A Saint From Bayonne?

Her followers prayed for a miracle. Now a nun from New Jersey has achieved beatification. Sainthood could be next.

HEAVEN KNOWS: Sister Kathleen Flanagan, left, and Sister Mary Canavan (seen in the chapel of the Sisters of Charity motherhouse in Convent Station) are among those dedicated to the canonization of Sister Miriam Teresa. Photo by Tim Townsend

HEAVEN KNOWS: Sister Kathleen Flanagan, left, and Sister Mary Canavan (seen in the chapel of the Sisters of Charity motherhouse in Convent Station) are among those dedicated to the canonization of Sister Miriam Teresa. Photo by Tim Townsend

When Sister Mary Canavan arrived at Convent Station as a young novice in 1947, she was sometimes sent to work in the basement of the sprawling motherhouse. A new office had opened there, home to the Sister Miriam Teresa League, a prayer society devoted to what seemed an improbable mission: to convince the world that another young nun who had once walked these halls should be made a saint. Sister Mary boxed Christmas cards the nuns sold to raise money for the canonization cause of Sister Miriam Teresa Demjanovich, an immigrant cobbler’s daughter who grew up beside the oil refineries on East 22nd Street in the Constable Hook section of Bayonne.

Sister Miriam Teresa is revered for her other-worldly piety

The odds, the nuns knew, were long. Sainthood in the Catholic Church is decades, often centuries, in the making, and a long line of more venerated souls stood ahead of Sister Miriam Teresa. At the time, there were no American-born saints—there are now just three—and it seemed unlikely that among the first would be a little-known nun from New Jersey who was just 26 when she died in 1927.

But enough of her fellow Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth were convinced of Sister Miriam Teresa’s sanctity—moved by the accounts of her mystical visions, otherworldly piety and farsighted theological writings—to keep her cause moving along its glacial path through the Vatican. “It was almost like a dead zone for a long time,” says Sister Mary, who later became the General Superior of the Sisters of Charity and, in her retirement, the vice-postulator of the canonization cause.

Making a saint is an act of both faith and bureaucracy, and a handful of nuns quietly did their part on both counts over the decades. Prayers ascended for favors great and small, and papers piled up: Sister Miriam Teresa’s own writings and the testimonies of those who knew her. Strands of her hair—shorn when she entered the convent, found in her trunk after her death (from an infection following an appendectomy)—were encased in mementos and distributed to believers, who also came to the cemetery in Convent Station to chip away nuggets of her gravestone. Sister Miriam Teresa has been venerated especially by the ethnic Slovaks of North Jersey—her parents were immigrants from what is now Eastern Slovakia—and by Byzantine-Ruthenian Rite Catholics, the church in which she was baptized.

Sister Miriam Teresa’s remains were exhumed in 1979 and buried in a crypt in the Holy Family Chapel at the motherhouse, where the petition box is filled with prayer requests. Her portrait gazes down from beside the altar. Two nuns spent 10 years writing a mammoth manuscript, the 500-page positio that chronicled Sister Miriam Teresa’s life and enumerated her virtues. Tribunals were convened. Finally, all the documents were placed in a wooden box that was sealed with wax and delivered to Rome in the diplomatic pouch.

But what the advocates still needed was a miracle—literally.

Michael Mencer was a first grader at St. Anastasia School in Teaneck in 1963 when he first realized that something was wrong with his eyes. “Playing catch with my older brother I noticed that I couldn’t see balls thrown straight at me,” he says.

It gradually became even harder for him to see straight ahead. Glasses didn’t help. He had to turn his head to use his peripheral vision to read or watch television. “The angle got more severe as it progressed,” says Mencer, now 58. He began to get muscle spasms in his neck. “It went from turning the head to almost turning the body.”

He told the doctor who examined him in the fall of 1964, that he wanted to be a fighter pilot and then an astronaut. “He didn’t say much at first, but then he said, ‘Well, you might want to think about a new line,’” Mencer recalls. He was diagnosed with juvenile macular degeneration, which would only get worse, and for which there was no cure. The doctor told his mother, Barbara Mencer, to contact the state Commission for the Blind. Her son, he said, would need its services.

