Newspaper Page Text
Cancer Home Pioneer Celebrates
50 Years As Hawthorne Dominican
BY GRETCHEN REISER
When she told her family she wanted to join an order of
nuns nursing incurable cancer patients, there was a “big
hullaballoo.”
“People thought it (cancer) was contagious — a great
many people did,” Sister M. Loretta Purcell, O.P. recalls.
“My people just didn’t think I could do it. I was never
strong.”
Her widowed father said, “It’s alright. You’ll be back in
two weeks.”
“He missed me, but I couldn’t wait any longer,” said
Sister Loretta, who had delayed her wish to enter religious
life because she was a companion to her father. “Two
weeks,” she remembers his prediction with amusement
now. “Two weeks, plus 50 years.”
September 19 Sister Loretta celebrates the 50th anniver
sary of the first vows she made in 1938 to the Hawthorne
Dominican Sisters, who brought her one year later to
Georgia to help found Our Lady of Perpetual Help Free
Cancer Home. A Mass celebrated by Archbishop Eugene A.
Marino, S.S.J. will be followed by a dinner in her honor.
“I wanted to be a sister from the time I was in grammar
school” in Flushing, New York “until I was about 21. Then I
must have shelved it and not thought about it again.” For
the 1930s, hers was a late vocation, and that fact, plus her
small stature and her nervousness makes her wonder now
that the order accepted her as a postulant in Hawthorne,
New York.
She suspects that it was the influence of one of the order’s
foundresses, Alice Huber, who was known as Mother Rose
in religious life. Miss Huber had joined with Rose
Hawthorne, the daughter of author Nathaniel Hawthorne,
to start the order in the 1890s. After her first contact with a
novice mistress, Sister Loretta had an interview with
Mother Rose, who accepted her.
A convert to Catholicism, Rose Hawthorne had taken
upon herself the plight of the destitute dying of cancer in
New York’s tenements in the 1890s, when cancer was
thought to be contagious, treatment was primitive, and suf
ferers, with terrible lesions and open wounds, were shunned
and feared. She moved into one of New York’s worst
neighborhoods and began taking in incurable patients and
nursing them herself. She was eventually joined by Miss
Huber, who was a young portrait painter, and other women.
They were received into the Third Order of St. Dominic in
1899.
To the young woman who met her in the 1930s, Alice
Huber was at first contact, “the most wonderful person I’ve
ever met.”
“From the time I first saw her I have never changed my
mind,” Sister Loretta said. “What a wonderful, wonderful
person.”
When a group of sisters was selected to travel to Georgia
to open the new home, Sister Loretta wondered because she
was not among those chosen. But “Mother Rose sent for
me,” she recalls. “ ‘I’m taking you South. But I want you to
see your father before you go.’ ”
Sister Loretta came a few months later on the train, with
the order’s co-foundress and another sister as her traveling
companions. The other young nuns wondered that she
might be frightened at the prospect of having such an
auspicious traveling companion, but Sister Loretta says,
f "\
Archbishop To Speak
At DeKalb Banquet
Archbishop Eugene A. Marino, S.S.J., will be guest
speaker at the eighth annual awards banquet of the
DeKalb Community Relations Commission on Satur
day, Oct. 1 at 6:30 p.m. at the Hyatt Regency Ravinia
Hotel, 4355 Ashford Dunwoody Road.
Gary Leshaw, the Decatur attorney who is one of
the leading advocates for the Cuban detainees in their
efforts to gain freedom in the United States, will
receive the citizenship award. This award is given to
a person who has unselfishly contributed time to a
volunteer effort. Six other county residents or
organizations will be honored at the event.
Tickets, at $35 each, may be purchased from the
Community Relations Commission office at 371-2393.
V
“Scared nothing. She’ll have a ball, she’ll enjoy it — which I
did.”
Arriving in Georgia, the habited nuns were an unfamiliar
spectacle to many of their patients. “People were afraid of
nuns. They appreciated very much the work. It took them a
little time to realize that was all we wanted” and that they
would not be forcibly converted while they were dying.
Lack of knowledge and limited treatment for cancer gave
the sisters many patients to care for, many of them country
people who did not recognize the nature of their illness until
they were seriously ill, Sister Loretta said.
Then as now the sisters did all the nursing of the patients
themselves at no charge. They have always taken in the
destitute who have been diagnosed as having incurable
cancer with no medical treatment. In these days, destitute
means those who have no means to afford the cost of a nurs
ing home in such a circumstance. Nine sisters care for
about 40 patients and there is a long waiting list of those
who would like to enter the home.
