By Rita McInerney, Staff Writer

PHILADELPHIA--Sister Peter Claver has a certain elfin quality. She wears her 95 years gently, her serenity as unwrinkled as her blouse.

New acquaintances are beguiled by her friendliness and hours spent at her side strengthen the first intimation of her vibrant faith, one destined not to wither.

Born Hannah Elizabeth Fahy, the daughter of a Catholic family whose roots in Rome, Ga., predate the Civil War, her youthful ambitions were for the ballet and theater.

When she realized she had a vocation to religious life, she prayed that God would let her work among poor blacks in the South. “I felt we owed so much to the black people,” she said. God granted that prayer and also led her to serve in black communities in the North in what is now almost seven decades of religious life.

For the past 15 years her base has been the motherhouse of her order in northeast Philadelphia, the Missionary Servants of the Blessed Trinity (MSBT). For a decade and a half she’s been reaching out to parishioners and the homeless, tutoring them, praying with and for them and doing whatever she can to enlarge and warm confined lives.

There is a distance of 95 years between the present and Sister Peter Claver’s birth in northwest Georgia. This doesn’t cloud her tales of ancestors she cherishes or dim happy family memories.

She is the daughter of a mother raised in the Jewish faith and an Irish Catholic father. Her maternal grandparents came to the South before the Civil War and lived in the large house at 320 E. Third Ave. in Rome.

‘During the war General (Nathan Bedford) Forrest took grandmother’s house for his headquarters and the family was among Rome citizens evacuated to Atlanta,” said Sister Peter Claver. Grandmother Hannah Jonas fled with her daughter Sarah, four. She gave birth to a son during the siege of Atlanta.

Grandfather Israel Jonas was serving as secretary to a Confederate general. When he died after the war, Hannah Jonas opened a millinery shop to support her family. She later began investing in property and, in time she and a Mr. Nevins built an opera house.

The theater booked touring stock companies and local performers.

“A Redemptorist priest, a Father (W.H.) Gross, when to grandmother and asked to rent the opera house for a week to give lectures on the Catholic faith.” Sarah Jonas attended the series, her daughter said.

Years later Sister Peter Claver read Father Gross’ version of her mother’s conversion in the archives of the Savannah Diocese. He became bishop of Savannah in 1873. The young sister was newly arrived in Savannah, assigned to organize a Catholic Charities bureau.

The Redemptorist bishop had written that her mother was the “greatest convert I’ve ever made.” He was especially impressed by her dedication to attending the teaching series, even when a “great storm” decimated one night’s attendance to two people, one of them Sarah, then 19.

One year later she married Thomas William Fahy. Sixteen years older than his bride, he came to Rome soon after the war from Ireland, where he had been apprenticed to a dealer in linens in Sligo. “My father had a dry goods store which later became Fahy’s Store, like Rich’s,” she recalled.

Hannah is the third youngest of 14 children born to Thomas and Sarah Fahy. Eleven lived to adulthood.

There were collective memories in the family about living in a place where priests were a rarity.

“I grew up knowing that priests, to keep the faith alive (in earlier days) would travel the area on horseback, stopping at places where the name sounded Catholic.”

In her girlhood, she said, “Marist priests would come from Atlanta twice a month to celebrate Mass, in summer just once a month.”

Rome’s few Catholic families “went to church regularly in Lent” and a Mrs. Givens led them in the stations of the cross.

Their place of worship was behind the Episcopal church on First Street. When her sister Janie finished her schooling at St. Cecelia’s, run by Dominican sisters in Nashville, she pumped the organ at the small wooden church.

“I remember Janie teaching me catechism in that cold church.” Janie, she said, never wed. She helped her mother raise the large brood. “She also taught music at home on the upright piano.”

Hannah Fahy studied music with Janie and also took elocution with a Mrs. Cook. “I was always performing,” the Trinitarian admits, a prelude to her brief career on the New York opera stage.

In the Fahy household, prayer was as routine as meals and fun, and the family rosary a regular act of faith. Sister Peter Claver remembers seeing her father, “an early riser, on his knees praying” as she passed his bedroom door.

Thomas Fahy, “wore himself out,” his daughter recalled. He died a few years before World War I. “He was anointed on the Sunday the priest was there (to celebrate Mass) and died the following Thursday. He was in his 70s.”

Both parents were highly respected in Rome and their children “never knew of any bigotry” because of their religion.