The family was scheduled to move to Cinnaminson in South Jersey on the day before Halloween 1964, but before they left, Michael’s teacher, Sister Mary Augustine—a Sister of Charity who happened to be director of the Sister Miriam Teresa prayer league in the parish—gave him a memento with Sister Miriam Teresa’s hair to take home to his mother. “I remember a weird look on her face,” Mencer says about his mother’s reaction. “She said I looked straight at her, which I hadn’t done because usually I had to tilt my head. I just looked at her and said, ‘Ma, can I go out to play?’ and she said I just took off.”

Mencer started Braille lessons in the den of their new home, in anticipation of impending blindness, but when he went to the renowned Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia, doctors there found his vision was normal. None could explain what had happened. The Braille lessons stopped. Mencer began to ride a bike with ease. His mother believed he was cured through the intercession of Sister Miriam Teresa, but she kept that belief to herself until 1971, when she read a story in a church newspaper about the sainthood cause. Sensing a connection, she wrote a letter to the prayer league in Convent Station.

The letter was filed for further investigation, only to fall between two folders, where it remained unseen and forgotten—for 27 years.

When Barbara Mencer’s letter was unearthed in 1998, Sister Marian Jose Smith—the small but formidable chemistry professor at the College of Saint Elizabeth who was serving as vice-postulator of the cause—enlisted a former student to investigate: Dr. Mary Mazzarella, a retired Nutley pediatrician. They found Michael Mencer working as an electronics technician in Denver, his eyes healthy enough that he didn’t even need reading glasses. They found his mother in South Jersey, still holding on to several documents that became important evidence in the case: letters from the doctor and correspondence with the Commission for the Blind.

“In [the doctor’s] own handwriting we see he dilated the pupils and he sees black pigment in the area of the macula,” Mazzarella says, describing the doctor’s exam notes from 1964. The black pigment in the macula—the tissue in the retina that controls the central vision—was a symptom of macular degeneration, and the reason Michael couldn’t see straight ahead.

Four American ophthalmologists examined Michael as an adult, and 14 more—including nine in Rome—reviewed the case. At the Vatican, Sister Miriam Teresa was number 268 in line for review for sainthood by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. With the new findings, she jumped ahead to number 78.

In May 2012, Pope Benedict XVI declared Sister Miriam Teresa “Venerable”—one of just 16 Americans currently so designated. She still needed credit for a miracle in order to reach the next stage: beatification.

Reports of the Vatican doctors’ findings—that Michael Mencer’s cure was medically unexplainable—arrived in Convent Station on October 24, 2012, what would have been Sister Marian Jose’s 97th birthday. She had died three weeks earlier, and had been speaking on behalf of Sister Miriam Teresa’s cause until the end. “Maybe it took Marian Jose getting up to heaven to move it,” says Sister Mary Canavan.

A panel of theologians had to weigh in next, then a panel of cardinals and bishops, who subsequently met with the Pope. On the afternoon of December 17, 2013, Pope Francis decreed that the cure was indeed a miracle.

This year, on October 4, Sister Miriam Teresa will become “Blessed”—joining an even more exclusive club, with just seven American members—in a beatification ceremony at the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Newark. It will be the first such ceremony ever held in the United States. (Beatifications were previously held only in Rome; now they take place in the home countries of the beatified.)

Then the cause will enter its final stage. To be canonized as a saint, Sister Miriam Teresa will need credit for yet another miracle. The faithful will continue to pray to her, and the Vatican will have to decide if any of those prayers are answered in a miraculous way. Her supporters have even created a Facebook page.

“I think it’s amazing that someone from Bayonne, New Jersey—from New Jersey!—might be a saint,” says Sister Kathleen Flanagan, who uses “Greater Perfection”—a collection of Sister Miriam Teresa’s writings that anticipate by four decades some of the changes wrought by Vatican II—in her theology classes at the College of Saint Elizabeth. “That says to me, ‘Well, heck, if she’s a saint then any of us can become a saint, and maybe we just need to think about that a little bit more.’”

The altar at Sacred Heart will be thick with bishops—including a Byzantine Catholic eparch, to honor the faith into which Sister Miriam Teresa was born. The Mass will be led by Cardinal Angelo Amato, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Rome. Sister Mary, Sister Kathleen and a host of other Sisters of Charity will walk in a procession up the central aisle. Michael Mencer will walk with them, carrying the relic that he brought home from school when he was 8. He will not have to turn his head to the side as he walks toward the altar, but will see it looking straight ahead.

Kevin Coyne is freelance writer and teacher at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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