Mother Margarita’s Dreams and Prayers Sustain Her Hospital

‘Everybody has a talent. God gave me a talent with bricks.’

--Mother Margarita Maria Chairman, Board of Governors Santa Teresita Hospital

She is frail in body now. She struggles--like someone carrying a load of bricks, perhaps--to get from her wheelchair to her desk. The doctors have even interrupted her lifelong custom of arising for prayers at 4:30 every morning.

“They said they don’t want me up so early,” shrugged Mother Margarita Maria, a tiny figure in flowing nun’s habit, seemingly barricaded behind an oversized desk stacked with papers. “Now I get up at 6.”

The robust personality of the 83-year-old mother superior still cuts a wide swath in the quiet domain of Santa Teresita Hospital, which she helped found more than 56 years ago as a tiny tuberculosis sanitarium in the middle of an orange grove.

In her office in the convent on the 17-acre grounds of the hospital, Mother Margarita, her round face jutting from the tightly wrapped wimple of the Carmelite order, is still very much the restless executive, with too much to do in too little time.

Rushing Amid the Clutter

“Look at all this mail,” she said, raising her hands helplessly, mirroring the picture on the wall behind her of Pope John Paul II spreading his arms wide in benediction. “It looks like I’ll never catch up. Not till after Christmas.”

She rustled through the clutter in front of her, sent an assistant scurrying away on an errand and handled a telephone call with disarming abruptness, whisking the caller away with a series of gentle negatives.

Then, between anecdotes about her origins in Mexico and the vicissitudes of building a hospital from scratch, she punched a number into the phone.

“Sister, do you happen to know the whereabouts of that publication I had yesterday?” she said, pleading in slightly accented English. “I can’t find it anywhere . You know, the one on hospital bankruptcies?”

These are tough times for hospitals, especially the medium-sized ones like Santa Teresita. The competition from major medical centers is stiffening, Medicare and Medi-Cal reimbursements are a lot leaner than they used to be and, like other industries in the throes of government cutbacks, the hospital industry as a whole is undergoing a major shakedown. According to the American Hospital Assn., 61 hospitals closed in the United States last year, 67 the year before.

Santa Teresita also has gone through some lean times in recent years, according to Sister Mary Ann, the hospital’s administrator for the past year and a half.

Survival Course

With many of Santa Teresita’s 283 beds standing empty, the hospital charted a survival course in the early 1980s. The plan, said Sister Mary Ann, was to modernize the hospital’s medical facilities, diversify services, entice doctors to a five-story medical center and go after patients like a salesman selling encyclopedias.

Although the hospital still suffers from some financial ills, the plan apparently has worked, with a little help from the Carmelite Sisters, 65 of whom help to staff everything from the operating rooms to the public relations department.

“Compared to a lot of other hospitals, we have a much greater chance of survival,” said Sister Mary Ann, who in the past two months has overseen the opening of a new surgical wing and a 21-bed unit for the care of comatose patients.

Mother Margarita, despite the circulatory problem she calls “the trouble with my legs,” is smack in the middle of the effort to shore up her dream. Although she stepped down as the hospital’s administrator three years ago, she still chairs the board of governors, oversees all the construction and renovation projects and heads the endless drive to raise funds.

Miracle Worker

Despite her advanced age, her colleagues say, she is still the hospital’s driving force and its spiritual center. A miracle worker? “She must have a connection with somebody,” said Duarte City Manager Ken Caresio. “The accomplishments have been just tremendous.”

Mother Margarita, a short, bespectacled woman who gestures a lot when she talks, reacts to such talk with a dismissive shake of the head, finding her own efforts far from miraculous.

“I could say, ‘I have a headache,’ and take two aspirins,” she said. “I get rid of the headache, so it’s a miracle.”

The real secret, she teaches her fellow Carmelites, is to find solutions through hard work and prayer. Explained Sister Mary Ann, who was trained by Mother Margarita for her present post: “One of the maxims she passes on to us is, ‘Work as though all depended on you; pray as though all depended on God.’ ”

But there was always a strong charm factor at work there, too, friends say. Mother Margarita’s powers of persuasion have become legendary, both in the Los Angeles Archdiocese and in the cities of Duarte and Monrovia.

‘Can’t Turn Her Down’

“She’s a hard person to say no to,” Caresio said. “When you see her rolling up with that nice little smile and she tells you her dreams and her problems and how you’re so important in helping her accomplish these important goals, you just can’t turn her down. She’s got a magnetic personality.”

Next June, Mother Margarita will observe the 60th anniversary of her arrival in the United States. She came to this country in 1927, an escapee from the terror of the so-called Cristero Rebellion, a bloody war between government troops and a guerrilla army of religious zealots, with Mexican priests and nuns often the victims.

She was born in the small town of Ameca in the state of Jalisco.

“I always say I’m from Guadalajara (the capital of the state), though I was born in Ameca,” she said, “just as Jesus was the Nazarene, not the Bethlehemite. My family moved to Guadalajara from my hometown when I was just a few months old.”

Guadalajara was one of the strongholds of Catholicism in Mexico. Her father was a goldsmith who specialized in making religious vessels, and both parents were deeply religious. “I was 14 before I learned how we came to this world,” she said.

‘Consecrated to God’

She became a nun at the invitation of Mother Maria Luisa Josefa, the mother superior of the Carmelite order in Guadalajara. But it was actually the religious life that chose the young would-be teacher, Mother Margarita suggested. The choices for a young woman in those times, she said, were three: to marry, to be a spinster or to be “consecrated to God.” She rejected the first two out of hand.

