MOTHER TERESA SAINTHOOD

           Mother Teresa declared a saint by the POPE at VATICAN ceremony

Pope Francis has declared MOTHER TERESA a saint as part of his Holy Year of Mercy.

BORN

Mother Teresa born in 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia, Mother Teresa taught in India for 17 years before she experienced her 1946 "call within a call" to devote herself to caring for the sick and poor. Her order established a hospice; centers for the blind, aged, and disabled; and a leper colony. In 1979 she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her humanitarian work. She died in September 1997 and was beatified in October 2003. In December 2015, Pope Francis recognized a second miracle attributed to Mother Teresa, clearing the way for her to be canonized as a saint on September 4, 2016. 

     Hundreds of Catholics have been declared saints in recent decades, but few with the acclaim accorded Mother Teresa, set to be canonized by Pope Francis on Sunday, largely in recognition of her service to the poor in India.

      "When I was coming of age, she was the living saint," says the Most Rev. Robert Borren the auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. "If you were saying, 'Who is someone today that would really embody the Christian life?' you would turn to Mother Teresa of Calcutta."

Born Agnes Bojaxhiu to an Albanian family in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, Mother Teresa became world-famous for her devotion to the destitute and dying. The religious congregation she established in 1950, the Missionaries of Charity, now counts more than 4,500 religious sisters around the world. In 1979, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her lifetime of service.

Mother Teresa Declare as Saint POPE

                        Applause erupted in St. Peter's Square even before he finished pronouncing the rite of can nation at the start of the Mass.

                            Hundreds of Missionaries of Charity sisters in their trademark blue-trimmed saris had front-row seats at the Mass, alongside 1,500 homeless people and 13 heads of state, including Queen Sofia of Spain. 

                           

                  Pope Francis' predecessor Pope John Paul II bent Vatican rules to fast-track Mother Teresa to sainthood – a process which usually does not start until five years after the candidate's death –two years after she died in 1997.

                           

                               Since her death, two alleged miracles have been attributed to Mother Teresa, paving the way for her classification as a saint.

In 2002, the Vatican ruled that an Indian woman’s stomach tumor had been miraculously cured after she prayed to Mother Teresa, leading to her beatification – the first stage towards sainthood – in 2003.

                           Pope Francis attributed a second miracle to her after a man with a bacterial infection in his brain purportedly recovered after praying to Mother Teresa.

    

     Mother Teresa is about to become a saint, despite accusations of ‘religious fundamentalism’ and criticisms of the medical care her order gave to the sick.