Mother Teresa moves closer to sainthood
Mother Teresa (L) smiling during mass at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Atlanta, Georgia.
VATICAN CITY (AFP) - The late Mother Teresa of Calcutta moved closer to sainthood on Friday after the Vatican officially recognized a miracle attributed to the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Pope John Paul on Friday signed two decrees that accept as authentic a 1998 miracle credited to Mother Teresa, who died the previous year, and pave the way for her beatification, scheduled for May next year.
Beatification in the Catholic Church is the last stage before sainthood.
In the first decree the pope recognised the "heroic virtues" of the ethnic Albanian charity worker who died in 1997, the Vatican said.
The second decree, based on the work of a Vatican commission, formally recognised as a miracle the September 1998 healing of a Bengali tribal woman, Monika Besra, who was suffering from an abdominal tumor.
Besra, who was 30 at the time, said that on the day of the "miracle," she had seen light coming from a photo of Mother Teresa, who died a year earlier. The following night, she woke up to find her pains gone.
The pope had to approve the commission findings before beatification -- which means elevation to the rank of "blessed".
After beatification the Church will then have to authenticate a second miracle to support Mother Teresa's elevation from "blessed" to saint.
Born Agnes Gonzha Bojazhiu in Skopje, Macedonia on August 27, 1910, Mother Teresa earned worldwide acclaim -- and the 1979 Nobel Prize for Peace -- for her charity work in the slums of Calcutta.