DHAKA: Pope Francis has signed off on the miracle needed to make Mother Teresa a saint, giving the Albanian nun who cared for the poor in India one of the Catholic Church’s highest honors just two decades after her death.

The Vatican said on 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 India’s eastern city of Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, where Mother Teresa lived and worked.

The miracle responsible for Mother Teresa’s canonization concerned the inexplicable cure of a Brazilian man suffering from a viral brain infection that resulted in multiple abscesses.

By December 9, 2008, he was in a coma and dying, suffering from an accumulation of fluid around the brain.

The Reverend Brian Kolodiejchuk, the person spearheading Mother Teresa’s canonization case, said in a statement on Friday that about 30 minutes after the man was due to undergo surgery that never took place, he sat up, awake and without pain, and was a day later declared to be symptom-free, reports Al Jazeera.

BDST: 1210 HRS, DEC 19, 2015
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