Sometimes the unexpected happens and the very sick
keep living. Mary Ann, a young girl who came to the Cancer
Home as a toddler, was expected to live six months, Sister
Loretta says, and she lived until she was almost 13 years
old. Her story was told in a book written by the sisters, with
an introduction by the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor.
Sister Loretta, who was the nurse particularly caring for
Mary Ann, said she was a powerful influence on her
caretakers. Tutors who came to teach her lessons at the
Cancer Home ended up joining religious life, the nun said.
“Mary Ann kept losing her tutors, about five anyway, if not
more, who became religious, about four to our order.”
Sister Loretta has acquired a bit of notoriety herself,
after commenting in a newspaper article that she was a
Georgia football fan and didn’t care about Notre Dame “at
all.” Coach Vince Dooley visited the Cancer Home after
wards and gave her a black Bulldogs hooded sweatshirt and
a “How ’Bout Them Dogs” tote bag. She was invited to be a
special guest at a Georgia game, but she prefers to watch
the games on television and is a dedicated football and
baseball fan.
After several decades of nursing the sick, Sister Loretta
was bookkeeper for the home and worked in the home’s
pharmacy. Now she visits patients, sets up tables and does
the dishes and assists in less strenuous ways. “Now I have
an avocation. I’m taking piano lessons,” from a teacher
who comes to the home, she says. “I’m not very good, but
nobody has to listen to me.”
Despite her family’s concerns years ago, she has been
strong enough for the work, crediting God’s grace and the
order’s physical and spiritual training. “I think if God gives
you a vocation, He gives you all you yourself need to handle
it with His help,” she says.
She is feisty about the religious habit she has worn for 50
years, a badge of honor that she would not part with under
any circumstances.
“I am proud of the habit — very proud — and I am very
proud that I have been accepted into this community,” she
says. “I have never lost those two feelings. I really think
God has been very, very good to me.”
St. Ann's Marks
BY MARY ANN FISCHER
St. Ann’s community of faith in Marietta is remembering
its tenth birthday with a series of marker events this fall.
Liturgies over the anniversary weekend, Sept. 16 -18, will
be festive. Archbishop Eugene Marino, S.S.J., will be
celebrant at the 12:15 Mass on the 18th. Father Tom Car-
roll, pastor of St. Ann’s from its beginning, will be joined by
LaSalettes who have served at St. Ann’s in the past as well
as by Father Brian Sheridan, M.S. and Father Jerry
Miller, M.S., present parochial vicars.
The music ministry, under the direction of Mary Root,
will combine existing groups — St. Ann’s Singers, the
schola, the primary choir and the junior choir — to lead the
congregation in praise and thanksgiving.
To begin the weekend events, over 400 parishioners will
dine and dance on Friday evening, recalling as they do, the
“St. Ann experience.”
At all the Masses over the anniversary weekend,
parishioners will receive a special “silver edition” of the
parish monthly newspaper, “The Spirit of St. Ann.” This
/ issue tells the history of the parish in story and picture.
PAGE 7 — The Georgia Bulletin, September 15, 1988
PLAYER AND FAN — Sister Loretta has an
avocation, learning to play the piano, but she is
also a dedicated Georgia Bulldogs fan, whose
enthusiasm attracted the attention of Coach
Vince Dooley.
10th Anniversary
One of the special projects to commemorate the anniver
sary was the design and crafting of the quilted banner that
hangs to the left of the altar. Parish groups contributed
financially toward this piece of art.
Parishioners have talked of doing a variety show for
several years. St. Ann’s tenth anniversary called for
talented members to come forward. Over 60 people
responded and have been rehearsing scenes from four
Broadway musicals — “Carousel,” “Sound of Music,”
“South Pacific” and “West Side Story.” This dinner
theatre, Oct. 7 and 8, is already sold out.
The Women’s Guild of St. Ann’s, as their gift celebrating
the anniversary, sponsored a professionally recorded tape
of Father Brian Sheridan’s songs. Many of these have
become the favorites of the residents of Americana Nursing
Home where Father Brian has served since his first week
at St. Ann’s almost six years ago. All the proceeds from the
sale of the tapes will go to the Argentina missions. Father
Brian will join fellow LaSalettes in Argentina when he
leaves St. Ann’s in November.
Ginny Dunigan is general chairperson for the tenth an
niversary activities.