Vatican City: Both the poor and the powerful will have VIP seats in St Peter's Square on October 19 when Pope John Paul II leads a long ceremony to beatify Mother Teresa, further testing his frail health to honor the nun he so greatly admired.

Now stooped and ailing, as was Mother Teresa in her final years of religious mission, John Paul was so impressed by her tireless devotion to the dying and destitute that he put her on the fast track toward sainthood after her death in Calcutta in 1997.

The pontiff, now 83, broke with the Church practice of waiting five years after a candidate's death before starting the often decades-long process of beatification, the last step on the path to sainthood.

Following several days of long public ceremonies to mark the 25th anniversary of John Paul's pontification, the October 19 two-hour ceremony underscores the Pope's determination to give the faithful fresh, and in this case, modern role models.

Police in Rome estimated as many as 300,000 people, one of the biggest crowds ever in St Peter's, could turn out.

City authorities have rerouted buses and erected barriers on streets leading to the Vatican in hopes of preventing traffic jams.

Portable toilets and tens of thousands of bottles of water were being supplied for the pilgrims, including some 4,000 from the United States.

The front-row seats in the square were reserved for politicians, diplomats and about 2,000 thousand poor people who are cared for by the Missionaries of Charity, the order of nuns Mother Teresa established and which now operates across the globe.

A few dozen of those poor live in a shelter inside the Vatican walls established at Mother Teresa's request. The shelter doubles as a soup kitchen for Rome's hungry.

Several hundred of the nuns, wearing the characteristic white saris with blue striping, have flocked to Rome for the ceremony, including some from India.

"But we couldn't take the poor with us because it would have been too expensive,'' said a nun at one of the Missionaries of Charities' convents in Rome. Citing a need to be humble, she declined to give her name.

Also in Rome was the Indian woman whose recovery from what was described as an incurable abdominal tumor was the miracle attributed to Mother Teresa. Once miracle was needed for beatification; a second after beatification is necessary for her to become a saint.

A panel of Vatican experts, including doctors, declared Monica Besra's recovery as miraculous.

Agencies