Upset about the incident and finding it hard to carry on with her work, she approached Mother Teresa later that evening. Littlejohn said she was fearful that Mother Teresa would chastise her and say she should have "turned the other cheek," however, what she heard was the opposite.
Mother Teresa, she said, told her it was a "grace from God" that she tried to chase the man down, and applauded her effort to catch him. However, she also cautioned her that it's "unwise to ever go out as a woman alone," which is why the Missionaries always go out two-by-two.
After the conversation, Littlejohn said Mother Teresa took time to pray with her, and in the end she left feeling "so elated, much more so than if it had never happened."
"This is the time she takes for one person, I mean who was I? I was nobody, I was a volunteer among many dozens of other volunteers who were there at that time, I was among thousands of volunteers who had been there over the decades and she took the time to listen to my story."
Littlejohn then recalled how at one point during her stay, Mother Teresa actually invited her to join the Missionaries of Charity.
The sisters had periodic spiritual retreats, and that there was always a certain time or talk that the volunteers could attend. One of the retreats, Littlejohn noted, was dedicated to the topic that "everyone on earth has a heavenly name" that they will discover only when they get to heaven.
As she was leaving the retreat alongside the stream of other volunteers, Littlejohn said Mother Teresa happened to be right outside the room, and walked straight up to her.
Mother Teresa, she said, "came up to me and took my hand in her two hands and she said, 'Heart full of Love, you must take the sari,'" referring to a typical Indian garment worn by women.
The habit for The Missionaries of Charity is a white sari with blue lines running along the edges, representing both purity and the Virgin Mary.
"I felt like she was calling me by my heavenly name," Littlejohn said, explaining that Mother Teresa's words "you must take the sari" were a direct invitation to come live with the community for two weeks, to discern whether or not it might be her vocation.
Littlejohn said she had wanted to say yes, but couldn't, since she was already married – a fact that shocked Mother Teresa, who "in her purity" never realized the man coming and going everywhere with Littlejohn was her husband, despite the fact they both wore their wedding rings.
Mother Teresa then invited the couple to become Lay Missionaries of Charity, taking them to the small room the size of a restaurant booth that served as the administrative headquarters of the order.
While Littlejohn was accustomed to spacious legal "war rooms" stacked to the ceiling with documents, "there was none of that with Mother Teresa."
"She had one little rickety file cabinet" from which she pulled the typewritten copy of the rules for the Lay Missionaries of Charity. It was the only copy.
"I just looked at this document and I thought to myself, 'if I were an irresponsible person and just walked off with this without returning it to her, she would not have the rules of the Lay Missionaries of Charity, it would be gone,'" Littlejohn said, but noted that this is how Mother Teresa lived.
"She lived such a life of faith that she just depended completely on God," for both the small things and the big.
After going through the rules and discussing them together, Littlejohn and her husband came to the conclusion that being lay missionaries with the order, while beautiful, wasn't for them.
However, even though they said no, "I feel that my experience with Mother Teresa has had enormous influence on my life," Littlejohn said, adding that the order's ministry of picking up dying babies off the street "is the spiritual inspiration" of the Save a Girl Campaign her organization is promoting in China.
The difference between the two is that while Mother Teresa and her sisters would shelter and care for dying or rejected babies, Littlejohn's organization encourages mothers to keep their daughters, giving them a monthly stipend to help with expenses.
While her organization works to fight gender discrimination in China, Littlejohn said that it was in India that she first encountered female gendercide.
While on a trip to India before working with the Missionaries of Charity, Littlejohn said she had been visiting Varanasi, and that as she was stepping from the shore of the Ganges River into a small motor boat for a ride, "I look down and right beneath me was a fully formed, dead baby girl floating in the water."
"I was aghast," she said, explaining that the baby "looked absolutely perfect. It did not look like a child that had died from some kind of illness, this was a perfectly beautiful baby girl, and I'll never forget it."
Working with Mother Teresa and her order prompted Littlejohn to both take another look at the faith of her childhood, and to look more closely to the needs of others.
"One of the things that I learned with Mother Teresa (is) what your limits are; you learn what the limits to your holiness are, you learn to expand your limits," she said, explaining that at first she was afraid to touch people with diseases, for fear of contamination.
However, "as you continue working your compassion for the person grows, so you stop thinking so much about yourself and you start thinking more about them and what they're going through and wanting to somehow relieve their suffering," she said.
She referred to the phrase "I Thirst," which was inspired by Mother Teresa and is written on the wall beside a crucifix in every Missionaries of Charity house.
"Loving Jesus in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor, as she would call it, was satisfying his thirst for souls," she said, explaining that the phrase serves as an inspiration to her and her work.
While her organization has a "justice-oriented mission," exposing forced abortion and sex-selective abortion in China, Littlejohn said "there's this whole mercy aspect of it, which is helping these women and baby girls, these women who do not want to abort," and offering a new, countercultural message that girls are just as good as boys.
"I think that's very in line with what Mother Teresa was doing, and she's a profound inspiration to me in the entire direction of my life."
In a letter she wrote to friends and family while in Calcutta, which was later published in the Yale Law Report, Littlejohn described Mother Teresa as "a short woman in her mid-seventies, bent at mid-back as if in a permanent posture of prayer."
"Her face is lined with love, and her deeply crinkled eyes pour out compassion. She is in such a state of grace that when she takes your hand, smiles and says, 'God bless you,' she opens the inner chambers of your soul and leaves you ecstatic for hours."
As someone born into an upper-class Albanian family, Mother Teresa is proof that "even those of us with privileged pasts can aspire to goodness," Littlejohn said, explaining that the nun "seems blissfully unconcerned about her stature in the world."
"I don't think she even thinks about how others view her. She just loves people, especially the poor, and caresses the hand of the leper with the same joy and respect with which she kisses the hand of the Pope or shakes the hand of a president."
Littlejohn described Mother Teresa's presence in the convent as "gentle," and said she kept "a low profile."
"She does not encourage hero worship, nor does she receive it. The nuns love her but are not preoccupied with her the way we Westerners are," she said, explaining that their attention was always on their prayer and on their work, "as it should be."
"This will leave the order strong once she is gone. For me, she is a brilliant example of someone who had the guts to give up an easy upper-class life to do God's work."
Elise Harris was senior Rome correspondent for CNA from 2012 to 2018.