By Thea Jarvis

At Our Lady of Perpetual Help Home, Sister Mary de Paul Mullen, OP, is more than the Director of Nursing. An afternoon at the oasis of care that sits in the shadow of Fulton County Stadium proves to any visitor that Sister de Paul is the smiling sparkplug who makes the earth move under the feet of patients and staff alike.

“I’m not shy,” said Sister de Paul when asked about her unremitting ability to interface at all levels with all kinds of people.

As the oldest of four children growing up in Philadelphia in the sixties, she had been “fearless,” her mother told her, “not afraid of anybody.”

She rolled her eyes and grinned just thinking about it.

At 32, Sister de Paul has put her childhood gifts at the feet of the Lord, offering herself in service to persons with terminal cancer. She is a small, sturdy package of energy and care, balancing crisis and routine, schedules and treatments with an aplomb beyond her years.

“Anything you can say about Sister de Paul is an understatement,” said Father Joseph Drohan, chaplain at “Our Lady” who has watched sister in action during her five years at OLPH.

Sister de Paul is uncomfortable with such plaudits. She would rather speak of others.

“I’m learning how to delegate,” she said, pleased with the new tool she is mastering. Delegation means “utilizing people with their gifts,” she has found, giving them “an opportunity to contribute.”

Sister de Paul’s own contribution came just a year after high school graduation when she entered the Dominican Sisters of St. Rose of Lima. She had been thinking of a Religious vocation, she said, but such thoughts were put on a back burner while she edited her high school yearbook, played in the band, tutored, worked in the library, practiced her German and kept up eligibility in the National Honor Society. Recounting her proficiency in science and math, she modestly claimed to be “just geared that way.”

Her mother asked her to wait a year before entering Religious life, and Sister de Paul found herself in the interim at Bucks County College with an after-class job of cooking for Vincentian priests who ran a nearby school.

“They tolerated me,” she said of her culinary abilities, but one Vincentian, a friend and spiritual advisor, encouraged her interest in a Religious vocation.

“If you keep putting it off, will you ever get there?” he had asked.

Sister de Paul had considered and rejected the cloistered life, and learned of the Hawthorne Dominicans through an associate of her father, whose daughter was a member of the order. When her Vincentian friend urged her to revisit Hawthorne, New York, motherhouse of the Servants for the Relief of incurable Cancer, she traveled east and found things to her liking.

“Everything just seemed so right” at Hawthorne, she remembered. “I could just see myself doing it, fitting in.”

Her novitiate began shortly after that visit, and along with religious formation, Sister de Paul continued studies at Pace University in New York, where she eventually received an associate degree in nursing.

She spent a total of seven years at the Hawthorne motherhouse, working in the Rosary Hill Home that, like its six sister homes around the country, provides free care and support to those with terminal cancer.

In September, 1985, Sister de Paul arrived in Atlanta, assigned to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Home as director of Nursing.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” she said, admitting that she was “a little homesick for Rosary Hill” at the outset. That soon changed, however. She found Southerners “more trusting and a little more at ease” than the Northern folk she knew who are “less likely to let their barriers down.” She hopes that openness will not change as the South becomes more and more urbanized.

One change she is anticipating is a plan for the Summerhill Community to accommodate a future Olympic stadium. The Summerhill neighborhood in southwest Atlanta includes the present site of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Home.

“I hate the thought that this wonderful, well-built building would be torn down. I hate the destruction of the big tree,” Sister de Paul said, referring to the giant oak that has stood watch over the OLPH family in the 17 years the home has been on Washington Street.

“And that’s not the most important thing,” she continued. “The patient upheaval if we have to move” would take its toll.

Sister Paul acknowledged that, if Olympic plans involve the home in a move from its present facility, she and the sisters would be unable to care for patients while the move was going on. That, to her, would be the greatest concern.

“If it has to be,” she said, she would just accept it. “Maybe it’s a blessing we just don’t see yet.”

Though she would dismiss such an analogy as excessive, Sister de Paul is thought of by many as a blessing people can see and appreciate now.

“She’s an extraordinary person,” said Sister Mary Regis Shaughnessy, who has been mother superior at OLPH for the past two years. In the tireless way she gives of herself, Sister de Paul “has helped more people than you can imagine.”

Her own family medical history has perhaps been a factor in Sister de Paul’s affinity for her work.

“There was a lot of cancer in my own family,” she explained. “From the second grade through the time I finished school, there was an annual death to cancer. We lost a whole generation on my dad’s side.”

Her official duties require Sister de Paul to coordinate nursing care on OLPH’s first floor, where men patients are attended by male nurses. Second-floor care of women patients is handled by fellow Dominicans, she said.

But the happy reality of Sister de Paul is that she balances everything from rounding up hospital canines to meeting with distressed family members; from moving temperamental wheelchairs to fielding questions from inquiring visitors.

“I love the work I’m doing,” she said. “But if the community opened its doors to anything else, any type of patient I was asked to take care of,” including AIDS patients, “I’d do it.”

And she would.