Mother Teresa to Be Declared Saint on September 4

Mother Teresa is to be declared a saint on September 4, Pope Francis has announced.

The Roman Catholic nun who worked with the poor in the Indian city of Kolkata (Calcutta) founded a sisterhood that runs 19 homes, and won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mother Teresa died in 1997 – aged 87 – and was beatified in 2003, the first step to sainthood.

Pope Francis cleared the way for sainthood last year when he recognized a second miracle attributed to Mother Teresa.

Born in 1910 to Albanian parents, Agnese Gonxha Bojaxhiu grew up in what is now the Macedonian capital, Skopje, but was then part of the Ottoman Empire.

At age of 19, Agnese Gonxha Bojaxhiu joined the Irish order of Loreto and in 1929 was sent to India, where she taught at a school in Darjeeling under the name of Therese.

In 1946, Mother Teresa moved to Kolkata to help the destitute and, after a decade, set up a hospice and a home for abandoned children.

She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950. The sisterhood now has 4,500 nuns worldwide.

Mother Teresa achieved worldwide acclaim for her work in Kolkata’s slums, but her critics accused her of pushing a hard-line Catholicism, mixing with dictators and accepting funds from them for her charity.

Five years after her death, Pope John Paul II accepted a first miracle attributed to Mother Teresa as authentic, clearing the way for her beatification in 2003.

Pope John Paul II judged that the curing of Bengali tribal woman Monica Besra from an abdominal tumor was the result of her supernatural intervention.

A Vatican commission found that her recovery had been a miracle after the Missionaries of Charity said that the woman had been cured by a photo of the nun being placed on her stomach. The finding was criticized as bogus by rationalist groups in Bengal.

In December 2015, Pope Francis recognized a second miracle, which involved the healing of a Brazilian man with several brain tumors in 2008. The man’s identity was not disclosed but the man was said to have been cured unexpectedly after his priest prayed for Mother Teresa’s intervention with God.

It often takes decades for people to reach sainthood after their death, but beatification was rushed through by Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis was known to be keen to complete the process during the Church’s Holy Year of Mercy which runs to November 2016.