THE Vatican said yesterday that Mother Teresa of Calcutta would be beatified, probably next spring, despite claims by Indian officials that a cure attributed to her intercession had been brought about by medical treatment.
Under Vatican rules a candidate for beatification, the last step before sainthood, must not only have led a holy life, but must also be shown to have been responsible for at least one medically inexplicable cure. For sainthood, proof of two such miracles is required.
This week Partho De, the former Health Minister in West Bengal, said that the healing in 1998 of Monika Besra, a 30-year-old Bengali tribal woman with cancer, had not been due to a miracle as the Vatican claimed, but to “very strong medicines”.
The Missionaries of Charity, the Order founded by Mother Teresa, had said that Ms Besra had been healed after a medal bearing the image of Mother Teresa had been placed on her stomach.
The former minister said: “I mean no disrespect to Mother Teresa, but it is stretching the truth to say that this was a miracle worked by her.” He said that he had been state Health Minister at the time, and could testify that Ms Besra had been cured of a tumour by treatment at Balurghat hospital in West Bengal.
Prabir Ghosh, head of the Science and Rationalist Association in Calcutta, said that it would be “a shame for Mother Teresa to be considered for sainthood on the basis of false claims and lies”.
She deserved to be made a saint “for her selfless services to Calcutta’s poor”, he said. His association was considering legal action against the Missionaries of Charity for “misleading the people”.
The Vatican, however, said that its beatification and canonisation procedures involved exhaustive investigations by a highly qualified medical team advising the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the church body that advises the Pope on candidates for sainthood.
The congregation “authenticated” the miracle a week ago, although it has yet to be promulgated in the presence of the Pope, the final stage in the process of authentication.
Mother Teresa, an ethnic Albanian who was born in Skopje but spent most of her life working for the poor in the slums of Calcutta, died in 1997 aged 87.
The Pope is said to be determined to elevate her to sainthood after the canonisation in June of Padre Pio, the charismatic southern Italian friar and healer, and of Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, the Spanish founder of Opus Dei, last Sunday.
All three are held up by the Pope as much-needed models of holiness for the modern world. They have all been put on a “fast track” to sainthood, after the Pope’s streamlining of what were once lengthy canonisation procedures taking decades or even centuries.