VATICAN CITY, Dec 20: Pope John Paul on Friday formally recognized a miracle attributed to Mother Teresa, speeding the world’s most famous nun towards rapid sainthood.

With a ceremony at the Vatican’s apostolic palace, the pope acknowledged that he believed a young Indian woman’s cancer had been cured as a result of her prayers to Mother Teresa, who is now set to be deemed a saint far quicker than is customary.

Friday’s move cleared the way for the woman who spent her life helping the poorest of the poor to be beatified on Oct 19 next year in Rome, Vatican officials said. She will only become a saint once a second miracle is attributed to her after the beatification.

That could take several years but the process is nonetheless moving unusually fast. Mother Teresa died aged 87 on Sept 5, 1997, and in normal circumstances the beatification process does not begin until five years after the death of a candidate.

However, the pope, signalling his great affection for the diminutive missionary, waived this usual waiting period and allowed work on her possible canonisation to begin in 1999.

“Her slender figure was a world emblem of Christian charity last century,” the Vatican said on Friday. “Through her example she inspired a vast movement of charitable and social work on behalf of the most marginalized.”

The first miracle formally attributed to Mother Teresa concerned Monica Bersa, whose stomach tumour shrank after she prayed to her in 1998, baffling doctors.

“I am fine now. It is all due to the blessings of Mother Teresa,” Bersa said in October in Danogram, near Kolkata.

A year after the Albanian-born nun’s death, Bersa, then 30, held an aluminium medal blessed by Mother Teresa to her stomach and prayed to the her. “The next day, my tumour was gone. Mother Teresa’s blessings cured me,” said Bersa.

A commission of doctors examined the case and stated that they had no ready explanation in medical science for the cure.

Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims are expected to pour into Rome for the beatification ceremony next year. There had been talk the pope might carry out the beatification in India, but that was ruled out because of his fragile health.—Reuters