Let’s review. In order for Mother Teresa to be declared a saint, the church needed to recognize that she’d performed not just one miracle but two.

The first miracle was the purported healing of Monica Beresa, who claimed she’d been cured of a cancerous tumor by a beam of light emitted from Mother Teresa’s picture in a medallion placed on her abdomen. But her doctor stated that it was a cyst caused by turberculosis, not a cancerous tumor, and attributed her gradual recovery thereafter to her months of medication. Even her husband declared the miracle a “hoax.”

Curiously, a call to put the medallion to the test to cure another tumor goes unanswered, despite the suffering it presumably would save.

Pope Francis recognized the second purported miracle last December, after a Brazilian man recovered from a brain infection when his wife prayed fervently to Mother Teresa to heal him.

This is superstition of the lowest order. Don’t understand something? “God did it.”

Seeking intellectual respect, Pope Francis recently declared that God is not “a magician, with a magic wand.” But as the pope’s canonizing Mother Teresa shows, he’s happy to promote God’s magic when it makes for good PR.