Mother Teresa: The miracle that made her saint

Monica Besra, a tribal woman in eastern India, is said to be the miracle which set the path for sainthood for Indian Nobel Peace prize winner Mother Teresa, who will be canonised in Vatican City on September 4. 

According to foreign media, Besra was so sick in 1998 that she could barely walk. But when nuns from the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded by Mother Teresa, helped her tumour was gone within hours. 

Although, Indian doctors and government debunked the miracle theory for the lack of evidence of tumour, Vatican, according to reports, considers this as Mother Teresa’s first of the two required miracles. 

For the Catholic Church to declare someone a saint, a lengthy investigation into that person's life, faith and good works can take years. Two "miracles" credited to prayers to the prospective saint must be recognized - one before the beatification rite, the penultimate phase of the process, the second before sainthood.

The second “miracle” was approved by Pope Francis in December 2015, when a man in Brazil was healed from a bacterial infection in the brain after prayers were said for him to Mother Teresa in 2008.

Mother Teresa’s canonisation ceremony is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to Rome and TV viewers across the world. It is the culmination of several steps that can last centuries but for her have been hastened to a mere 18 years. 

Canonisation typically doesn’t begin until at least five years after death. Because she was so widely admired among the faithful, however, Pope John Paul II waived that traditional waiting period, allowing the process to begin only 18 months after her death in 1997.