When Joe McGowan Jr. worked as Associated Press bureau chief in India, he would often meet with locals to pick their brains for possible leads — anything that might offer an unusual angle he could craft into a gripping feature for the wire service’s worldwide audience.
In 1966, at dinner with an editor of a Calcutta publication, he made the usual inquiries. And the uncommon response led him to a remarkable narrative that continues to have resonance today.
“He said, ‘Well, there’s that funny little nun who goes around picking up dying people every morning,'” recalls McGowan, 85, from his home in Broomfield. “I knew I had a story.”
In fact, he introduced much of the world to Mother Teresa, who will be declared a saint on Sunday by Pope Francis in a ceremony in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. The canonization comes 19 years after her 1997 death.
“I felt for a number of years it would happen,” says McGowan, who retired in 1998 after 11 years as AP’s Denver bureau chief. “I think she’s been a saint her entire life.”
For two steaming hot days in March of 1966, he followed Mother Teresa through the streets of Calcutta — the city was renamed Kolkata in 2001 — accompanied by two men who pushed a gurney to area hospitals. Amid rampant overcrowding, the hospitals simply expelled patients believed to be terminally ill onto the streets if they didn’t have family to care for them.
Mother Teresa collected the destitute and wheeled them to her Home for the Dying, a converted Hindu temple where dozens of men and women lay on thin mats while sisters cared for them, offering tea and whatever comfort they could. McGowan remembers the workers reading to Muslim patients from the Koran, giving Hindus water from the sacred Ganges River and administering Catholics last rites.
“Under her care and her fellow sisters’, some got well and got up and walked out,” McGowan says. “Most did not. But some did.”
He filed an extensive news feature intended for papers to display prominently in their largest circulation Sunday editions. He recalls that the work provided the first worldwide coverage of Mother Teresa’s now well-chronicled calling.
“Obviously, she impressed me,” he says. “I thought she was doing amazing work and was totally dedicated to it.”
While McGowan’s journalism career took him all over the world, he and Mother Teresa crossed paths one more time. During a prayer service at McNichols Sports Arena in 1989, she announced she would launch a mission in Denver to serve the poor.
Although Mother Teresa wasn’t offering press availability, McGowan contacted the Denver archdiocese and sent copies of his 1966 stories along with his request to meet with her. She agreed, and he chatted with her in a room at the arena. Afterward, she gave him a handwritten note, which he still has displayed at his home along with a photo of them together: “Love others as Jesus loves you, God bless you. M. Teresa.”
Did she recall that first meeting when a young reporter chronicled her work for the world?
“She said she did.”
He certainly never forgot. His brush with Mother Teresa provided an enduring example of goodness in a world that, for an international newsman, too often put him in close proximity to violence and disaster.
“I’d seen that side of the world,” McGowan says. “A few short years later, I see a woman try to comfort people and do good things. She definitely was a balance for me — and so desperately needed in that city of Calcutta.”
*Because of a reporter’s error, the story has been updated as of September 6, 2016 to reflect McGowan’s correct retirement year of 1998. The former Denver Associated Press bureau chief Joe McGowan Jr. incorrectly noted his retirement date.