By Msgr. Noel C. Burtenshaw

Over 40 years ago, before she took the sister’s veil, Sister Margaret Cooney had obtained a law degree. She joined the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart and got herself a master’s degree in literature from Catholic University. She received a fellowship to Oxford University in England. The Wall Street Journal gave her a journalism award. She became a professor of English at D’Youville College in Buffalo.

So what is this remarkable woman doing counseling alcoholics and drug addicts in Atlanta?

“I came to Atlanta in 1975 to teach at St. Jude’s School,” says this ever-youthful sister, “but I made it known that I was interested in helping victims of addiction. Well, word came pretty quickly from a most unusual doctor who was organizing a most unusual center that he wanted me to see. It began a new day in my career.”

The “unusual doctor” was G. Douglas Talbot, an addictionologist and psychiatrist who was organizing Ridgeview Institute in Smyrna. “Dr. Talbot persuaded me to obtain qualification as a Clinical Pastoral Educator (CPE). I did and on Easter Sunday 1977, the work under this great man began at Ridgeview.”

Dr. Talbot is one of the nation’s foremost proponents of the disease concept of addiction. According to Talbot, drug and alcohol dependency is a three-fold disease, emotional, physical and spiritual. Sister Margaret Cooney is a treatment specialist when it comes to the victim’s spiritual recovery.

“The patient is bankrupt spiritually when he comes to us,” says Sister Margaret. “His disease told him to be dishonest, to lie, to be sneaky. The drug became his god. He used anyone and anything to get it. Faith-wise, he may have very little. Helping that side of recovery is most rewarding.”

Every morning Sister Margaret applies her skills as therapist when she leads the patients in spiritual “group.” “They organize it and they love to do it,” says Sister. But the medicinal hand of this unusual nun is always there.

Sunday mornings from 10 to 11 the patients bring their families and all participate in the spiritual medication of Sister Margaret. “At Ridgeview we say addiction is a family disease. We treat the family here and then in aftercare we continue the treatment for two years after the patient goes home. The entire family is touched by the disease; the entire family needs repair.”

But Sister Margaret’s ministry goes deeper. “Addicts have often lost contact with their church and also with the leaders of the church. They have shunned contact with the clergy or have been looked down upon by the clergy who sometimes consider them simply morally evil. So we try to reach out to the ministers.”

Boldly, Sister Margaret has reached out from the beginning. In October 1977, as she began her work for addicts, Sister Margaret and Ridgeview sponsored the first Clergy Day at the Smyrna center. “That first year 27 attended,” remembers Sister. “Last year 109 were present. And the attitudes have greatly changed. The disease concept of chemical dependency has grown in everyone’s experience.”

Sister tells the story of a prominent local minister who attended a seminar at Ridgeview some years ago and when thanking the staff for the enlightening experience of the day repeated his own belief that their patients had to be helped to get rid of their “bad habits.”

But Sister is quick to withhold blaming the clergy. “Dr. Talbot has special concern for fellow doctors,” says Sister Margaret. “The medical profession is still slow to treat addiction as a disease. But he reaches out to them with the message and many of his patients here at Ridgeview are impaired physicians from across the nation and Canada. It is amazing. Acceptance can be slow.”

Sister Margaret has those facts about addiction at the tips of her fingers, facts that we all dread to hear. Doctors liberally prescribing Valium and Librium and a host of other drugs to housewives and pressurized business people until the line of addiction has been crossed.

Drugstores peddling non-prescription drugs, pills and remedies at a lively rate to victims who eventually go under to the chemical. “Ridgeview Institute through its program and its aftercare, which often includes supervised half-way houses, carries the message that these broken lives are victims of a disease. The moralist and the medics are beginning to see it.”

Last year some of Sister Margaret’s former patients spoke to the gathered clergy. “That is always an experience,” says Sister Margaret. “One of our recovering addicts really put it well last year when he said that each time he looked for a pamphlet on addiction at his church, he found it lined up with the books on immorality. It was on the rack with all the ‘shall nots.’ The addict is not evil, he is sick.”

Sister Margaret knows that recovery can be the most courageous path any human being can travel.

“We understand that,” says this well-adjusted professional religious woman. “If clergy also understand it, so will the flock. Very often in the past as the patient left he would say ‘I don’t want to go back to church, Sister. They just would not understand.’ Well, that attitude is changing. We see it--it’s changing.”

Clergy Day at Ridgeview is being planned once more. Sister Margaret is preparing to invite clergy from across the metro area to this experience of education on Tuesday, Oct. 13. “It has been a deepening experience for us all in the past,” says Sister. “This year will be beneficial too.”

If attitudes among professionals, including clergy, are changing concerning the disease aspect of addiction, then Ridgeview Institute and centers like it can be thanked for this ministry.

And Margaret Cooney, a Catholic Sister for this time of growth, is a vital part of that rich outreach.