Miracle credited to Morris Twp. nun shaped man's life

Michael Mencer's life has taken amazing turns, starting one October day in 1963 when, at age 8, he was given a memento of Sister Miriam Teresa Demjanovich, a local nun who died in 1927.

Almost instantly, the boy, who had juvenile macular degeneration, was able to see.

Last December the Vatican determined that what happened to Mencer, now 58, was a bona fide miracle accomplished through the soul of the nun, a Sister of Charity in Convent Station until her death in 1927.

Because of the miracle, Sister Miriam Teresa has earned the Roman Catholic status of Blessed. Her beatification, the first to happen on American soil, will be celebrated Oct. 4 at Sacred Heart Basilica in Newark at a mass officiated by Cardinal Angelo Amato of Rome. Thousands are expected to attend.

Mencer, who now lives in Nebraska, will participate in the mass by walking down the aisle while carrying the precious memento—a strand of hair—that his third-grade teacher gave him a half century ago.

"What makes me a little sad is my mother can't make it," Mencer said. "She had a couple of strokes. Though she pretty much recovered, the medicine she's on makes her dizzy and tired."

It was his mother who first beheld what Mencer, to this day, calls "the cure." He shared as much of the story as he could before the beatification. The church requested he withhold some information until afterwards.

"I was given that hair and I looked at it," Mencer said. "Think about that: I only had peripheral vision. Most people can't see a piece of hair if they don't have central vision. This happened after my third-grade teacher, Sister Augusta, handed me the memento and the prayer card. I remember looking at her sideways. She handed me the prayer card, and I started walking home alone."

At the time, Mencer went to school at the Church of St. Anastasia in Teaneck.

"Somewhere between school and home, I was cured," Mencer added. "My mother said that when I got home, I looked at her straight on and asked, 'Can I go out and play?' She said, 'Sure.' I didn't run back in those days because of my eyesight. I have a scar on my head from a tree I hit."

After the cure, his vision was 20/20, as doctors would later learn. Today, he recalls that he was in shock. He'd been mentally preparing for complete blindness and even studying Braille.

To this day, Mencer uses only basic reading glasses. He hasn't had an eye checkup in a decade, he said, and doesn't use the reading glass prescription he has. What works best for him is a $10 off-the-shelf pair, the kind bought in drugstores.

The most unusual event of his boyhood, Mencer told the Daily Record, set off an unusual and itinerant life that, after graduation from Cinnaminson High School in 1974, was marked by many jobs in many industries and four bouts with testicular cancer.

"My life is almost like 'Knight Rider' (or) one of the TV shows back in the 1950s where the character would come into someone's life and then leave," he said. "I've had a lot of that. I'm like Clint Walker in 'Cheyenne.'"

The cancer was first diagnosed in October 1986, Mencer said, and spread to his lymph nodes and then to his liver and, almost, his lungs. The first two bouts spanned the late 1980s and early 1990s and the third and fourth, 2006 to 2008.

"I spent every birthday between 1986 and 1991 in the hospital," he recalled, adding he has been cancer free since 2008.

A single man, Mencer has lived in many states and worked many jobs from candy maker and auto tech to photocopier repairman and certified nursing assistant. He also has worked on tug boats, in produce, and in the oil industry, among others.

In 1990, during his second bout with cancer, he received a bone marrow transplant and chemo in Indianapolis, where his hospital experience inspired him to earn a degree in biomedical electronics at Indiana University-Purdue University. The timing of his graduation, he said, coincided with a hiring freeze at the hospital where he'd wanted to work.

Today, Mencer sees all his experiences in light of a pact he made with God in the years following the miracle.

"If you were to put a percentage on how the miracle affected my life, it would have to be 100 percent," he said. "It led me into the way I live—traveling and interacting with people, helping people, talking to them."

If he'd lived a conventional life, he said, he wouldn't have been able to touch so many lives with a helping hand—from assisting someone with a car problem to listening to the personal concerns of a nurse to conversing on spiritual topics with many people, including strangers.

The pact, he said, came shortly after the miracle, when he was 10.

"We already had moved to Cinnaminson in South Jersey. At that time, I was going to CCD (Continuing Catholic Development) classes," he recalled. "It was a perfect day at the beginning of spring. I was staring up at the clouds, thinking how I could thank God. I had a chat with him. I didn't hear him, but I just said, pure and simple, 'Whatever you want me to do, let me know.'"

At 12, he felt the need to ratify the contract but, he said, he was still young to make such a commitment.

"There were several ratifications later in life," he went on. "There was a ratification at 20 and then another one at about 27. That's when the deal was sealed. During those years, I was traveling a lot and realized that's what I like to do. I worked as a candy maker, so I would take three months off during the summer and travel in my van. Usually, I would go cross country with a friend."

One year, he tried to bicycle across the country but only got from Cinnaminson to Ohio—800 miles. There was a time on that trip, like other times in his life, that he felt a mystical connection to Sister Miriam Teresa. He recounted that he was in the woods when darkness fell faster than he'd expected. He'd had trouble finding his way back to his tent when "a bright light that came from nowhere" briefly appeared.

"It was enough to get me going in the right direction and then I found it," he said.

In the past year or two, Mencer said, the miracle comes up more and more in conversation and he believes that's because the world is ready for Sister Miriam Teresa. The church was different in the 1960s and 1970s, he said, before people started looking toward New Age religions.

"There was a lot of far-out spiritualism," he said, "but people are ready for this now. Sister Miriam Demjanovich fits in with modern day people. She appeals to people young and old."

In the Roman Catholic Church, a person is beatified — and called Blessed — after the Vatican certifies he or she is posthumously responsible for one miracle. If another miracle is ascribed to the intercession of Sister Miriam Teresa, she will be canonized and made a saint.

Lorraine Ash: 973-428-6660; lash@njpressmedia.com