Mother Teresa beatified

last updated 8 January 2015

Rome

A quarter of a million people thronged St. Peter’s Square this week to watch the increasingly frail pope beatify Mother Teresa. The Albanian nun, who died in 1997, devoted her life to caring for the dying in Calcutta, India, and is revered by millions throughout the world. Pope John Paul II admired her so much that he started the beatification process—which entails the certification of a miracle and is a major step toward sainthood—two years after her death instead of the customary five. But the fast-track beatification wasn’t without controversy. The miracle attributed to Mother Teresa occurred about a year after her death, when an Indian woman said a beam of light shot out of the nun’s portrait and cured her tumor. The woman’s doctor disputed that account, saying it was a cyst, not a tumor, and that it was cured by the drugs he prescribed.