Safe Haven : Children Get Respite and Religion Behind the Thick Walls of Santa Ana’s Heart of Jesus Retreat

There is no tagging allowed on the walls of the Heart of Jesus Retreat Center. This, says Sister Eileen Sullivan, is God’s turf.

The Santa Ana center’s cleanliness is one of the first things youngsters notice. Many come from the nearby gang-infested neighborhoods; they are used to walls scrawled with graffiti.

“They are always impressed by the bathrooms,” Sullivan says.

Run by the Sisters of the Society Devoted to the Sacred Heart, the retreat center offers respite and religion to children and adults. Most hear about the center through their local parishes, prayer groups or friends.

Children are the most frequent visitors. They come for one-day retreats from all over Southern California, some from the roughest areas of Santa Ana, Compton and East Los Angeles. A few youngsters are already gang members. Some have seen older siblings get in trouble with gangs.

The sisters lead the children in games, crafts, skits and, of course, prayer. In addition to the one-day retreats, they run a Sacred Heart Kids Club and Sacred Heart Teen Club. For a few hours after school each week, members enjoy a tranquil hiatus from their often-chaotic existences.

“With the support they find here, the children think they can do better than their older brother who’s in prison,” Sullivan says.

Problems at home or school, trouble in the neighborhood--the children check all of that at the door. The sisters tell their visitors that the center was built for them, a safe haven from the world outside.

Among the regulars at the Wednesday afternoon Kids Club is Anne, a developmentally disabled 12-year-old whose father died several months ago. (The names of the children have been changed.)

“Anne wants us to pray for someone,” says Sister Doreen Reinke, the club director, during a recent meeting. Anne stands.

“My friend Michael got shot in the leg while walking home from school with me,” she says, bursting into tears.

Some of the children are no strangers to the perils of drive-by shootings and gang life. Later, during craft time, 12-year-old Richard stops coloring long enough to offer Anne worldly advice: “Whatever you do, don’t wear all black. People will think you’re in a gang and shoot you.”

There’s 11-year-old Juan, who has flunked out of every school he’s attended, say the sisters. “There’s abuse in his background,” says Sister Susan Blaschke.

“In school, there’s too much violence. Here they teach you how to handle your problems,” Juan says. “The nuns don’t tell you, ‘Don’t come anymore.’ ”

There’s 12-year-old Julie, tall and slender with straight brown hair, whose parents are divorced. Her mother, a stewardess, is out of town for a month, she tells a sister. She lives with her mother’s roommate during these long absences.

No matter what their background, the children know they are accepted here.

“We don’t yell at them or tell them they’re wrong,” says Sullivan, the clubs’ assistant director. “What we do here is we love them unconditionally. Our purpose is that, when they leave here, their hearts will have some hope.”

Not all of the children come from troubled environments. Some have happy families and comfortable homes. They come to the club because their parents think it will be a positive experience. Still, there are enough children contending with divorced parents, street fights and abuse to make the sisters worry about life beyond their thick, adobe-style walls.

“These kids are dealing with things (adults) never had to deal with in (their youth),” Blaschke says.

Getting away from all that for a few hours a week can lead to noticeable changes in even the most hardened youths, Sullivan says.

“When you treat them like a real person, they start to act like one. They start to dress a little different. Their clothes begin to fit them instead of being so huge. Their vocabulary changes. They begin to drop the gang language. They take little steps. It’s a new start.”

Juan, for instance, was highly aggressive when he started coming to the Kids Club one year ago. He’d egg on the other children, picking fights and disrupting the meetings.

Reinke began meeting with him separately. The two would do projects together, such as making crafts or assembling a bicycle. While they worked they would talk about getting along with others, about why he’d been expelled from school and what he could do differently.

Today Juan attends the club meetings faithfully. His hand is the first to shoot into the air when the sisters ask questions or seek volunteers for skits. When he made it through three trouble-free meetings, the sisters rewarded him by taking him to Antonello’s (free lunch for the sisters and their charges is a standing offer at the upscale Santa Ana restaurant).

“He had never been to a place like that before,” Blaschke says. “I think he had about six Shirley Temples.”

The nuns don’t preach or punish. If they did, they’d probably scare off their charges. Instead they get their message across by singing songs (including a rap number about God written by Reinke) and performing skits that can have the kids howling as the nuns take the parts of misbehaving children.

In one skit, Reinke plays a girl who is more interested in watching TV and loudly slurping chocolate milk than helping her mother unload 12 bags of groceries.

“What should I have done?” she asks the children.

An 8-year-old Latino boy steps in to take her place and demonstrate how the child should act.

“Hi, Mom. Do you need help with the groceries?” asks the little actor.

The kids applaud. But from the back there’s a voice of dissent.

“You should have just said, ‘Hi, Mom,’ ” says a dark-haired boy, an apparent expert on avoiding household chores.

The message behind the day’s skits, according to Reinke: “Living for Jesus is not living for yourself.”

The skits deal with matters that are both practical and spiritual. When the sisters discovered some children were free to play outside until late at night, they offered some simple advice: Get inside before dark.

“A lot of the children don’t have any boundaries or curfews,” Sullivan says. “There are 11-year-olds playing at 1 in the morning on the street.”

The playground is where the sisters often communicate best with the children. During a heated game of basketball or whiffle ball, a child might venture up to one of the sisters and confide in her about a problem at home or school.

“That’s a real important time to see we’re normal. They’ll listen better,” Blaschke says.

The day ends on a quiet note, with the children gathered around Reinke inside the chapel that’s grown dark with the long shadows of twilight. They say a prayer out loud and in sign language. Using their hands makes them “less antsy,” Blaschke says.

Although the Sacred Heart sisters are Catholic, they hold retreats for adults and children from all faiths. The society was founded in Hungary in 1940 by Ida Peterfy. Persecuted by the Communists, the sisters fled to Canada in 1950 and joined the Los Angeles Archdiocese in 1956 to establish their motherhouse. The retreat center began operating in Santa Ana in 1979, and a new expanded center opened in January 1992 serves about 1,000 people a month.

Eight nuns live at the center’s convent and conduct retreats five or six days a week.

To belong to the Kids Club, children pay 1 cent, a dollar or whatever they can afford each week. The center relies on donations from the community, particularly the annual Gentlemen’s Haberdashery fund-raiser and fashion show that will take place March 17 at the Hyatt Regency Irvine.

The attendance of both clubs varies from week to week, depending on how many children can make the trip and how many take friends. The Kids Club averages about 40 children, age 8 to 12, from all over the county and from all ethnic backgrounds.

The club would be larger except many children have no way to get to the center. The lucky ones can ride their bikes or get rides. Some children take three buses to get the center.

“I asked one boy, ‘Why do you come?,’ ” Sullivan says. “He said, ‘Because I’m accepted here.’ ”