By Gretchen Keiser

The sisters who staff Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cancer Home had white orchid corsages adorning their plain white habits April 11.

The flowers, and two days of celebrations at the Cancer Home, marked the 50^th Anniversary of the sisters’ arrival in Atlanta in April 1939.

In the last five decades, the Hawthorne Dominican sisters have cared for 14,000 cancer patients and cared for them, as was their foundress’ vision, without charge.

The golden anniversary celebration began with Mass at Sacred Heart Church in Atlanta where Father Richard Lopez, the homilist, called the Cancer Home “a home and a house of peace…and a home and house of joy.”

Father Lopez at one time lived at the Cancer Home for two years, filling in as chaplain. A teacher at St. Pius X High School, he said he regularly tells his students caught up in the pressure for success and material things that the Hawthorne Dominican sisters - “celibate…broke” and working daily with the sick and dying - are the “happiest people I’ve ever met.

For many people the word cancer inspires fear and dread, he said, but after visiting the Cancer Home that feeling changes to one of awe and love. “Why?” he asked. “It’s Jesus Christ.”

The order, whose full title is Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer, was founded by Rosa Hawthorne, daughter of author Nathaniel Hawthorne, at the turn of the century.

She began alone in the tenements of New York, living with and nursing the poor with cancer who were dreaded outcasts. She was joined by an artist named Alice Huber, and together they formed the order under Dominican auspices. The motherhouse is Rosary Hill in Hawthorne, New York, just north of New York City, and from that home, a group of sisters set out in 1939 to establish a free Cancer Home in Georgia.

The original building was the Hebrew Orphan’s House which served for 30 years and was replaced in 1974 by the new, present facility at 760 Washington St., S.W. As is the case with all the order’s buildings, it was paid for through donations without debt or financing.

On the first floor male patients are cared for and the second floor is for women. A first-floor chapel can be viewed from a second-floor balcony to which patients can be wheeled. Decorations, blooming plants and homey touches mark the rooms. A second-floor porch furnished with white wrought iron furniture is bright with yellow cushions and large green plants. A venerable oak tree with massive trunk stands in the back and shelters the yard, providing food for the eyes and the imagination. The nearby Atlanta Stadium is also a place of activity for patients to observe from the home or the gardens outside.

At the 52-bed home the sisters themselves provide basic nursing care for their patients, feeding and bathing them, changing dressings and bandages. Rose Hawthorne, whose name in Religious life became Mother Alphonsa, emphasized that this care must be given freely in love, without charge, and in compassion, without any abhorrence for the illness and its effects, said Sister M. Raphael Kennedy, O.P.

“God gives you the strength to do all that,” said Sister Raphael, convert to Catholicism who has been a member of the order for 39 years. “But you have to be faithful to prayer, to your meditation.”

“We didn’t come here because we were holy,” she emphasized. “We came here because we wanted to become holy.” According to Father Lopez, the home is a place of laughter and wit of those coming to terms with death. He recalled in his homily Father Patrick Connell, a chaplain at the Cancer Home, who was then nursed there during his own terminal illness. At one point a nurse leaned over the bed, checking to see if Father Connell was still living, Father

Lopez said. With one eye open and a twinkle, the priest confided to the nurse, “I’ll be the first to know.”

On another occasion, Father Lopez recalled, he was celebrating Christmas Mass at the home while Monsignor Michael Manning, in a wheelchair and almost without speech, took part. He brought the figure of the Christ child from the manger over to Monsignor Manning for a moment of adoration, Father Lopez said, and as he did Monsignor Manning spoke his “two words for the day.” “Looks Irish,” he said.

“You dear sisters, from the moment you cross the threshold of Rosary Hill and don’t look back, you tell us about a God and your God is charming, attractive, lovely and we want him,” Father Lopez said. “His smile, His love, His gentleness and His goodness are in these ladies.”

About Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cancer Home, people of the archdiocese say, “God is in the place we know it,” he concluded.

The principal celebrant of the Mass was Archbishop Eugene A. Marino, S.S.J. and other celebrants included Father Augustine Moore, O.C.S.O., retired abbot of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Monsignor Michael Regan, Monsignor Donald Kiernan, Father Walter Donovan, Father Edward Hennessey, Father Dan O’Connor, and Cancer Home chaplain, Father Joseph Drohan. Twenty or more priests of the archdiocese also concelebrated the Mass and other Religious women were special guests.

Mother M. Bernadette, O.P., the mother general of the Hawthorne Dominican order, came from Hawthorne, N.Y. for the anniversary.

Back at the grounds following the Mass, and on the following afternoon, an outdoor buffet under large yellow and white tents, music, tours of the home, a video presentation and bunches of yellow and white helium balloons tied to thousands of supporters of the Cancer Home. The auxiliary of the Cancer Home arranged for the celebrations and hosted the tours and other festivities.

Sister M. Rosalie Bricher, present superior, is the ninth to serve as superior of the home in Georgia. Sister M. Loretta Paurcell, who celebrated her 50^th anniversary as a Hawthorne Dominican last September, was one of the sisters to come from Rosary Hill in 1939 to open the home.

When they first arrived, “people were afraid of nuns,” Sister Loretta said in an interview at the time of her anniversary. “They appreciated very much the work. It took them a little time to realize that was all we wanted” and that dying patients would not be forcibly converted.

Initially many patients were from rural Georgia, she said, with limited access to medical care and often unaware they had cancer until the illness had progressed. Now those who cannot afford care include people of moderate means.

Free care seems unbelievable in this day, Sister Raphael acknowledged. But as a past superior of two of the order’s homes in Ohio and Minnesota, she said she had seen huge bills be met by large donations as soon as they arrived. “When the bill came in, the check came in too,” she said. “It’s awe-inspiring. It leaves you dumbfounded. But the Lord said, ‘Ask and you will receive.’”

She said she thought the work would continue as long as they remained faithful to Mother Alphonsa’s vision of free care and compassionate care.