Cardinal Sean O’Malley on Friday recalled meeting Mother Teresa and said he will celebrate Mass for her in Dorchester on Sunday, when Pope Francis officially makes her a saint in Rome.

Francis will canonize Mother Teresa, who died in 1997, at the Vatican.

“I know that the crowds in Rome are going to be just overwhelming,’’ O’Malley wrote on his blog, adding that a death in his family prevented him from the making the trip.

Instead, the leader of the Boston Archdiocese will “celebrate a Mass at Mother Teresa Parish in Dorchester with our local sisters,’’ he wrote. “So, on the morning of the canonization, we will have our own ‘little canonization’ here in the archdiocese.’’

O’Malley said he first met Mother Teresa, who dedicated her life to helping the poor in India and elsewhere, when he taught at the Catholic University of America and she visited the campus.

When she spoke of her experiences, O’Malley wrote, “everyone was weeping, it was just so powerful.’’

He said he later turned to her for help amid a “terrible scandal’’ in Fall River when he arrived there in the early 1990s, an apparent reference to a former priest in that diocese who was convicted of molesting children.

“I told her that the sisters [from the Missionaries of Charity] would be a healing presence in the diocese,’’ O’Malley wrote. He recalled that Mother Teresa then sent a community of nuns from her order to New Bedford.

Travis Andersen

globe correspondent

Travis Andersen can be reached at travis.andersen@globe.com.