Good Deeds, Mixed Reviews : Novice Nuns Emulate Mother Teresa In S.F., Get Varied Reactions

Nearly 50 novice nuns are here learning to emulate Mother Teresa, the celebrated “saint of the gutters” of Calcutta, and they have generally endeared residents to their self-denying and charitable ways.

Since the convent was quietly established three years ago, stories of the nuns’ spartan life abound:

- Not long after finding an empty convent in a middle-class neighborhood, the nuns removed all of the carpets except in a room where they kneel in prayer. The poorest of the poor don’t have carpeting, they explained.

- Catholic neighbors offered to buy them a washer and dryer after noticing that the sisters laundered by hand and hung the clothes to dry on the roof. The sisters declined, saying that really poor people don’t have washers and dryers.

- Priests living in the nearby rectory of St. Paul’s Church noticed one day that they didn’t have any hot water. It seems the sisters, whose convent is on the same water line, wanted to forgo hot water, because the desperately poor. . . .

Hot Water Restored

The priests arranged to have their hot water restored.

“People love them. Who doesn’t love Mother Teresa?” said Father Miles Riley, information director for the San Francisco Archdiocese.

But some people don’t love what Mother Teresa’s nuns--who soon may expand their work to Los Angeles--started doing recently on Valencia Street here.

Shop owners on that street--not a prosperous area but not run-down, either--did not object when four sisters moved into a building a year ago and opened a shelter for pregnant women, both single and married women in troubled circumstances.

But about a month ago, the sisters also started a soup kitchen there.

“It has a bad effect on this block,” complained Ali Yarandi, owner of the neighboring Liberty Lighting, who specializes in assembling and repairing Victorian-style lamps.

“My customers are mostly ladies and they are discouraged from coming here by the bummers,” a word Yarandi used to describe people he viewed as vagrants and drunks among the 10, 15 or more people who gather for meals in the late afternoons.

“I don’t have anything against poor people,” he said. Pointing to his open mouth, Yarandi said, “I eat one meal a day to save money.”

Shaking his head, Yarandi said, “I’m sorry, but Mother Teresa in this area is a pain.”

Michael Rosenthal, co-owner of Modern Times Bookstore on the other side of the soup kitchen site, complained that needy people are being drawn from outside the immediate area.

Nuns’ Plans Kept Secret

Shop owners have been particularly upset that the nuns “never let anyone know what their plans are,” Rosenthal said. “They’d say, ‘We’re too busy.’ The soup kitchen opened overnight. There seems to be no desire to cooperate with anyone on the block.”

While pledging a wait-and-see attitude, Rosenthal also indicated that a philosophical difference exists between his bookstore, which he said is “slanted toward progressive social awareness,” and Mother Teresa’s order, whose charitable acts are usually associated with traditionalist or conservative solutions to poverty.

A bookstore customer, Jackie Cantwell, said that more poor people seem to live in the neighborhood now than when she first moved there 10 years ago. But she did not sympathize with the work of the nuns.

“I don’t like Mother Teresa,” she said. “Why don’t they get 10 washing machines and let people use them for free?”

Father Tom Seagrave, associate pastor at the parish where the nuns are based, said the sisters “wanted a spot in the middle of the people they serve,” but they moved into what facilities were available--the convent and the Valencia Street building--instead of continuing to search for obviously poor areas to locate.

“You see them all over the city traveling in pairs,” Seagrave said. “They work in some parts of the city that you wouldn’t think had many poor people, but, by golly, those nuns would find the poorest of the poor.”

The nuns wear white Indian saris for habits, a distinctive reminder of who their exemplar is--the 1979 Nobel Prize winner regarded by many Roman Catholics to be a living saint.

“They befriend a lot of the people they work with. The personal touch is a high priority for them,” Seagrave said.

Interviews Declined

Publicity and public relations do not appear to be priorities. The sisters, all women in their 20s, decline interviews and usually hide their faces from photographers. Sister Frederic, head of the order at the North American headquarters in New York City, turned down an interview request.

Visitors here are invited to leaf through a scrapbook filled with words and pictures of Mother Teresa: “There in the slums in the broken body we see Christ and we touch Him.” “We fight abortion with adoption” (under a photo of Mother Teresa holding a baby). “I prefer you to make mistakes in kindness than miracles in unkindness.” “MCs (Missionaries of Charity) are infallible when they obey” (under a photo of Mother Teresa with a bishop).

The novitiate--the only North American novitiate for Mother Teresa’s order of nuns--is a two-year training center before the sisters take their temporary vows. Its director for the last year, Sister Sylvia, said in a recent interview that 50 women live in the convent, 46 of whom are novices. They rise at 4:40 a.m. for prayer. They have a Mass at 7 a.m. and breakfast after that.

“We are seeking the families of the needy. We visit them regularly,” Sister Sylvia said.

The order has about 15 houses in North America--and may have another in Los Angeles if Mother Teresa grants Archbishop Roger Mahony’s request this month for her nuns to run a hospice for victims of AIDS.

Would Welcome It

“We would be happy to have one more house in California,” Sister Sylvia said.

The Missionaries of Charity opened a 14-bed hospice for victims of acquired immune deficiency syndrome Dec. 24 in New York’s Greenwich Village. Four sisters run the hospice, the sister said.

Sister Sylvia expressed no concern about contact with AIDS victims, noting that sisters overseas have worked with leprosy victims. “We try to take precautions, and none has caught (leprosy) as far as I know,” she said.

A native of India, Sister Sylvia said that so far the order has had enough sisters to meet the demands for them. While most of the novices here are from Latin America, some are from the United States, she said.

Most U.S.-based Catholic sister orders have suffered a depletion of ranks and new members as they permitted more latitude in community life and diversified their ministries beyond traditional school and hospital work.

Rigorous Discipline

Mother Teresa’s order reflects the more rigorously disciplined community life and piety, which disturbs some Catholics who contend that fascination with a traditionalist model of sisterhood encourages those who want the church to return to a more authoritarian age.

“We know it is very useful for our religious life,” Sister Sylvia said. As for the various styles of nuns’ orders in America today, she said, “You can’t say one is better than the other.”

The convent that serves as the Missionaries of Charity novitiate, in fact, became available because of the decreased numbers of another religious order that serves the St. Paul Parish high school.

But St. Paul’s Father Seagrave said there is no difference in dedication between the Mother Teresa novices and the plainclothes Blessed Virgin Mary sisters at the convent across the street. “I’m happy they’re both here. Both groups put out 112%,” he said.

Nevertheless, the unusual style of the Mother Teresa nuns gives rise to unusual anecdotes. Seagrave said two of the novices befriended a Polish immigrant who lived alone in a nearby apartment, drank heavily and refused the pleas of his family to come to the East Coast where they could care for him.

The man died about four months ago. “I don’t think (the nuns) ever got him over his problem, but he was not alone late in his life,” Seagrave said.

At the funeral Mass, the priest said, “I’ll never forget the sight” inside St. Paul’s.

On one side of the aisle were the man’s son, two elderly Polish men and a neighbor of the deceased. On the other side of the church, all 50 sisters in their white garb were assembled, Seagrave said.

“They were trying to say, ‘You did not die alone or unmourned.’ ”