Mother Teresa ‘miracle’: Doctor says seen nothing like it

In 2002, the Vatican officially recognised a miracle Mother Teresa was said to have carried out after her death, namely the 1998 healing of a Bengali tribal woman, Monika Besra, who was suffering from an abdominal tumour.

The traditional canonisation procedure requires at least two miracles.

The second miracle involved a 35-year-old Brazilian man who had not long been married when he was diagnosed with eight brain tumours in 2008, according to Vatican expert Andrea Tornielli.

On December 9, the man was wheeled into the operating room in an induced coma, but doctors were forced to delay the medical procedure by half and hour because of technical problems. While they waited, the man’s wife led prayers to Mother Teresa in the hospital’s chapel. When the surgeon returned to the operating room he is sais to have found the patient awake, sitting up and asking “what am I doing here ”

“I have never seen a case like it,” the surgeon was quoted as saying, after a CAT scan showed that the Brazilian’s tumours “had suddenly and inexplicably disappeared”, Tornielli said in La Stampa daily.

For all the reverence with which her name and memory are treated, Mother Teresa was not without her critics.

She has been accused of trying to foist Catholicism on the vulnerable, with Australian feminist and academic Germaine Greer calling her a “religious imperialist”.

One of her most vocal detractors was the British-born author Christopher Hitchens, who accused her of contributing to the misery of the poor with her strident opposition to contraception and abortion.

Questions have also been raised over the Missionar-ies of Charity’s finances, as well as conditions in the order’s hospices where there has been resistance to introducing modern hygiene methods. A series of her letters published in 2007 also caused some consternation among admirers as it became clear that she had suffered crises of faith for most of her life. She was granted Indian citizenship in 1951 and received a state funeral after her death.