USD Magazine Fall 2016

The power of love is transcendent n 1991, then 81-year-old Mother Teresa of Calcutta was admitted to a local hospital after she was

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stricken with pneumonia while working with the poor in Tijuana. At the time, Msgr. Daniel Dillabough ’70 was chancellor for the Diocese of San Diego; he is now USD’s vice president of mission and ministry. “When Mother Teresa was in the hospital at San Diego’s Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation, Bishop Robert Brom and I went out to visit her.” said Msgr. Dillabough. “While we were visiting, the phone rang. The nurse picked it up and said that the Holy Father was on the line, Pope John Paul II. Mother Teresa ripped off her oxy- gen mask and grabbed the phone and said, ‘Bless me, Holy Father, bless me.’We could hear him saying, ‘I bless you, Mother and your Sisters.’ And then she said, ‘I love you, Holy Father, I love you.’ He said something back to her and she put the phone over her heart and looked at all of us, gathered around her bed — Sister Nirmala (her suc- cessor), a nurse, me and the bishop — and she said, ‘He loves me too.’ I thought that was such a power- ful moment. Here are two of the most important people not only in the Church, but for what they’ve done all over the world, and the most important thing for them was to say at that moment was, ‘I love you.’” During her hospital stay, Mother Teresa’s endless devotion to the poor inspired a number of American doctors to promise to staff mobile clinics in Tijuana, working in conjunction with the Missionaries of Charity community in Tijuana, one of hundreds of convents her order established around the world.

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