By Gretchen Keiser

When she told her family she wanted to join an order of nuns nursing incurable cancer patients, there was a "big hullabaloo."

"People thought it (cancer) was contagious -- a great many people did," Sister M. Loretta Purcell, OP, 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 wishes 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 50^th anniversary 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, SSJ, 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, NY.

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 1890's. 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 sufferers, 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, "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 nursing 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 afterwards 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."