Mother Teresa to become saint after pope recognises ‘miracle’

Brazilian man’s recovery from multiple brain tumours attributed by panel of experts to woman nicknamed the ‘Saint of the Gutters’

Pope Francis has approved a second miracle for Mother Teresa, paving the way for the late nun who was known as the “Saint of the Gutters” to be canonised next year. The Vatican said in a short statement on Friday that the Argentinean pontiff had approved the miracle, in which a Brazilian man was said to have been cured of multiple brain tumours in 2008 following the nun’s intercession.

The honour for the Nobel prize winner, who won acclaim for her work with impoverished and dying people living in the slums of Kolkata, India, has been widely anticipated for months in Italy, and the ceremony to make her a saint – expected to be held on September 4 2016 – will be a highlight of the church’s jubilee year of mercy.

But it is also controversial. Mother Teresa’s work has been questioned for decades by notable critics, who have alleged first that the Catholic missionary, who died in 1997, misused funds that were meant for charity, and second that she was a Catholic fundamentalist more concerned with evangelism than with serving the poor with adequate medical treatment.

The negative assessment was underscored by researchers at the University of Montreal and the University of Ottawa, who concluded in a 2013 report that the nun did not deserve the saintly reputation she had acquired over her lifetime due to her “rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce”.

The researchers found that the vast majority of patients who had come to visit Mother Teresa’s missions for the dying had hoped to find doctors to treat them, but instead found unhygienic conditions, a shortage of care, inadequate food and no painkillers.

Vatican journalist John Allen at the Crux website said that the final view on Mother Teresa was ultimately a matter of personal opinion, but that Catholicism did not equate sainthood with perfection. “In reality, declaring someone a saint does, indeed, reflect a judgment that he or she lived a holy life, but it’s not tantamount to a claim of moral perfection. It doesn’t mean they never made mistakes or were utterly free of blind spots,” he wrote.

The late journalist Christopher Hitchens, who skewered the nun’s staunch objection to birth control and abortion and was one of her most vociferous critics, ridiculed the first medical miracle that was attributed to Mother Teresa in 2003, when she was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2003 in a “fast-track” process that, in effect, meant she did not have to undergo the standard five-year waiting period after a possible saint’s death.

“Surely any respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the obviousness of the fakery,” Hitchens wrote in Slate that year. “A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of Mother Teresa, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumour. Her physician, Dr Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn’t have a cancerous tumour in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine.”

The office that investigates candidates for sainthood has come under fire in two new books that raise questions about the oversight of the church’s finances. The books, allegedly based on church documents, found that every investigation conducted by special sainthood researchers costs about €500,000. When a special committee created by Pope Francis to examine church finances asked the office to produce documentation to back up its expenses, the office allegedly balked, and could not produce any receipts for costs running into the “tens of millions of euros”.

In India, meanwhile, the news about Mother Theresa was being celebrated as a Christmas gift from the Holy Father. “We were waiting for this moment, since many years really, and now that it has come we are very happy, overjoyed,” Archbishop Thomas D’Souza of Kolkata said. “Her entire life was spent in service to the poor … She was reflecting God’s love here among the poorest of the poor, and so it comes as a very significant event in this Year of Mercy that the Holy Father has given to the church.”