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ROME, December 18, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – Pope Francis has approved a second miracle attributed to the intercession of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta and opened the door to her becoming an officially recognized saint of the Catholic Church. 

The pope authorized the Congregation for the Causes of Saints yesterday to promulgate a decree regarding the miraculous cure of a Brazilian man through the intercession of Blessed Teresa, reported Vatican Radio. 

According to a report by Avvenire, the miraculous cure took place in Brazil in 2008 and happened to a 35-year-old man with “multiple cerebral abscesses with hydrocephalous obstruction” who was about to die. 

America magazine has more:

The man had already “undergone a kidney transplant and was in therapy with immune- suppressors.” The diagnosis left little hope for the man’s life.  

The man (whose identity has been withheld) is an engineer and he had only recently got married when soon after his health problems began and by the end of 2008 he was diagnosed with eight abscesses. His condition seriously worsened with the emergence of hydrocephaly and he fell into a coma on Dec 9 and was taken for surgery. At the pleading of his young wife, many people started praying to Mother Teresa for him to intercede with God for his cure, and they did so especially on this day.

That day the operation had to be postponed for a short time due to technical reasons, and when the doctor came back to carry out the surgery 30 minutes later, he found the man sitting up and asking what he was doing there in the operating theatre. The doctor was stunned, and then examined him only to discover that he was without any sign of his major health problems. At that very hour, the man’s wife and other people were praying together with a priest to Mother Teresa in the hospital chapel. No one had any doubt, the miraculous cure was attributed to Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

Archbishop Thomas D’Souza, the Archbishop of Calcutta, said he was “very happy, overjoyed” to hear the news.

“It is a real Christmas gift that the Holy Father has given, especially the Church in Calcutta,” he told Vatican Radio. “We were waiting for this moment, since many years, really.”

The Italian news agency AGI reported last month that the canonization will likely take place early September next year. 

Mother Teresa's work helping the “poorest of the poor” in the slums of Calcutta as well as spreading her work with the poor around the world through the Missionaries of Charity — which she founded in 1950 — was recognized with a Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. 

She died in 1997 at the age of 87 and was beatified by Pope St. John Paul II on October 19, 2003.

Her statements condemning abortion while courageously supporting the poor, helpless, and voiceless are part of the lexicon of all pro-life work around the world.

Mother Teresa once said: “Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want.”

“The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men,” she also said. “It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts – a child – as a competitor, and intrusion and an inconvenience.”

In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1979 in Norway, she famously stated, “I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child – direct murder by the mother herself… Because if a mother can kill her own child – what is left for me to kill you and you kill me – there is nothing between.”

In a 1985 interview with New York journalist she reiterated and expanded on this point, explaining that the unborn child is created “in the image of God for greater things, to love and be loved.”

“That is why it is such a terrible thing to think that the mother, to whom the child has been given as a gift of God, could destroy it.”

“That’s why I think that abortion has become the greatest destroyer of peace today because it destroys the life of the child, but also destroys the conscience of the mother also, and for years and years, she knows that she has murdered her own child,” she said.

She made the same point in February 1994, at a National Prayer Breakfast attended by pro-abortion President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton.

Abortion “is really a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself,” she said.

“If we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?” she asked. “Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love one another, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.”

“Her entire life was spent doing works of mercy,” Archbishop D’Souza said. 

“Her entire life was spent in service to the poor…she was reflecting God’s love here among the poorest of the poor, and so it comes as a very significant event in this Year of Mercy that the Holy Father has given to the Church,” he said.