Mother Teresa touched many lives, and her visit to St. Paul in 1982 remains a bright memory to several who shook her hand and came face-to-face with the small unassuming woman and her presence of love and kindness. Those gathered that day would end up being able to say that they met a living saint, as Mother Teresa will be canonized in Rome by Pope Francis this week, Sept. 4, with masses and celebrations taking place around the world and in the area.
For Irene McNeilly, who has worked with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in St. Paul for 30 years, this is an event she has looked forward to for a long time; she considers herself blessed to have met the iconic figure a few times and corresponded with her over the years.
“I am really joyful to meet a saint in my lifetime to be canonized – it’s my greatest joy,” she said, in the week before the canonization.
McNeilly first met Mother Teresa in 1977 in Delhi, where McNeilly lived and worked before immigrating to Canada. At the time, McNeilly’s father was sick and dying of cancer, and she was worried for him and her family and siblings.
“I was just desperate,” she said, recalling that sisters she met told her that she should visit Mother Teresa, as her prayers sometimes had a miraculous effect. Not many people knew of the Albanian Roman Catholic nun, who had left the comparative comfort of convent life to live and serve the people of the poverty-stricken streets of India, but McNeilly was ready to try any intervention.
She still recalls very clearly her first meeting with the gentle, loving presence of Mother Teresa as McNeilly pleaded with her to pray for her father.
Mother Teresa comforted her and quietly told her, “Jesus wants him more than you want him.”
This caused McNeilly to burst into fresh tears, and she told Mother Teresa that no, this was impossible, her family needed her father to stay alive.
“So much love I never experienced, and she said, ‘Say yes to Jesus,’” said McNeilly, who recalled that Mother Teresa reminded her that when God closes a door, He opens a window. McNeilly felt she wasn’t interested in any window, and managed to take from Mother Teresa a promise to pray for her father.
“God will bless you; I will pray for you,” she told the weeping young woman.
“My father passed away soon after,” said McNeilly, adding, “But then six months after, I miraculously met this man from Canada.”
McNeilly would end up being wed to the gentleman, Keith MacNeilly, who served as a doctor in Elk Point, and would go on to move to Canada.
But on a 1983 visit to India, her and her husband’s path would cross again with Mother Teresa, who they heard was nearby while they were passing through Bombay. The pair ran to meet her, and when they did, McNeilly was quick to introduce her husband, saying -
“Mother – yes, God opened my window and here is my blessing!”
When Mother Teresa learned that her husband was a doctor, she exhorted him to treat each patient like he or she was Jesus himself.
“That touched my husband very much – we both did that.”
McNeilly was in St. Paul in 1982 when Mother Teresa came to visit, and also met her again in a subsequent trip that Mother Teresa quietly made to the town to visit the local Missionaries of Charity, whom McNeilly worked alongside.
At difficult times in her life, she would write to Mother Teresa, who responded with a few typed letters, which, along with her autographs and relics such as a piece of her sari and a strand of hair, are among McNeilly’s treasured possessions..
“Many times I think of her,” said McNeilly, noting she sometimes is amazed at what it must have cost a woman to leave a convent and live and serve people on the street - beggars, abandoned children and the sick, amidst turbulent times and the violence of the times like during the partition of India into India and East Pakistan/West Pakistan.
“What a sacrifice to say yes to God, to leave a comfortable life,” she said. “To the end, her life was just like Jesus, the Stations of the Cross.”
On Sunday, a mass will take place in St. Paul at 11 a.m., with Bishop Paul Terrio presiding, in conjunction with her canonization in Rome. McNeilly says there will also be special prayers in St. Vincent, with what she estimated would be 30 to 40 people gathering to venerate Mother Teresa’s relics.
It will be a special moment for McNeilly to remember a woman who touched her life, as she says, “Spiritually, I’m completely changed, because of her, her prayers, her blessings.”
