Calcutta, India-Mother Teresa, the frail Nobel Peace Prize-winning nun who ministered to the poor, sick and dying and came to embody charity and goodness for countless millions, died Friday at her convent here.

She was 87 and had been in frail health for years.

Bowed almost double by age and afflictions, her labors reflected in the wrinkles on her beatific face, Mother Teresa died when her heart simply stopped.

Funeral arrangements have not been announced.

A close friend, Naresh Kumar, said "the Mother" as she was known to millions said only, "I can't breathe," then died.

Pope John Paul was told immediately of her death and announced a celebratory Mass for today at Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence outside Rome.

President Clinton remembered her as an incredible person, and the House of Representatives observed a moment of silence in her honor. Three months ago, she had visited Washington to accept the Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor the United States offers.

Although her death was announced at a relatively late hour, thousands poured out of their dwellings to stand outside the convent she founded. Hundreds wept.

Inside and outside the Roman Catholic Church, the tiny nun was a larger-than-life symbol of faith, kindness and hope in a confusing, materialistic and violence-marred age.

"My life is dedicated to God, and I have never interfered in politics, of which I know nothing," she said in 1995. "I see human beings as God's children, with the right to live in love, peace and harmony."

With her winning smile, Mother Teresa became one of the best-known and most admired women on Earth. She traveled widely, raising money for her humanitarian activities and receiving the homage of presidents, prime ministers and princes. She had become a friend of Princess Diana and sent swift condolences after the noblewoman's death last weekend in a Paris auto accident.

Of Mother Teresa, former United Nations Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar once said: "She is the United Nations. She is peace in the world."

She founded and led the nuns of the Congregation of the Missionaries of Charity, clad in their distinctive white cowls trimmed with blue bands, until March, when her health forced the appointment of a successor. Her followers fanned out to comfort and assist the victims and survivors of innumerable disasters, from a catastrophic earthquake in Armenia to clan warfare in Somalia.

In 1982, Mother Teresa went to Beirut to help victims of the Lebanese civil war. When Ethiopia plunged into a killer famine, she placed a telephone call to the Regan administration, which soon dispatched $64 million in food aid.

When acquired immune deficiency syndrome surfaced as a global menace to health, the Missionaries of Charity opened hospices to allow AIDS patients to die with dignity.

"I once asked Mother Teresa if there was any place she had not reached," said Navin Chawla, her friend and biographer. "She replied with a laugh, "If there are poor on the moon, we shall go there, too. "

The woman born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on Aug. 27, 1910, to Albanian parents in Skopje, now the capital of Macedonia, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her charitable work with beggars, orphans, lepers and other afflicted humans.

"The hallmark of her work has been respect for the individual?s worth and dignity," John Sannes, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said at the Dec. 10, 1979, award ceremony in Oslo, Norway. "The loneliest and most wretched, the dying destitute, the abandoned lepers have been received by her and her sisters with warm compassion devoid of condescension, based on this reverence for Christ in man."

Attired in the $1 white habit she wore throughout her ministerings, Mother Teresa appeared before the white-tie gathering to accept the prize "in the name of the poor." She persuaded the Nobel committee to cancel the customary banquet and use the money to help those who really needed a meal.

To her original religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, Mother Teresa added a fourth: "wholehearted and free service to the poor," which is unique to her order.

In 1952, the fledgling order opened the Nirmal Hriday (Immaculate Heart) Home for Dying Destitutes in Calcutta.

Those first years were hard. Many wondered what one woman with a small band of helpers–the order numbered just 27 sisters in 1953 could do to alleviate the suffering of the hungry, homeless and dying in the poverty-ravaged metropolis that Rudyard Kipling vividly dubbed "the city of dreadful night.'

"We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean," Mother Teresa acknowledged. "But if that drop was not in the ocean, I think the ocean will be less because of that missing drop."

Mother Teresa took Indian citizenship in 1948, the year after the nation won its independence, and at the moment of her death was arguably the most famous Indian citizen in the world.

"I have said often, and I am sure of it, that the greatest destroyer of peace in the world today is abortion,? Mother Teresa said in a message to the U.N. Conference on Population in 1994 in Cairo, Egypt, renewing controversial remarks she had made in her Nobel acceptance speech. "If a mother can kill her own child, what is there to stop you and me from killing each other? The only one who has the right to take life is the one who has created it."

Such orthodoxy won Mother Teresa a considerable number of critics, as did some of her contacts with the rich and powerful. In 1980, she accepted the Legion of Honor from Haitian dictator Jean-Claude ?Baby Doc? Duvalier. Nine years later, she laid flowers on the grave of Albanian Communist strongman Enver Hoxha.

"God will find another person, more humble, more devoted, more obedient to him, and the society will go on."
( She finally did retire in March when she was 86.)