Local priest met Mother Teresa, will attend canonization

Although he met her only once, the Rev. David Hulshof found his fleeting encounter with Mother Teresa profoundly memorable.

At the time, the priest of St. Vincent de Paul Parish in Cape Girardeau was a 23-year-old theology student serving at a soup kitchen near the Circus Maximus in Rome, and the famous nun was there visiting a group of novices soon to take the veil.

It was the early 1980s, and even then, Mother Teresa had the gravitas of a saint.

As she approached the soup kitchen, Hulshof said he first noticed her diminutive form, then his eyes strayed to her sandaled feet.

"They looked like New Testament feet," he said. "It looked like she had walked many, many, many miles."

He said he knew unequivocally he was in the presence of someone immensely special.

"I reached out and shook her hand and said, 'Thank you, sister, for your work,'" Hulshof recalled.

Now, decades later, Hulshof again will have a chance to pay his respects to the Albanian woman whose charitable endeavors are legend, as she is canonized Sunday in Vatican Square.

Hulshof already planned to be in Rome for a sabbatical in which he and a group of other priests from around the country will study the letters of St. Paul the Apostle. From there, the group will proceed to Greece, visiting ancient sites that trace the saint's biblical travels.

The program begins Monday, right after the canonization festivities.

"It's providence. ... Just by coincidence, her canonization is next Sunday," Hulshof said.

Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhui in Skopje, Macedonia, in 1910, is best known for her work with the poor and dying in the Indian city of Calcutta (now known as Kolkata), and for founding the Order of the Missionaries of Charity in 1950.

In 1979, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for humanitarian work -- one of hundreds of other distinguished recognitions over the years.

After her death in 1997, Catholics all over the globe began to call for Mother Teresa's canonization, and reports of miracles began pouring in to the Vatican.

While Pope John Paul II waived the usual five-year waiting period after the nun's death, the Vatican followed a strict set of protocols to investigate the miracles attributed to her.

Two incidents served to clinch their eventual approval -- one in 1998 in Bengal, India, in which a woman was cured of an end-stage ovarian tumor, and the other in 2008 in Brazil, when a young man was cured of several brain abscesses.

Neither person was expected to live much longer but recovered rapidly after praying to Mother Teresa for help.

ljones@semissourian.com

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