 and came to India in 1929. She set up Missionaries of Charity in 1950 and dedicated her entire life to the service of the poor, destitute and ailing living in the slums and streets of Kolkata.

Mother Teresa was awarded with the Nobel Prize in 1979. (With inputs from Shiv Sahay Singh)

Mother Teresa to be made a saint in September

Mother Teresa will be made a saint on 4 September, Pope Francis has announced at a meeting of cardinals to give the final approval to several sainthood causes.

He had cleared the way in December for sainthood for the Nobel peace laureate, who died in 1997 aged 87.

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.

What is unclear is whether the pope will bow to appeals from the Catholic church in India and travel to Calcutta for the ceremony or, as Vatican sources say is more likely, preside over one in Rome.

More than 300,000 pilgrims went to Rome in 2003 for Teresa’s beatification – the first step towards sainthood.

Known across the world, Teresa was awarded the Nobel for her work with the poor, sick, old and lonely in the slums of Calcutta, one of India’s biggest cities, now known as Kolkata.

She is revered by many Catholics, but her canonisation is not without controversy. Mother Teresa’s work has been questioned for decades by notable critics, who have alleged that the missionary misused funds intended for charity, and that she was a Catholic fundamentalist more concerned with evangelism than with helping the poor access adequate medical treatment.

The negative assessment was underscored by researchers at the University of Montreal and the University of Ottawa, who concluded in a 2013 report that the nun did not deserve the saintly reputation she had acquired over her lifetime due to her “rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception and divorce”.

The researchers found that the vast majority of patients who had come to visit Mother Teresa’s missions for the dying had hoped to find doctors to treat them, but instead found unhygienic conditions, a shortage of care, inadequate food and no painkillers.