Mother Teresa, the founder of the Missionaries of Charity, will be canonized as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church next year, the Vatican announced on Friday. While a date of her canonization has not yet been announced, many are speculating that it will be sometime in September. The ninth anniversary of her death will be September 5, 2016.
Mother Teresa was beatified, the step below sainthood, on October 19, 2003, by Pope St. John Paul II. The Vatican had to confirm an additional miracle before granting sainthood, and did so on Thursday.
The pontiff marked his 79th birthday on Thursday by approving a decree that the nun had performed a second miracle 11 years after her death, the Vatican confirmed in a statement.
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The miracle needed for her canonization involved the curing of a man in Santos, Brazil, with a serious viral brain infection, according to Father Brian Kolodiejchiuk, a Missionaries of Charity Father who worked closely with Mother Teresa for 20 years and spearheaded the cause of her sainthood.
"The patient's wife continuously sought the intercession of the Blessed Mother Teresa for her husband," he said in a statement explaining the event.
The unidentified man was in a coma and about to undergo an emergency operation when a neurosurgeon "returned to the operating room and found the patient inexplicably awake and without pain," the statement said.
The patient made an immediate and full recovery. Despite tests showing that prolonged drug treatment had made him sterile, he went on to have two children, Kolodiejchiuk said.
Mother Teresa, née Anjezë Bojaxhiu, was born in what is now Macedonia and is of Albanian descent. She is expected to be honored in Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, and India.