Mother Teresa's Message after Her Canonization to Become Better Known

• 03.16.2016, 21:52
•  No-politics

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Pope Francis approved sainthood for Mother Teresa, a Roman Catholic nun known as the "saint of the gutters" who founded a religious order dedicated to assisting the poorest of the poor.

She will be declared a saint on September 4, 13 years after her beatification and 19 years after she died at the age of 87. The Pope cleared the way for sainthood in December by approving a second miracle attributed to her, which involved the healing of a Brazilian man who had suffered a viral brain infection that left him in a coma.

An ethnic Albanian on August 26, 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia, then part of the Ottoman Empire, she took her religious vows at the age of 21, two years after arriving in India, The New York Times informs.

Mother Teresa spent most of her life working with the poor in India, founding the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 to care for "all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared-for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone," she said in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

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.

Archbishop Thomas D'Souza conducted a special Mass on Tuesday, while the nuns of her order, the Missionaries of Charity, held prayers at her tomb, BBC reports.

"Mother Teresa's canonization means that the Mother's message will become better known," said Sister Christi, one of the senior nuns at the Kolkata headquarters of the order.

The Vatican ceremony will draw tens of thousands to honor the tiny, stooped nun who was fast-tracked for sainthood just a year after she died in 1997. St. John Paul II, who was Mother Teresa's greatest champion, beatified her before a crowd of 300,000 in St. Peter's Square in 2003.