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Mother Teresa to be made a saint, Pope Francis announces

The nun who worked with the poor will be declared a saint on September 4.

Mother Teresa is to be declared a saint on September 4, Pope Francis has announced.

The Roman Catholic nun who worked with the poor in India founded a sisterhood that runs 19 homes, and won the Nobel Peace Prize.

She died in 1997 at age 87, and in 2003 was beatified, which is the first step to sainthood.

Born Agnese Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Macedonia, Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950, which now has 4,500 nuns worldwide.

Pope Francis announced the sainthood last year after he recognised a second miracle attributed to Mother Teresa, but has only recently confirmed the date, the BBC reports.

Pope John Paul II accepted a first miracle attributed to Mother Teresa – the curing of a woman from an abdominal tumour – as authentic five years after her death, which cleared the way for her beatification in 2003.

A Vatican commission found that her recovery had been a miracle after the woman had been cured by a photo of the nun being placed on her stomach. The finding was criticised as bogus by rationalist groups in Bengal.

In December 2015, Pope Francis recognised a second miracle, which involved the healing of a Brazilian man with several brain tumours in 2008.

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