Jim Bradshaw: Mother Teresa's little Acadiana miracle

Pope Francis made it official on Sept. 4 with solemn ceremonies at the Vatican, but the people of south Louisiana already knew they were in the presence of a saint when Mother Teresa visited Lafayette 30 years ago.
My lasting impression of that visit is of what a tiny, frail woman she was. I have a photo of her walking next to the Rev. Joe Brennan, who I’d guess is at least 6-foot4. Mother Teresa barely reached his elbow.
The Rev. Curtis Mallet noted the same thing when her relics were brought to Lafayette in 2010, including the sandals she was wearing at the time of her death in 1997.
He said “those little worn-out sandals” made such an impression on him because “they were so tiny because she was such a tiny person, but a powerful person walked in those shoes.”
Some 16,000 people turned out when Mother Teresa spoke in Lafayette in the summer of 1986. She’d made Father Brennan’s acquaintance when he spoke 10 years before at a Catholic Daughters convention in New Orleans. After that, he traveled twice to Calcutta to visit her and she decided to include a stop in Lafayette, where Brennan was pastor at St. Genevieve Church, during her 1986 trip to the United States.
“She talked quietly but with force about life and its beauty,” Brennan recalled in a memoir in 2002, “and then she announced that one of the reasons for her visit was to open a convent for her sisters in Lafayette. The announcement stunned the crowd,” he remembered, “but I had already been stunned by it, because I was supposed to do something to make it happen.”
The new convent for Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity was “an old and abandoned residence” across from St. John’s Cathedral in Lafayette that, Brennan said, “had not been inhabited for years, and showed it.”
He was further stunned when Mother Teresa told him that her nuns would arrive in less than a week.
“The house needed to be completely rewired. It needed complete new plumbing. It was filthy and had to be cleaned and painted from top to bottom. I needed workmen. I needed money. I needed a miracle.”
Mother Teresa just smiled. “She was used to such things happening,” he said. His spirit got a bit of a boost as he and she looked up after her talk and saw “a gigantic rainbow.” It was an omen for good, he thought, but a bit ephemeral in light of what needed to be done,
“I’d seen the rainbow, but I figured I’d also better find help in a hurry.,” he said.
He called Sheriff Donald Breaux, who told him not to worry.
He still worried.
But, somehow, miraculous work got done. “With the help of trusties from the Lafayette Parish Correctional Center, just a block away from the cathedral, and with many other volunteers, the impossible was accomplished in just four days. Mother Teresa’s sisters arrived in Lafayette, and their convent awaited them,” he said.
The Missionaries of Charity have now worked quietly among the poor in south Louisiana for three decades, and Mother Teresa’s legacy will continue here for years to come.
It began in part through a little miracle made possible at the hands of jail inmates who may not have fully understood who she was or the work of her “little sisters,” as Brennan called them, among the poor, the sick, and men and women like them, the imprisoned.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589