NJ Monthly - October 2014

tomy)—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 astro-
naut. “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.