Pope Announces Mother Theresa To Be A Saint

Roman Catholic nun Mother Teresa will be declared a saint on September 4, Pope Francis has confirmed.

17:04 16 March 2016

Mother Teresa, the Roman Catholic nun who worked with the poor in India and won a Nobel Peace Prize is to be declared a saint on September 4, Pope Francis has announced.

 

The nun, who founded a sisterhood that runs 19 homes, died in 1997 and was beatified in 2003, the first step to sainthood.

 

Mother Teresa, whose real name was Agnese Gonxha Bojaxhiu, was born in 1910 to Albanian parents and grew up in the Macedonian capital, Skopje. She joined the Irish order of Loreto when she was 19 years old and was sent to India in 1929 where she taught at a school in Darjeeling using the name Therese. She moved to Kolkata in 1946 and set up a hospice and home for abandoned children. She also founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950, which now has 4,500 nuns worldwide.

 

Five years after her death, Pope John Paul II accepted the first miracle attributed to Mother Teresa as authentic, clearing the way for her beatification in 2003. He considered the curing of Bengali tribal woman from abdominal tumour as her supernatural intervention.