Pope confirms that Mother Teresa will be canonized on Sept. 4

Pope Francis on Tuesday decreed that Mother Teresa, the founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, will be made a saint on Sept. 4.

The pontiff presided Tuesday at the Vatican celebration to announce the canonizations of several beatified individuals, including Mother Teresa, who was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in what is now Macedonia in 1910 and joined the Loreto order of nuns in 1928.

Mother Teresa, who did much of her charitable work with the sick and indigent in Calcutta, will be made a saint one day before the 19th anniversary of her death in that Indian megacity.

The announcement came after the Catholic Church had unanimously approved the “extraordinary cure” which the Church deemed a miracle experienced in 2008 by a Brazilian man suffering from supposedly terminal cancer and said to have occurred with the future saint’s intercession.

With the approval by the pope of that second miracle, a basic requirement for any person to be made a saint, the process leading to sainthood for Teresa begun in 2003 by Pope John Paul II who called her a “tireless benefactor of humanity” came to an end.

Mother Teresa died on Sept. 5, 1997, at age 87 and at the time, her order had nearly 4,000 nuns and operated about 600 orphanages, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and clinics.