Pontiac — There aren’t many people who can get away with kidnapping a soon-to-be-saint, but Fr. Jim Kean managed it.

Technically, it wasn’t kidnapping — he was following his passenger’s orders — but when the passenger is Mother Teresa, alarm bells are sure to ring when you suddenly turned down a narrow Roman alley as the other cars in the caravan wiz by.

It was the late 1980s, and Fr. Kean was a member of the Brothers of the Word, a community in Rome affiliated with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. Fr. Kean had the honor of driving Mother Theresa from place to place “about eight times.”

During one of their trips, “I was driving Mother Teresa, and there was a priest beside me telling her about this mother who was terminally ill,” recalled Fr. Kean, now pastor of St. Damien of Molokai Parish in Pontiac. “Mother asked if we could go visit this village, so I turned rapidly down a side street, ditching the rest of the convoy.”

In an era before cellphones, the rest of the cars must have been confused; did a 22-year old American seminarian just kidnap Mother Teresa in Rome?

The three stopped at the village just outside of Rome, where now-Blessed Teresa visited the dying woman. Mother Teresa’s comforting face brought a smile to the woman, who was graced to have a future saint in her home, Fr. Kean recalled.

“It was a beautiful moment, but I could only think of how much I was in trouble,” Fr. Kean laughed. “Fortunately, Mother Teresa’s warm, affectionate smile was all she needed for the dying women.”

Love knows no language, which was convenient for Fr. Kean, who struggled relating what Mother Teresa was saying to the dying woman.

“This little old lady was glowing on her deathbed, so happy to see Mother Teresa, but she had this confused look when I tried to translate to her what Mother Teresa said,” Fr. Kean said. “I bumbled through the translation, so the old lady just had this confused look on her face and said, ‘What?’”

Words lost in translation — and accidently kidnapping one of the most beloved people of the 20th century — aside, Fr. Kean enjoyed his time driving around the woman he always knew was a saint.

“When you were with Mother Teresa, you knew you were in the presence of someone special,” Fr. Kean said. “She was truly authentic to her identity. You knew she was the Lord’s. She was always a saint, and now the Church is recognizing it.”