Pope approves miracle for Mother Teresa's canonization

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Pope Francis has signed off on the miracle needed to make Mother Teresa a saint, giving the nun who cared for the poorest of the poor one of the Catholic Church's highest honors just two decades after her death.

The Vatican said Friday that Francis approved a decree attributing a miracle to Mother Teresa's intercession during an audience with the head of the Vatican's saint-making office on Thursday, his 79th birthday.

No date was set for the canonization, but Italian media have speculated that the ceremony will take place in the first week of September — to coincide with the anniversary of her death, and during Francis' Holy Year of Mercy.

"This is fantastic news. We are very happy," said Sunita Kumar, a spokeswoman for the Missionaries of Charity in the eastern city of Kolkata (earlier called Calcutta), where Mother Teresa lived and worked.

Mother Teresa, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, died on Sept. 5, 1997, aged 87. At the time, her Missionaries of Charity order had nearly 4,000 nuns and ran roughly 600 orphanages, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and clinics around the world.

Francis, whose papacy has been dedicated to ministering to the poor just as Mother Teresa did, is a known fan. During his September 2014 visit to Albania, Francis confided to his interpreter that he was not only impressed by her fortitude, but in some ways feared it.

Francis recounted that he had met Mother Teresa, an ethnic Albanian, when they attended a 1994 bishop synod at the Vatican together. At the time, he was Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

"Bergoglio had Mother Teresa behind him, nearby, and he heard her intervene often with great strength, without letting herself in any way be intimidated by this assembly of bishops," the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, later recounted. "And from that he developed a great esteem for her, as a strong woman, a woman able to give courageous testimony."

But Bergoglio, who has long shown admiration for the women who raised him and taught him, added: "I would have been afraid to have had her as my superior, since she was so tough."

Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on Aug. 26, 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia.

She joined the Loreto order of nuns in 1928 and in 1946, while traveling by train from Calcutta to Darjeeling, was inspired to found the Missionaries of Charity order.

The order was established four years later and has since opened more than 130 houses worldwide to provide comfort and care for the needy, sick and "poorest of the poor."

Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her work with Calcutta's destitute and ill — work which continued even after she herself took sick.

"The poor give us much more than we give them," Mother Teresa said in 1977. "They're such strong people, living day to day with no food. And they never curse, never complain."

St. John Paul II, one of Mother Teresa's greatest champions, waived the normal five-year waiting period for her beatification process to begin and launched it a year after she died, convinced of her saintliness and apparently intent on at least beatifying her in his lifetime.

He bestowed that honor on her in 2003 in a Vatican ceremony.

The miracle needed for her canonization concerns the inexplicable cure in 2008 of a man in Brazil with multiple brain abscesses who, within a day of being in a coma, was cured, according to a report in Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops' conference. The Vatican ascertained that his wife's prayers for Mother Teresa's intercession were responsible, the report said.

Archbishop of Kolkata Thomas D'Souza said the news of the Vatican's decision was "the best Christmas gift one can get."

"We are grateful to God and we are extremely happy," he said.

While Mother Teresa is known and beloved by many around the world, she was not beloved by all. She was criticized for taking donations from Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and disgraced American financier Charles Keating. Detractors opposed her stance against birth-control use in Calcutta's slums, which was nevertheless in keeping with church teaching opposing artificial birth control.

I hope it blows up in its face and causes more of its members to leave the fold.

Peace

I personally am a great admirer of Mother Theresa and if the pope canonizes her I will be very happy.

The release levels three types of accusations against mother Teresa and her supporters (quotes are direct, and I don’t mind extensive excerpting since it’s a press release):

1. The woman was in love with suffering and simply didn’t take care of her charges, many of whom fruitlessly sought medical care.

“At the time of her death, Mother Teresa had opened 517 missions welcoming the poor and sick in more than 100 countries. The missions have been described as “homes for the dying” by doctors visiting several of these establishments in Calcutta. Two-thirds of the people coming to these missions hoped to a find a doctor to treat them, while the other third lay dying without receiving appropriate care. The doctors observed a significant lack of hygiene, even unfit conditions, as well as a shortage of actual care, inadequate food, and no painkillers. The problem is not a lack of money—the Foundation created by Mother Teresa has raised hundreds of millions of dollars—but rather a particular conception of suffering and death: “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering,” was her reply to criticism, cites the journalist Christopher Hitchens. Nevertheless, when Mother Teresa required palliative care, she received it in a modern American hospital.”


