Mother Teresa to be canonised for her work with the poor in India

Pope Francis will canonise the late Mother Teresa, the Catholic nun who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work with the poor in the slums of the Indian city of Calcutta, now known as Kolkata.

The second required miracle attributed to the intercession of the nun, who founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950, involved the healing of a Brazilian man with several brain tumours in 2008. Hundreds of the members of the religious order are expected in Rome for the canonization ceremony. Mother Teresa was born in Albania in 1920 and died in India in 1997 at the age of 87. She was beatified by the late Pope John Paul II in 2003. Beatification is the first step towards sainthood. India honoured her with a state funeral and she was buried in the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity. According to her Vatican biography, her tomb has become a place of pilgrimage and prayer for people of all faiths. The Missionaries of Charity runs 19 homes for women, orphans and the aged in Kolkata. It also runs a school for street children, an AIDS hospice and a leper colony. The religious order now numbers more than 4,500 nuns worldwide, with its headquarters at the Mother House in central Kolkata.