There were ample opportunities to marry. “Friends would tell me, ‘So-and-so is very nice,”’ she recalled. “I would say, ‘Then let him find another girl.’ ‘Oh, you must be waiting for King Alfonso,’ they’d say.”

Yet the idea of joining the ranks of unmarried women was repugnant to her. “I’d detest being a spinster,” said Mother Margarita, making the kind of face children make when they swallow bad-tasting medicine.

She joined the Carmelite Sisters as a 20-year-old, urging Mother Luisita, as her mother superior was affectionately called, to put her in a classroom. “If you put me in charge of the sick, the patient will surely die,” she warned.

Mother Luisita chose not to heed the warning. “My dream was to wear the brown habit of the Carmelites to be in a school,” she said. “Do you know how long I did that?” She held the fingers of her hands together to make a large circle. “Zero.”

Assigned to Hospital

By the time she was a fully professed sister, the Cristero Rebellion, which was dramatized by British author Graham Greene in “The Power and the Glory,” was heating up, and the young nun was assigned to a hospital.

Sparked by the government’s decision to close church schools and convents and to seize church property, Catholic guerrillas had declared war on the government and the church itself had initiated a strike, closing church doors and refusing to give the sacraments openly.

By 1927, Mexican refugees were crossing into the United States, telling tales of priests and nuns being summarily executed on the streets by government firing squads.

There were frightening episodes for the Carmelites, including one search by rifle-wielding government soldiers for clerics while 20 nuns hid in a tiny basement. Mother Margarita remembers most vividly a visit by suspicious government agents to the hospital where she was working.

“There were seven novices hiding in the beds (disguised as patients),” she said. “The hospital director, holding a handkerchief over his nose, told the government men, ‘If you want to enter here, go ahead. All are contagious.’ I was so nervous that I really did get sick.”

Forced to Leave

Things were particularly unstable in Guadalajara. “Mother Luisita knew that the only way to save the situation was to take us all out of Mexico,” Mother Margarita said.

In small groups, the Mexican Carmelite sisters, dressed in civilian clothes, began heading for California. The 23-year-old Mother Margarita was one of the first to go, accompanied for the train ride by Mother Luisita and another nun.

“Mother Luisita said, ‘Tell your mother to take you to a shoe store to buy you the kind of shoes that girls wear now,’ ” Mother Margarita recalled. “You see, in the convent we used to wear just sandals. You know what I did? I picked out some red shoes with heels like this.” She holds her hands six inches apart.

It was an unwise choice. “I did not know that one of the tunnels had fallen in, blocking the train tracks,” she said.

Passengers had to disembark and hike for several miles over rocky terrain to reach another train, waiting to take them on the last leg of the trip to California.

‘My Feet Were Hurting’

“A man on the train kindly said he’d help me,” Mother Margarita said. “With him on one arm and his wife on the other, they walked me to the train. By the time we got there, my feet were hurting terribly.”

In their new home, the sisters were invited by church officials to open a sanitarium in Duarte to care for girls with tuberculosis.

Santa Teresita, which opened in August, 1930, was begun on a three-acre farm, with a farmhouse, a garage and two small satellite buildings. Mother Margarita, as the only sister who spoke English, was recruited to head the staff.

“By Christmas we had 16 patients,” she said. “The government paid us $1.05 for each patient for each day of treatment.”

There were no lasting regrets at emigrating to a country where religious freedom is rarely challenged, said Mother Margarita, who became a U.S. citizen in 1935.

Making Do

The sisters became ingenious at making do with limited resources.

“We made bedside tables for the girls out of fruit crates and cloth remnants that had been donated to us,” Mother Margarita said. “Someone gave us 16 chairs for the girls, with no one like the other. In the beginning, we sisters slept on boards. It was nothing.”

This was all training for the young mother superior as a hospital administrator and as a fund-raiser.

“By hand, I wrote 200 letters, asking for money,” she said. “You know how much we received? Exactly $205, $200 from one man, and five others sending $1 apiece.”

By 1955, when tuberculosis receded as a major health problem, the sanitarium had treated more than 2,000 patients.

That was when the sisters opened an acute care hospital, which grew as the needs grew, eventually expanding across the city limits into Monrovia.

Fund-Raising Efforts

The 30-year building program, said Sister Mary Ann, has been financed largely by the fund-raising efforts of Mother Margarita and by the sweat of the nuns.

By now, Santa Teresita is a full-service hospital, with every standard medical capability except radiotherapy and open-heart surgery. It boasts as well something of a tourist attraction: a chapel decorated with the wood carvings of the celebrated Mexican-born sculptor Rudolph Vargas, who died last month.

And by now, Mother Margarita has become the consummate businesswoman, friends and city officials say. The diminutive nun has also become a tough administrator, added Dr. Erwin Gerberg, the hospital’s chief of staff and head of the radiology department.

“Mentally tough but very fair-minded,” he said.

Everybody at Santa Teresita seems to have a favorite Mother Margarita story.

“Two statements that she has made really stand out,” said Gerberg. “One was, ‘I was not born a nun; I chose that profession. I know what it’s like to be a woman.’ The other was, ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ ”

Uses of Adversity

For Sister Mary Ann, it’s something Mother Margarita said when the hospital hit a rough spot.

“She said you’ve got to have problems or it’s not God’s work,” said the hospital administrator. “If everything goes too smoothly, it’s not the way he wanted it to happen.”

The elderly mother superior herself says, with a little teacherly flourish of the hands, that her philosophy could be pared down to another bit of wisdom that she passes along to young novices, a sort of ideal in administering a Catholic hospital.

“You have to think that each hospital room is like another chapel,” she said. “Each bed is an altar, each patient another Christ.”