VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis approved sainthood Tuesday 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.
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis approved sainthood Tuesday 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 made a saint on Sept. 4, 13 years after her beatification and 19 years after she died at age 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 born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on Aug. 26, 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia, then part of the Ottoman Empire, she took her religious vows at age 21, two years after arriving in India.
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.
The pope 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; José Gabriel del Rosario, from Argentina, known as the “gaucho priest”; and José Luis Sánchez del Río of Mexico.
© 2016 The New York Times Company