But their mother, until her death in 1933, fought anti-Catholicism in Georgia as a leader in the Catholic Laymen’s Association of Georgia formed to rebut the virulent bigotry abroad at the time. She never hesitated to take up her pen in response to the public rantings of a prominent bigot, Tom Watson, a U.S. congressman and later senator who made no secret of his hatred for the papists.

“She was a great one for writing. She was a remarkable woman. She was a business woman who managed her mother’s estate and a marvelous cook. She ran her house, raised her children and was active in civil affairs,” Sister Peter Claver said.

Although raised in a devout Catholic home, the young woman was graduated from college and working before she realized she had a vocation to religious life.

When she graduated from high school the one thing she wanted to do was study ballet in New York. “Mother never tried to discourage me,” she recalled. Instead, Sarah sent her daughter off to try her wings chaperoned by a brother who traveled North on business.

She enrolled in the dance class at the Metropolitan Opera. Her studies brought exciting opportunities for providing an “atmosphere” in the operas. In “Aida” she shared the boards with Enrico Caruso. “I was a page walking across the stage with a plate of fruit.”

Her adventures in New York ended when a brother returned from World War I service. He was “appalled” at his sister’s cosmopolitan life. “Take her out of there and put her in college,” he strongly advised his mother.

She entered Trinity College in Washington, D.C. “I don’t know how I ever got in.” But she had “a ball” until graduating in 1923. Eventually she began going to Mass and communion every day. “I promised to say litanies to the Sacred Heart and the Blessed Mother every day.” Her prayer was “please let me make my life worthwhile.” She decided to make a retreat during Holy Week and asked for a sign as to what she should do. Her work wasn’t frivolous. It was to develop Girl Scouying in Catholic institutions.

Her “mystical experience” occurred at a Holy Week retreat. She had prayed on her knees for an hour or more. Suddenly she became “very fearful” and left the chapel. She returned a short time later and again was deep into prayer. A woman dressed in gray entered the chapel. She came over and said “pray for me” to the young woman.

“When that happened everything (I felt) against being a nun disappeared. The ecstatic feeling lasted for a week. I’ve never had anything since like that.”

She found the work of Father Rhomas Augustine Judge in Alabama filled her need. Father Judge, ordained a Vincentian in 1899, had started a lay apostolate in both New England and Alabama. Some Northerners came south to help him. From his mission work, two new religious congregations were formed: the Missionary Servants of the Holy Trinity for priests and brothers, and the Missionary Servants of the Blessed Trinity for sisters.

Sister Peter Claver served in the South, “off and on” for many years. Early on she set up Catholic Social Services in Birmingham and was twice assigned to Catholic Social Services in Mobile. For several years she served Choctaw Indians at a settlement in Mississippi.

She worked extensively with black communities in New Jersey cities “long before desegregation,” teaching Catholic doctrine in homes and storefronts, any place where people could gather to learn about the faith. Her work took her to Paterson, Passaic, Newark, Montclair and other cities.

She remembers St. Peter Claver Church in Montclair, begun as a mission Jan. 14, 1931. Eight people attended the first meeting held in the basement of a nearby Catholic parish. Today, says the pastor, Father George C. Lutz, there are 360 families registered, African-American and Haitian-American for the most part.

Sister Peter Claver’s name is recorded in the parish library “for her great work during the early beginnings of the missions.” For her part, she recalls with affection “the faith of the people and the beautiful church” they struggled to build.

In 1933 two women alike in their boundless love for God and his poor met and became close friends.

That year Sister Peter Claver went to the Catholic Worker house in Manhattan to meet Dorothy Day. She made the trip from New Jersey after learning that a priest friend had given Day the dollar he had solicited from the Trinitarian.

“Dorothy always said it was the first donation she received to help pay for the first printing of The Catholic Worker,” the nun told a conference celebrating 50 years of the paper held at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass.

Day frequently visited the black missions in New Jersey where her friend served and spoke at a communion breakfast at the Montclair mission.

She traveled South to visit Sister Peter Claver in Mobile, Ala. The friends found their way to the Seamen’s Union where the surprised men told them no Catholic women had visited before and the head of the local said the church did nothing for them. They informed Bishop Thomas J. Toolen who appointed a chaplain and later built a center for the seamen across from the cathedral.

The friends visited the Monastery of the Holy Ghost in Conyers for the monks’ first midnight Easter Vigil and stayed long enough for Dorothy Day to give the community several conferences via a remote speaking system.

The pair also visited Sister Peter Claver’s sister Sarah in Atlanta where she had started a clinic for black people.

