Mother Teresa, head of the Missionaries of Charity order, cradles an armless baby girl at her order’s orphanage in Calcutta, India in 1978.

The nun was beatified on October 19, 2003, in a ceremony in St Peter’s Square after the Vatican declared the healing of a woman with stomach cancer a miracle.

The beatification ceremony is the penultimate step to being canonised a saint and was the shortest in modern history. Following the beatification, a second miracle had to be verified by the Vatican for Mother Teresa to be proclaimed a saint.

Chairman of the Norvegian Nobel Committee Professor John Sanness hands the Nobel Peace Prize to Mother Teresa in Oslo, Dec. 11, 1979.

Mother Teresa won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize for her work among the poorest people in India.

Mother Teresa in Oslo with the Nobel Peace Prize she received, Dec. 12, 1979.

The nun, born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu Aug. 26, 1910 in Skopje, Macedonia,was internationally celebrated for her commitment to the poor and destitute.

Mother Teresa (L) chats with Diana, Princess of Wales, during a visit to a convent in Rome, Feb. 19, 1992.

She left home at 18 with the goal of becoming a missionary and joined the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Ireland. She soon left there for India.

The nun lived and worked in India for many years. She took her religious vows as a nun in May 24, 1931 and became known as Mother Teresa.

Mother Teresa hugs a child in West Beirut, Lebanon, Aug. 15, 1982.

On a train ride from Calcutta to Darjeeling in 1946 she reportedly received her “call within a call,” inspiring her to eventually found the Missionaries of Charity. In 1948, she donned the blue-bordered white cotton sari she became associated with, as she set out from the Loreto convent to work with the poor.

Mother Teresa attends to a patient in her Home for the Dying in Calcutta’s teeming slum on February 2, 1986.

The nun opened the home in 1952 as a free hospice for the poor. The Missionaries of Charity then opened homes for those with leprosy and orphans in Calcutta and around India.

Pope John Paul II holds hands with Mother Teresa after visiting the Casa del Cuore Puro, Mother Teresa’s home for the destitute and dying in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata, Feb. 3, 1986.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta prays during a religious service in Pescara, September 20, 1977, where she attended the National Eucharist Congress.

Mother Teresa is welcomed by aged women lepers on arriving at St. Lazarus Leprosy Village’s church in Shinhung, Korea on January 27, 1985.

The Missionaries of Charity expanded their work internationally in dozens of countries.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta blesses one week-old Dejen Abreha as nurse-practicioner Trish Fleck looks on in the neo-natal intensive care unit at Saint Margaret’s Center for Women and Infants, in Boston.

Mother Teresa Blesses Sister Nirmala, the new head of the Missionaries of Charity, March 14 at Mother Teresa’s house in Calcutta. Sister Nirmala was elected to succeed Mother Teresa.

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton meets with Mother Teresa at the opening of the Mother Teresa Home for Infant Children June 19, 1995 in Washington. Clinton Later attended Mother Teresa’s funeral in Sept. 1997.

Nobel Laureate Mother Teresa in New Delhi. By 1997, her charity operated in 123 countries around the world, running hundreds of orphanages, hospices and leper homes from its base in Calcutta. Calcutta was the Albanian-born nun’s home for more than four decades.

Mother Teresa died of cardiac arrest on Sept. 5, 1997 and was honored with a state funeral in India. She was buried in the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity.

Her canonization falls on the eve of the 19th anniversary of her death.

The body of Mother Teresa is carried by soldiers near the Missionaries of Charity at the end of her funeral procession in Calcutta, Sept. 13, 1997.

Mother Teresa said, “By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By Faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus.”

Catholic nuns from the Missionaries of Charity, the global order of nuns founded by Mother Teresa, attend a prayer meeting on the occasion of Teresa’s 12th death anniversary in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata, Sept. 5, 2009.

Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity, look at the official canonization portrait of Mother Teresa, during a portrait unveiling ceremony at The Saint John Paul II National Shrine, Sept. 1, 2016 in Washington, DC.

Swiss Guards stand in front of a tapestry depicting Mother Teresa of Calcutta before a mass, celebrated by Pope Francis, for her canonisation in Saint Peter’s Square at the Vatican, Sept. 4, 2016.

Faithful wait for the start of a mass celebrated by Pope Francis where Mother Teresa is to be canonized in St. Peter’s Square, at the Vatican, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. 

Thousands of pilgrims thronged to St. Peter’s Square on Sunday for the canonization of Mother Teresa, the tiny nun who cared for the world’s most unwanted and became the icon of a Catholic Church that goes to the peripheries to tend to lost, wounded souls.