Ex-Nuns Establish Own Sisterhood : Apartment Building Is Home for Lay Religious Group

Deep down, beneath the tinsel, the hectic socializing and the expensive presents, what most people probably want for Christmas is simple: a warm moment surrounded by family and friends, a chance to care for others and to feel that they, too, are loved.

For many, such feelings surface but once a year. For the residents of an unusual apartment building on Kenmore Avenue, however, such feelings endure year-round.

Forty women, members of the Immaculate Heart Community (IHC), a lay religious community with roots in a Catholic sisterhood, and two retired priests are the inhabitants of this three-story building in the Wilshire District.

From the outside, with its shingle-and-brick trim, the apartment building doesn’t stand out from others on the street. But in the carefully tended lobby there is a graceful statue of the Virgin Mary flanked by potted plants and a reproduction of a medieval Madonna and Child, introducing the dwelling’s spiritual dimension.

Upstairs, one of the apartments has been converted into a chapel with a modest crucifix on the wall, muted rose-colored carpet and a handmade oaken altar.

IHC was founded in 1970 when a group of nuns belonging to Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, desiring to modernize their order but unable to resolve their differences with the Catholic hierarchy, asked for dispensation from their vows and formed an independent community. The Sisters of the Immaculate Heart maintain a facility on Waverly Drive in the Los Felix area.

“We couldn’t accept the fact that men in Rome were going to tell us how to live,” says Marie Egan, IHC president. Today, IHC’s 192 members are energetically committed to a wide variety of service and education projects and to a shared spiritual life. Made up mostly of single Catholic women, the community also includes a few men, married members and members of other Christian denominations.

The community’s first residence was the “Mother House,” the old convent of the religious order, long a Los Angeles landmark at the corner of Franklin and Western avenues until it was demolished in 1971. (Immaculate Heart High School, run by IHC, still stands on the site.)

Although many IHMs (as members call themselves) were by then living on their own, “we had our elderly, including some women who needed custodial or nursing care, and we also had a lot of people who were coming out of institutional living, who had never cooked, for example,” says Egan, an associate professor of theology at Mount St. Mary’s College.

“At first, we literally walked down the street from the high school and leased a building nearby, but in 1980 we put everything we owned in hock and bought the building on Kenmore.”

“I like everything about living here,” says Mary Edwards, 94, the oldest resident of the house, a retired English teacher who is active in calligraphy and sewing classes and in the local chapter of Delta Kappa Gamma, a national sorority for teachers. “We’ve been friends and sisters for years. When you’ve all grown up together, you have a lot of common factors. I like having the freedom of an apartment and still being able to carry on our traditions. We have three Masses a day, and a Sunday retreat once a month for prayer and reflection. During Advent we have Sunday evening prayer services, too, so that we can tell the Lord we’re glad he’s coming.”

Bernadette Cahill, 78, says, “The house is full of a variety of people doing a variety of things. The diversity enriches our lives.” She describes herself as “retired” only on official government forms. She volunteers five days a week as a clerical worker at Immaculate Heart College Center, the successor to Immaculate Heart College.

Some residents, who range in age from 40 to 94, have salaried jobs, mostly as teacher or hospital worker. Others commit themselves to a considerable amount of volunteer work, visiting convalescent homes and hospitals, serving as “eucharistic ministers,” bringing communion to the bedridden or working with the homeless through various social agencies.

Mechtilde Lauer, for example, serves on a number of committees devoted to the welfare of the aging (“She has enough commendations to paper her apartment,” notes Edwards) and was recently invited to join the Task Force on Aging of the Los Angeles Archdiocese.

Residents pay rent, and about 20 of them pay an additional amount for meals in the communal dining room, a converted single apartment opening onto the sunny central patio. “They pay in the spirit of being independent,” Egan says. “If they have no income or no Social Security, we give them some spending money because we want them to be as self-directing as they can be. People in a religious community tend to be givers rather than takers. If you suddenly shift them into the ‘taker’ category, it’s debilitating.”

Glenda Ulfers, IHC director of recruitment, says older members view money as something to pass on, not something to keep for themselves. “Money becomes a gift,” she says, recounting the story of one elderly member who recently slipped a carefully hoarded $20 bill to the director of the residence kitchen to help defray higher food expenses that have occured due to striking supermarket employees.

One of the few reminders of the more regimented life style most of the women led before 1970 hangs on the wall in the residence infirmary, where the six members who need nursing care reside. A framed group picture shows several hundred sisters, all in black habits and white coifs, lined up in front of the high school on Franklin Avenue. The almost-anonymous faces in the picture contrast greatly with the colorfully dressed women who point themselves out.

“Some of us still have marks where the coif used to come,” says Anna Cecelia Hatfield, laughing. “And the summers were unbearable in the habit.”

Today, the women have only one visible item in common: a silver band, worn on the third finger of the left hand, engraved IHM.

Residents decorate their apartments to their own taste, combining the nondescript furniture that came with the apartment house with pieces bought and donated. “Everybody’s relatives are represented in some piece,” says Cahill, whose orderly room is decorated for Christmas with a somber, skillfully carved wooden creche she bought in the Italian Alps more than 30 years ago.

In contrast, Hatfield’s apartment is a jumble of holiday cookies and brightly wrapped packages awaiting the traditional afternoon Christmas party for residents.

“After we had to move out of the Mother House, I noticed how lonely it was on Christmas afternoon,” recounts Hatfield, wearing a Christmas-tree brooch on her bodice. “All the people who had relatives were out, and it was quite a letdown for the ones who were left, so I decided to give a party. The afternoon passed so quickly, and we had so much fun that the party became a tradition.”

Hatfield receives donations of presents all year long, and this year each resident will receive five or six gifts. (She also makes certain that each resident receives a present on her doorstep for her birthday and All Saint’s Day every year.) Another Kenmore Avenue tradition is the Christmas dinner donated by Queen of the Valley Hospital in West Covina, where IHM member Louise Messmer works in the dietary department.

“I like to think that we in the community are modeling a new way of relating to people,” Egan says. “Whatever the bond is, it’s like family. You know cousin Louie is still cousin Louie, no matter how long it’s been since you’ve seen him. The same is true with our members. Whether a member is nearby or faraway, she’s ours and we’re hers. Those bonds are real. There’s no official category for a group like ours, no page in canon law in Rome. As a visitor said to us recently, ‘You’re not held together by laws, you’re held together by your heartstrings.’ ”