By Jack Spalding, Editor, The Atlanta Journal

One of the remarkable places in Atlanta or anywhere else is the building on Washington Street called Our Lady of Perpetual Help.

It is a place where 12 nuns look after terminal cancer patients. That is it. Terminal cancer is prerequisite for admission and so is the inability to pay for care.

You would think it would be a grim place, a death row. Not at all. It should be depressing, but it isn't. It is cheerful. The patients comfort each other. The sisters who staff it are there out of love for the sufferers of this earth. A visitor may approach the place warily. He may even feel elated when he leaves. An acquaintanceship with suffering never hurt anyone. The end of life is not so fearful, so frightening, after all.

On Friday, October 8, there will be a groundbreaking ceremony for a new building. The sisters will be there, and the patients, and the many friends of the place.

The new home will cost $2,000,000.

It is another tribute of the faith of the nuns in the goodness of man. Their order is prohibited from publicly soliciting funds.

They need larger quarters. The old home was the Hebrew Orphanage on Washington Street, a vintage Victorian piece. The sisters have been in it since 1939. The time has come to move. The demands upon the place are heavy. Despite all, there still are too many terminal cases of cancer. So, the sisters are going ahead. The new building will be on the old grounds and when it is finished the old one will be torn down.

To visit the place is not punishment. Cheerfulness is the memory which remains. But sorrow built it, the sorrow of a remarkable woman for the sick and dying in the slums of New York.

This woman was Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, a daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne. She was aware of the tragedy of old age and untended illness in the slums. From this awareness grew a place where the old and the sick could die with dignity. From this community grew an order of nuns under the Rule of St. Dominic and six sister houses, one of which is in Atlanta. It is to the eternal good fortune of this city that this is so.

I remember when the sisters first came, at the invitation of Archbishop (then Bishop) Gerald P. O'Hara. They were friendless and alone, but not for long. Their work was understood immediately by a community strange to the ways of nuns and bishops, but which understood and sympathized with this work. I remember the arrival in the earliest days of an ancient black man from Marshallville, frightened of his exile, of the strange women in the strange clothes and I still remember the terror in his face. I recall thinking of the racial taboo broken by his admittance, but there was no trouble. Atlanta and Georgia understood immediately that here was a work of such importance that any sort of quibbling about race or creed would be absurd.

So the place has kept open, nourished by the prayers of the nuns and their friends, sustained by a loyal auxiliary which was ecumenical before the word became fashionable. This auxiliary sponsors one fund-raising event each year, a fashion show. The rest of the time, its members find many ways to help with goods, with making pads and bandages, visiting the patients and helping the nuns with their work.

As I said, it is one of the most remarkable places here or anywhere. It is testimony to the best in man. I shy away from death and from suffering and the times I have visited Our Lady of Perpetual Help have been with reluctance. But each visit has buoyed me, and has strengthened a shaky belief that mankind is worth saving.

The patients there gather strength from each other and from the nuns. In this one instance at least, it is the poor who have it better than the rich.