Sister Ida Peterfy; Founded Educational Order of Nuns

Sister Ida Peterfy, who founded a forward-looking order of nuns that was one of the first in the country to eschew wearing the traditional habit, died Tuesday after a long struggle with lymphoma. She was 77.

Peterfy began the Society Devoted to the Sacred Heart, dedicated to religious education, in her native Hungary in 1940. During World War II she helped hide several Jewish families from the Nazis, and when Communist rule came to Hungary she kept her group together by creatinga cover organization--a secretarial school for typing and shorthand.

“She was always resourceful,” said Sister Jane Stafford, now the superior of the Northridge-based order. “If you called your organization a school, you could live together and own property. It was brilliant.”

Arriving in Los Angeles in 1956, the order created a stir because of its nontraditional dress code. The local Catholic newspaper, the Tidings, took a cue from the popular “Dragnet” TV show when its headline declared: “Check, Friday, These Are Sisters.”

But even Cardinal James McIntyre, then head of the Los Angeles Archdiocese and known for being extremely conservative, urged Peterfy not to change the dress policy, telling her: “Mark my words: The church will need you as you are,” according to Sister Agnes Raday, a longtime member of the order.

It was one of the last times the order made news. Peterfy worked in a low-key manner, her associates said, shunning the limelight. “She did not have a PR agent like Mother Theresa,” Raday said.

The sisters of the order taught basic elements of church doctrine to children. They used puppets, song and dance and educational techniques that Peterfy had begun to develop in Hungary. They sponsored educational retreats to their camp in Big Bear, where they held classes for children and their parents.

In the early 1970s, Peterfy took her message to television, producing the children’s show “My Friend Pookie,” which ran on KABC for three seasons. In the 1980s, she produced 30 half-hour installments of the “Sacred Hearts Kids’ Club.” They are still shown around the world, although the program has never aired in Los Angeles, Raday said.

Peterfy believed that the membership of the order, which established a convent in Burbank in the late 1970s, should be multinational, Raday said. At the time of Peterfy’s death, the order had 52 nuns from numerous countries and ethnic backgrounds. In addition to the mother house in Northridge, the order has a novitiate in Winnetka, several houses in the Los Angeles area, and missions in Hungary and Taiwan.

A lifelong athlete who especially loved hiking and camping (she took the sisters of the order on several trips to the Grand Canyon), Peterfy was diagnosed as having lymphoma in 1995. At first it hardly slowed her down, Stafford said. Later she made several hospital stays at the City of Hope, where she was visited by church leaders.

“She treated everyone the same,” Stafford said. “One time I walked in and she was talking to the cleaning woman, asking about her family and telling her how much she appreciated having a clean room when she was sick. The nurses used to fight over who would take care of her.”

She died in her room at the mother house. “The sisters all came in and we had a vigil for eight hours,” Stafford said. “We sang her goodbye. If you want to talk about a holy death, this was it.”

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony will officiate at a rosary for Peterfy at St. John Baptist Church in Chatsworth at 7 p.m. Friday.