By Gretchen Keiser

The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, an order of sisters with several members already teaching school in Rome, Georgia, has agreed to send a sister to work in Cedartown and Polk County among the rural and urban poor.

“It’s a commitment as long as I’m needed,” said Sister Elizabeth Racko, D.C., a 43-year-old sister who will be coming to Cedartown this August. “It's a part of our community’s charism to stay in the community as long as we’re needed…I’m not going there just to be there, but to fill a recognized need.”

Sister Racko’s response is to the need seen by Father Patrick Bishop, who is pastor of St. Bernadette’s Church in Cedartown, where the 87 Catholic families make up a tiny percentage of the town’s population of 8,700. Surrounding Polk County, with a population of approximately 3,200, is home to many who are isolated and only marginally making ends meet, said Father Bishop.

While she will be coming to St. Bernadette’s, Sister Racko’s efforts to reach the poor and those in need will also be on behalf of the Cedartown Ministerial Association, which includes Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian and Pentecostal churches, Father Bishop said.

Her job will be as “a full-time minister of the Gospel reaching out to those in need in the name of all,” Sister Racko said in a telephone interview from Portsmouth, Va., where she is working and living now.

Father Bishop, who became pastor of St. Bernadette’s parish in 1983, “following the tragic death of Father Vinnie Mulvin,” said he has become increasingly aware of those who are poor in the community, whose presence, because they are more isolated than those in urban ghettoes, can be overlooked.

“The human tragedy of people who suffer alone I have become much more aware of,” he said. “The best way I can describe what we hear from them is whimpers, not even cries.”

He gave the example of two women he had seen recently “picking through discarded clothes in a city dumpster” looking for clothes for their children. As they found usable clothes, “I saw them fold them and put them aside in a neat pile” as shoppers would with new items in a department store, he said.

The poor include the elderly, “the marginally successful small farmers” who may be pushed into the ranks of the poor by the current drought, struggling blue-collar families and Cedartown’s Mexican community of about 100 or more young people in their late teens and twenties who have been drawn there by the promise of work in a meat processing plant.

For all of these people “I feel, and the ministerial association feels, there has to be some kind of outreach to them,” Father Bishop said. “Sister would be trying to get out and meet these people and help them manage.”

St. Bernadette’s parishioners bring food to Mass every Sunday, he said, and with three other churches rotate giving out food to those in need. In addition, a fund set up in the name of Father Mulvin is used to help those who can’t pay utility bills or need other kinds of emergency financial aid.

But, he said, “we’re giving food and money to the same people over and over again” in some cases. “We need to work with them to be sure they are getting the kind of public assistance they need…and to know how and what to buy with that assistance.”

Because of the parish situation, the order has not asked for a stipend for Sister Racko and has asked the parish simply to provide a car, insurance and maintenance so that she can carry out her work in the rural area. However, even that generous offer is still beyond the means of St. Bernadette’s alone, Father Bishop said, and he is searching for outside support in order to pay for the transportation and other costs that will support Sister Racko’s work.

“One of the charitable organizations is considering helping us, but right now I have $150 in the bank for Sister Elizabeth and that is it,” he said.

The sister, meanwhile, has begun preparations to work in the community. Coming to Georgia over Memorial Day weekend to visit, she also wrote the parish recently that she had chosen to make her own retreat in preparation for coming at the same time as St. Bernadette’s youth were having a retreat.

An elementary school teacher for the last 21 years in Richmond and Portsmouth, Va. and Washington, D.C., she has also spent a number of summers working with youth Bible study programs and assistance programs in rural Alabama and South Carolina. That experience includes three summers in Langley, S.C., between Aiken and North Augusta, as a team member and coordinator of a program of assistance to the poor as a worker with children and youth, she said.

A member for 13 years of a black parish in Washington, D.C., she is planning to study Spanish this summer in El Paso, Texas, to learn the language and something of the Mexican culture before coming to Cedartown.

Since 1830, the Daughters of Charity worked with youth in forming Marian Associations, she said, which incorporate spiritual development with service to the poor. “Youngsters have this in them to reach out to others, but they don’t know how to do that,” she said. “If there’s a need for it, I would be happy to start that organization in Cedartown.”

One hope for her presence in the community is that it will reach out to those in need where many do not know Catholics and where the church is little understood. Father Bishop said that the element of isolation was the overwhelming factor for the poor in Polk County, isolation both from one another and, in some cases, from the church.

“These people have no representatives, they have no boards, no lobbying groups,” he said.

“The poor I’m worried about are the ones who come to our attention from time to time, when their roofs are needing repair or they are having their power cut off,” he said. “Many of them go to church, many do not…The less exposure they have to other people, the less understanding they have of what others are like.

Sister Racko’s work will primarily to make a human connection with these people, he said, and then to make recommendations to the parish and the ministerial association of what the real needs of the poor are and how the Christian churches can help them.

Her presence will be obvious in one way, she observed, by the habit of her order which she wears. However, she is also accustomed to being a part of a Catholic minority, coming from Virginia where the Catholic population is about three percent, she said. Looking ahead to cooperative efforts, she said, “I think when you work with people for the same goal, you break down prejudice.”

She will live with the sisters of her order already in Rome and will be their superior, known in the order as the Sister Servant.

In Cedartown “I hope to be a good listener and an advocate for those in need,” she said. “I will be open to what the Lord wants me to do.”