Wahlberg shared that he grew up in a family that had “no real faith.”
“We were Catholics by tradition,” he said. “I never went to church with my parents. I never heard anybody invoke the name of Jesus Christ in my home — unless it was in a very angry way.”
Despite having eight brothers and sisters, he still felt alone. Wahlberg attended a different school every year from the first to the seventh grade and was introduced to alcohol at a young age.
“When you find alcohol and drugs and you’re a broken person and all of a sudden — just for that time while you’re under the influence — you don’t feel the shame and the guilt and the remorse and you don’t feel any of that, you’re numb from it, and so you chase that numbing feeling, and that’s what I did,” he said.
“While under the influence I was a dangerous person. I’d rob and steal from people that loved me, kind of just as a way to push them away. I felt like I didn’t deserve their love.”
Wahlberg ended up in the juvenile justice system, and by the time he was 17 years old he was on his way to serve a five-year sentence in state prison. After completing his sentence, he picked up a drink again on his first day out.
“It’s like being dropped off on another planet,” he recalled. “I didn’t understand the world anymore. I understood prison.”
He lasted six months on the streets before he was arrested again and received a six- to nine-year prison sentence. Knowing he would be older than 30 years old if he spent nine years in prison, Wahlberg tried “to create an illusion that I’m trying to become rehabilitated” in an effort to be released early.
“The only person going for it was the Catholic priest, Father Jim Freitas, the greatest man I’ve ever met in my life,” Wahlberg said.
“He approached me and he said, ‘Hey, I hear good things. I hear you’re trying to change your life. I have a job opening in the chapel,’” he shared. “Gives me a job in the chapel and within weeks tells me excitedly that Mother Teresa was coming to the prison. And I’m like, ‘Fantastic! That’s so great! Who’s Mother Teresa?’”
Wahlberg said that he now knows, at 58, that “she was sent there for me.”
(Story continues below)
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“Without a doubt in my mind,” he said. “I believe that there were breadcrumbs along the way in my life that I just never saw and I just kept running in the other direction away from God because I was raised with the ‘God’s going to get you’ [mentality] — that’s what I was raised on. Nobody ever told me God loved me, that Jesus died for me, nobody ever told me that. She gets up and says that God loves you. That Jesus Christ died for you. And there was a moment when she was speaking that it was just me and her.”
After this profound experience, Wahlberg recalled spending the night tossing and turning thinking about her words. The next morning he ran to Freitas and told him that he wanted to know more about this God that Mother Teresa spoke of — a God who loved him.
From that moment, Freitas began to catechize Wahlberg in preparation for his confirmation.
“He started to teach me lovingly about our faith and about our Jesus,” he said.
A few months later, Wahlberg received the news that he was transferring prisons. He ran to Freitas concerned.
Wahlberg recalled: “He picked the phone and he called the priest at the other prison and he said, ‘Hey Father, Father Freitas here. I got a special delivery FedEx package that’s coming to you. His name is Jim Wahlberg and this is where we are in the journey.’”
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