Mother Teresa will become a Saint on September 4, Pope Francis announced Tuesday.
The date she will be canonized falls on the eve of the anniversary of her death, which occurred on Sept. 5, 1997. Born in 1910 in Albania, Mother Teresa was 87 years old when she died.
In December, Francis announced she would become a saint after recognizing a second miracle attributed to her. The Italian Catholic bishops’ association’s official newspaper Avvenire reported that a Brazilian man with multiple brain tumors was healed after prayers by her loved ones to her to heal him. The miracle happened after her death.
Her first miracle was a posthumous one, approved by the now deceased Pope John Paul II, in which a 30-year-old Kolkata woman said she was a cured of a stomach tumor after praying to her. After a Vatican committee found no scientific explanation for her healing, it was declared a miracle.
In October 2003, John Paul II beatified Mother Teresa.
Mother Teresa, who dedicated her life to caring for the poor in India, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.
Francis also approved the canonization of four other saints: Stanislaus of Jesus and Mary, born Jan Papczynski, of Poland; Maria Elizabeth Hesselblad, the first Swedish saint in more than 600 years; Jose Gabriel del Rosario, from Argentina, known as the “gaucho priest”; and Jose Luis Sanchez del Río of Mexico.
