Earlier, the pope waived the five-year waiting period before the process can begin.

Archbishop D'Souza told Vatican officials that Missionaries of Charity Father Brian Kolodiejchuk was scheduled to reach the Indian metropolis of Calcutta in mid-March to begin the process, reported UCA News, an Asian church news agency based in Thialand.

Father Kolodiejchuk is the superior of a Missionaries of Charity house in Rome, said a spokesman for Missionaries of Charity Fathers in Calcutta.

The postulator, of Canadian origin, was chosen because he was "very close to Mother (Teresa)for many years and is the best person to do the job," the spokesman told UCA News March 6.

Sister Nirmala Joshi, the superior general of the Missionaries of Charity, the religious order founded by Mother Teresa, told UCA News, "We are very happy with the development." Sister Nirmala added that the postulator's function is "to make the petition on behalf of the Missionaries of Charity."

She said the postulator must collect "aughentic copies of all the writings of Mother Teresa" and list persons and collect evidence from "those who can testify to the virtues and holiness of Mother Teresa." A biography of Mother Teresa with a chronologically arranged report of her life and deeds should also accompany the petition.

Sister Nirmala said a panel of doctors would examine cases of reported miracles effected by prayer seeking Mother Teresa's intercession.

"This job will be done by rome," she added.

Asked about the possibility of Mother Teresa being declared a saint in the year 2000, Sister Nirmala said, "Anything can happen. The Holy Father has all the power.

"The whole process is time-consuming," she added. "But if the will of God is to canonize Mother next year, then the pope will do it.

    Lazar said their mother's example was a determining factor in Agnes' vocation. As a student at a public school in Skopje, she was a member of a Catholic sodality with a special interest in foreign missions.
 
    "At the age of 12, I first knew I had a vocation to help the poor," she once said. "I wanted to be a missionary." At 15 Agnes was inspired to work in India by reports sent home by Yugoslavian Jesuit missionaries in Bengal, present day Bangladesh. At 18 she left home to join the Irish branch of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, known as the Loreto Sisters. After training at their institutions in Dublin and in Darjeeling, India, she made her first vows as a nun in 1928 and her final vows 9 years later. While teaching and serving as a principal at Loreto House, a fashionable girls' college in Calcutta, she was depressed by the destitute and dying on the city's streets, the homeless street urchins, the ostracized sick people lying prey to rats and other vermin in streets and alleys.

    In 1946, she received a "call within a call" as she described it. "The message was clear. I was to leave the convent and help the poor, while living among them," she said. Two years later, the Vatican gave her permission to leave the Loreto Sisters and follow her new calling under the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Calcutta.
 
     After three months of medical training under the American Medical Missionary Sisters in Patna, India, Mother Teresa went into the Calcutta slums to bring children cut off from education into her first school. Soon volunteers, many of them her former students, came to join her.

    In 1950 the Missionaries of Charity became a diocesan religious community, and 15 years later the Vatican recognized it as a pontifical congregation, directly under Vatican jurisdiction. The members of the congregation take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, but the vow of poverty is stricter than in other congregations because, as Mother Teresa explained, "to be able to love the poor and know the poor, we must be poor ourselves."
 
    In addition the Missionaries of Charity take a fourth vow of wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor.  Mother Teresa once explained:  "This vow means that we cannot work for the rich; neither can we accept any money for what we do.  Ours is to be a free service and to the poor."

    In 1952, Mother Teresa opened the Nirmal Hriday (Pure Heart) Home for Dying Destitutes in a dormitory donated by the city of Calcutta.  Although some of those taken in survive, the primary function of the home is to be a shelter where the dying poor may die in dignity.
 
     When Pope Paul VI visited Bombay, India, in 1964, he gave Mother Teresa a white ceremonial Lincoln Continental given to him by people in the United States.  She raffled off the car and raised enough money to finance a center for leprosy victims in the Indian state of West Bengal.

     When Ronald Reagan presented Mother Teresa with the presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House in 1985, he call her a "heroine of our times" and noted that the plaque honoring her described her as the "saint of the gutters."  He also joked that Mother Teresa might be the first award recipient to take the plaque and melt it down to get money for the poor."

     Popes, rarely kown to praise still living individuals for sanctity, have not hesitated to hold Mother Teresa up as a symbol of what it means to be a Christian.  Awarding her the first Pope John XXIII Peace Prize in 1971, Pope Paul VI proclaimed her "an example and symobl of the discovery of the secret of peace..  that man is our brother."  Mother Teresa used the $25,000 prize to establish a home for leprosy patients.

     Mother Teresa's attitude toward money was that "God will provide."  "Money, I never think of it," she once said.  "It always comes. The Lord sends it.  We do his work; he provides the means.  If he does not give us the means, that shows he does not want the work.  So why worry?"

         When Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, Dec. 10, 1979, she accepted it " in the name of the hungry, of the naked, of the homeless, of the blind, of the lepers, of those who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society."

    The tiny, wizened Mother Teresa in her familiar white and blue sari traveled the world to deliver a single message: that love and caring are the most important things in the world. "The biggest disease today," she once said, is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for and deserted by everybody. The greatest evil is the lack of love and charity, the terrible indifference toward one's neighbor who lives at the roadside, assaulted by exploitation, corruption's, poverty and disease"

     A favorite motto she lived and preached was "Do small things with great love."  The "small things" she did so captivated the world that she was showered with honorary degrees and other awards, almost universally praised by the media and sought out by other figures of wealth and influence.

    Mother Teresa condemned abortion as the world's greatest destroyer of people. "To me, the nations who have legalized abortion are the poorest nations," she said. "They are afraid of the unborn child, and the child must die." During a June 1988 visit to the United States, she told pro-lifers in St. Louis, "If I had power I would open a jail, and I would put every single doctor (who performs abortions) in that jail for killing--killing life, killing a child, a gift from God" New York 1981 "If you know anyone who does not want the child, who is afraid of the child, then tell them to give that child to me."