By Thea Jarvis

When Our Lady of Perpetual Help Home received a Christian Council award for outstanding community service March 90, it came as no surprise to the home’s unabashed admirers.

Although the facility is staffed and administered by the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, it draws many patients, supporters and volunteers from outside the Catholic population, making it an ecumenical as well as a medical success story.

Mary Knighton began her affiliation with Our Lady of Perpetual Help years ago when she modeled for their annual fashion show and luncheon. At that time, models were paid for their professional services.

“I’m a cured cancer patient,” said Mrs. Knighton, who underwent a mastectomy when she was “very, very young” and was one of the originators of the “Reach for Recovery” program. As a consequence, she would automatically “turn my check over to the home” when she finished her modeling duties.

When a friend and OLPH supporter later invited her to visit the home, she expected “a depressing place” where she would “see all this horrible stuff.” Instead she was “just overwhelmed. It was the most marvelous thing I had ever seen.”

The visit prompted her to approach other professional models, who agreed to work the OLPH luncheon as a benefit, without remuneration.

“They responded each year,” Mrs. Knighton said proudly. Although she herself has moved from runway into print and television commercials, she continues to coordinate the model pool for the annual fundraiser.

Models give their time “strictly on their own,” without agency affiliation, Mrs. Knighton explained. “We get the cream of the crop, the top ones in Atlanta.” What is more, the models enjoy being part of the OLPH family, she said. “They get real pleasure out of it.”

Father Tom Marrette, a priest of the United Episcopal Church, said he first visited the home in the early fifties when OLPH was located in the former Hebrew Orphans Home in Atlanta. At the time, he was assigned to visit the sick in his pastoral care.

“It was in the old building when the sisters did their own washing,” he related from his home in LaFayette, Georgia, on the Tennessee-Alabama line.

These days, Father Marrette and his wife, Sue Ellen, make the 250-mile round trip to OLPH at least once each week.

“I visit everybody in the home on Mondays,” when OLPH chaplain, Father Joe Drohan, is off. Father Marrette explained. He also fills in when Father Drohan takes his vacation each summer.

At the home, he finds a light and peaceful atmosphere. “The sisters are so cheery. It’s not institutional at all,” he said, describing wallpaper, drapes and linens designed to lift the spirits of visitors and patients alike.

“Death is not treated lightly” at OLPH, Father Marrette said, “but accepted, not with resignation, but with joy.”

Mrs. Marrette, who accompanies her husband on weekly trips to Atlanta, said the visits have been “the most rewarding experience of my life. I receive so much personal satisfaction. I’ve never seen a place like it.”

She related the story of an elderly man she met at the home some years ago.

“He was always laughing,” she recalled, though “he never had anybody.”

One day, as she passed his room, he asked her to hold his hand and say the Lord’s Prayer with him. Before they had finished praying together, her friend had died.

“I never felt the presence of the Lord so strongly,” said Mrs. Marrette of the experience. “I just know I was in the presence of the Lord.” It confirmed, for her, the sisters’ attitude that “death is a process of life,” she said.

Jacqueline Roos, a patient at OLPH since January, finds such an approach personally freeing.

“We’re all in the same boat,” said Mrs. Roos, a Chicago native and former special education teacher from Woodstock, Georgia. “We all know we have cancer, our time is limited. We’ve come face to face with our own mortality.”

With her friend, Nancy Whitley, Mrs. Roos holds court in the second-floor parlor, halloing patients, visitors and staff who pass in and out of the bright, open space.

The self-appointed welcomers, both of whom are Baptist, have begun a non-sectarian Bible study that meets in the parlor each morning at ten o’clock.

“We’re going to talk to each other anyway,” laughed Mrs. Roos. “We might as well talk about the Lord.”

The Dominicans at Our Lady of Perpetual Help are “nurses as well as sisters,” she reminded a visitor. For cancer patients like herself, threatened with a loss of dignity because of their illness, the nuns “take care of you with dignity and give you back your dignity.”

It was this kind of sensitivity that drew Sister Mary Clare Morrell to the Hawthornes. Raised on a farm in Larned, Kansas by a father who was a Seventh Day Adventist and a mother who attended the Presbyterian church, Sister Clare, surprisingly, “always felt called to be a sister.”

At the age of 10, she had asked her mother if she could be a nun and was told one had to be a member of their church to enter.

“That was the first time I knew they were Catholic,” she said, smiling.

In 1980, after attending a Christmas Eve Mass that was “like coming home,” she entered a RCIA program in Salt Lake City and converted to Catholicism. Later, an ad for the Hawthorne Dominicans in Catholic Digest caught her attention and she wrote to the vocations director at Hawthorne, New York, who invited her to visit.

“I liked the habit,” she said of her first impressions. “It proclaims to the rest of the world that you can live for the Lord. It’s a symbol of fidelity.”

She also “liked the idea of community,” and found that, in the order’s small population of 90 to 100 women, “everybody got along well together.”

“What the patients eat the sisters eat,” she explained. “If we have a feastday, they eat the same food we do. Things like that really impressed me.”

Sister Clare entered the Dominican novitiate at Hawthorne and spent six and a half years there before coming to Atlanta, where she has cared for patients at OLPH for over a year. Last fall, she professed final vows, committing herself to what she describes as “a hard life,” but one she finds joyful and satisfying.

“I feel happy and fulfilled that I can help someone find their peace with God,” she said, where they are “in comfort, pain-free, happy and at peace.”

The goal of most medical institutions, Sister Clare said, is to help people get better. “Here, we strive to help them be the best they can be until the Lord calls them.”