2. She was tightfisted about helping others, seequestered money donated for her work, and took money from dictators.

“Mother Teresa was generous with her prayers but rather miserly with her foundation’s millions when it came to humanity’s suffering. During numerous floods in India or following the explosion of a pesticide plant in Bhopal, she offered numerous prayers and medallions of the Virgin Mary but no direct or monetary aid. On the other hand, she had no qualms about accepting the Legion of Honour and a grant from the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. Millions of dollars were transferred to the MCO’s various bank accounts, but most of the accounts were kept secret, Larivée says. ‘Given the parsimonious management of Mother Theresa’s works, one may ask where the millions of dollars for the poorest of the poor have gone?'”


3. She was deliberately promoted by BBC journalist Malcolm Muggeridge (a fellow anti-abortionist), and her beatification was based on phony miracles.

.” . .In 1969, [Muggeridge] made a eulogistic film of the missionary, promoting her by attributing to her the “first photographic miracle,” when it should have been attributed to the new film stock being marketed by Kodak. Afterwards, Mother Teresa travelled throughout the world and received numerous awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance speech, on the subject of Bosnian women who were raped by Serbs and now sought abortion, she said: ‘I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing—direct murder by the mother herself.’

. . . Following her death, the Vatican decided to waive the usual five-year waiting period to open the beatification process. [JAC: As I recall, it took only a year.] The miracle attributed to Mother Theresa was the healing of a woman, Monica Besra, who had been suffering from intense abdominal pain. The woman testified that she was cured after a medallion blessed by Mother Theresa was placed on her abdomen. Her doctors thought otherwise: the ovarian cyst and the tuberculosis from which she suffered were healed by the drugs they had given her. The Vatican, nevertheless, concluded that it was a miracle. Mother Teresa’s popularity was such that she had become untouchable for the population, which had already declared her a saint. “What could be better than beatification followed by canonization of this model to revitalize the Church and inspire the faithful especially at a time when churches are empty and the Roman authority is in decline?” Larivée and his colleagues ask.”

She called in medical help whenever it was available---third world countries just don't have all the doctors, nurses, and hospitals we have. And she worked on a limited budget. Taking money from dictators---to help the poor I would too!

What have you ever done for the poor, Sail Dancer? Why don't you sell your fancy boat and gove the money to the poor?

And by the way, the more members of the Missionaries of Charity there are, the more poor people being served.

"I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people."

Suffering is good for us---if we offer it up to God in reparation for our sins, it cleanses us of them and reduces our Purgatory sentence.

Schools, hospitals, faith, family life, charity, sanctity, purpose in this life, salvation in the next life, these are the fruits of the Catholic Church.

"Oh, Christians are hypocrites because they don't do enough to help the poor," secularists tell us. Then along comes a great saint like Mother Teresa who dedicates her whole life to helping the poor, and secularists call her a b*tch.

She never willed suffering on anyone. She spent her whole life relieving human suffering. She never took a penny for herself. Using donations to build convents so that many more nuns could be put to work helping the poor? What's wrong with that?

You're looking for excuses to keep from believing in Christ, Sail Dancer.

Theresa led a life glorifying suffering of the dying in filth and squalor. She collected money from criminals and denied care to those she was pretending to care for. She told the dying their suffered gloried Jesus. The church might as well canonize Adolf Hitler and the rest of the Nazis too while they're at it.

You are a very dangerous individual...yes, for mankind.

Of course she spent money to house her sisters. Where were they supposed to live?

So a Missionary of Charity sister from Yonkers or Pittsburg or London or Barcelona is supposed to commute from those cities to Bombay and Calcutta every day, do some good work for 8 hours, and then fly back home? And do it all again the next day?

Give it a rest.

She was running a cult of suffering.

She would take dying people off the street plop them on the floor, give the almost next to no treatment nothing for pain and watch them die.

But when she needed medical attention she was flown to the best hospitals in the world.

All the Missionaries of Charity did/do was/is to prop up the suffering and give them no medical attention? I think somebody doesn't have their facts straight.

All the Missionaries of Charity did/do was/is to prop up the suffering and give them no medical attention? I think somebody doesn't have their facts straight.