When deliberating over whether or not to become a priest, Kinley Tshering – an extremely rare Catholic convert in his native Bhutan – asked God for a sign.

The sign came on an ensuing airplane flight when he discovered he was sitting next to Mother Teresa (now St Teresa of Calcutta). He soon joined the Jesuit Order and in 1995 became the first Catholic priest born in Bhutan – a landlocked South Asian country, surrounded by India and China, with a total population of about 800,000, some three-fourths of whom are Buddhists; most of the remaining one-fourth are Hindus, and Christians account for less than 1% of the population.

As a devout Buddhist family, Tshering’s parents actually took him as an infant to a monastery and dedicated him as a Buddhist monk. And yet he proceeded to receive a Catholic education. He tells how, as a small child in the early 1960s, “there weren’t many good schools in Bhutan.” So his family sent him to Catholic boarding schools in Darjeeling, India.

He proceeded to work in the business industry. But something about his conventional way of life left him unsatisfied and he continued to deliberate about becoming a priest.

For a long time, he had been praying to God to give him a sign to let him know that he should enter the priestly vocation.