The last time Sister Peter Claver saw Dorothy Day alive was Nov. 8, 1980, Day’s 83rd birthday. She proudly showed the nun an afghan knitted by her daughter Tamar. The friends held hands and prayed the Our Father.

“I made the sign of the cross on her forehead and said a last goodbye to a lifelong friend.”

Dorothy Day died Nov. 28, 1980, with her daughter at her bedside. Her viewing was at Maryhouse on the lower East Side where she had lived with homeless women. He body rested in a plain pine box and she wore, as she did in life, a housedress and a kerchief around her head.

At her funeral Mass at Nativity, parish church of The Catholic Worker, the community “worshipped in joy and gratitude that God had called forth such a valiant woman to live, labor and witness among us,” Sister Peter Claver said.

The Trinitarian nun gave letters from her friend and her own writings about her to the Dorothy Day Collection in the Marquette University Archives in Milwaukee.

One letter from Day, dated Wednesday of Holy Week, 1965, was written after concluding a speaking trip. She wrote, “I made you the subject of talks many times on my trip. You bring the love of Christ everywhere, and you are a living example of the seed in the ground dying, rising and bearing fruit” dying again...”

“All well here--that is, the usual collection of saints and sinners and the usual sufferings. “In the cross is joy of spirit.”

In another letter, dated Sept. 8, 1975, Day said, “I wrote a letter full of groanings and complaints and then tore it up. So just consider I have wept on your shoulder, and say a few prayers for me, and I will for you, blessing you for all you have meant to me over the years. St. Peter Claver--I’m going to read about him today, thinking of you. Lives of the saints help one to understand the times we are living in and to take courage...”

In late January, actress Moira Kelly came to Philadelphia. She is portraying Dorothy Day in an upcoming film about her life and work.

The film is being made by Paulist Pictures, which also made the acclaimed film about the Archbishop Oscar Romero several years ago. Ms. Kelly has appeared in “The Cutting Edge,” “With Honors,” and was the voice of Simba in “The Lion King.”

Ms. Kelly wanted to get closer to the essence of the woman whose total advocation of non-violence and justice for the poor has drawn followers to this way of life for decades.

The actress stayed at the Catholic Worker House of Grace, one of two CW houses in Philadelphia’s inner city. Sister Peter Claver lunched with her there. “I shared stories of Dorothy.” she found the actress “young, gentle, unassuming.”

At the Sister Peter Claver Catholic Worker House, Moira Kelly helped with the after-school program for neighborhood children, according to Susan Dietrich, a volunteer there for five years.

Ms. Dietrich said her community goes regularly to the Solly Avenue motherhouse for spiritual direction from Sister Peter Claver. She usually has rosaries, prayerbooks and prayer cards for the volunteers to use in their work.

Her day is rich with prayer, Eucharist, reading, writing. Of prayer and the spiritual life she believes “you must give yourself entirely. It’s a question of falling in love.”

She rises at 5 a.m. and goes to the chapel to pray before the daily Mass at 6:45 a.m. She shares communal prayers with her sisters in religion in the early morning and late afternoon.

As often as she can during the day she visits the chapel to pray the rosary and read Scripture. There is private prayer in her room and current reading of books by such authors as Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Jewish theologian, and Thomas Keating, a Trappist who writes on centering prayer.

Then there are always people seeking her out--for spiritual direction, for help with a problem, or just to visit.

Family is still necessary for Sister Peter Claver, whether it be her siblings, Sarah, 100 and Julian, 96, who live in the Washington, D.C. area, her nieces and nephews, her Trinitarian congregation, or the friends who share her concern for the poor and for prisoners.

She keeps in closes touch with her nephew and godchild, Father Joseph Fahy, CP, who has served with the Hispanic Apostolate in North Georgia for several years.

His Passionist priesthood is a blessing to her, one she asked God for as she held him during his baptism at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

Last July at the motherhouse in Philadelphia, many members of her life gathered to share two events of great joy with her: her 68th year as a Trinitarian sister and her 95th birthday. The chapel was crowded for the Mass of celebration.

In his homily, Father Fahy mentioned her choice of a religious name, that of the Spanish Jesuit who “spent his life in heroic service to the slaves” whose inhumane condition he tried to alleviate. Father Fahy also dwelt on his aunt’s “remarkable and striking love of prayer, spirituality, of the Church’s magnificent legacy of liturgy and mysticism. Her daily, faithful fidelity to prayer, in spite of consuming demands upon her time and energy, is a permanent characteristic of her life as woman, Christian, religious and apostle.”

Letters from Dorothy Day were provided by Phillip M. Runkel, archivist Marquette University Library.