Mother Teresa and Her Miracles

By Manfredo Ferrari, CC BY-SA 4.0

Mother Teresa, which is how I will always think of her, is going to be canonized by Pope Francis on Sunday. This inevitably brings up a lot of articles. Here are a couple of good ones, both about the miracles whose documentation led the way to sainthood.

This NPR piece, How the Catholic Church Documented Mother Teresa's 2 Miracles, features Bishop Robert Barron and Father James Martin.

In Mother Teresa's case, a woman in India whose stomach tumor disappeared and a man in Brazil with brain abscesses who awoke from a coma both credited their dramatic recovery to prayers offered to the nun after her death in 1997.

"A saint is someone who has lived a life of great virtue, whom we look to and admire," says Bishop Barron, a frequent commentator on Catholicism and spirituality. "But if that's all we emphasize, we flatten out sanctity. The saint is also someone who's now in heaven, living in this fullness of life with God. And the miracle, to put it bluntly, is the proof of it."

As the report points out, we want proof and will be happy with atheists examining the evidence. Because we want the real deal or nothing!

NCR's article, The Miracles That Made Mother Teresa a Saint, goes into more details about the miracles and investigations. I myself liked the additional story that no one thought to mention the second miracle for 7 years. What with the doctor not being Catholic and all.

How the healing was actually reported was also rather miraculous.

In an interview with the Register in December 2015, Father Kolodiejchuk explained why there was a delay between 2008 and 2015. “The miracle happened in 2008,” he said, “but we didn’t hear about it till 2013. The doctor [neurosurgeon] was not Catholic. Somehow, after the Pope’s [Pope Francis] visit there [to Brazil], it triggered him to say something to one of the priests of Santos, and that news eventually made its way to myself and the postulation office. That started the chain of events.”

Anyway, go read both pieces. They're fascinating.