Rosary Hall, Cleveland · 1953–1966
For twelve more years she ran Rosary Hall on five days, a three o’clock rosary and a coffee pot, taking in thousands of alcoholics, counseling their wives, and quietly treating priests from other cities.
“Now is eternity; this very moment is eternity.”
Rosary Hall ran on Akron’s rules, with a few of its own. A patient came in once; there were no repeaters. He needed a sponsor, and from now on the sponsor needed a full year of sobriety. There were no radios, newspapers or telephones, and the only visitors were AA members. At three o’clock every afternoon, patients and visitors said the rosary together for alcoholics still suffering. The worst cases went first to the one single room, which she called “the defrosting room”; the rest shared. The stay began at five days. Darrah says it rose to six in the second year, though a reporter in 1956 still wrote of a five-day stay; by the early 1960s it was ten. The days themselves are in Five days.
The ward was busy from the start. Bill W. counted a thousand admissions in the first year. Gerard Sherry, profiling her for The Sign in 1956, put the total since December 1952 at about three thousand; Bill’s history of AA, a year later, at 5,000; Bill again, in 1966, at ten thousand over fourteen years, though she ran the ward for about twelve and a half. She kept seeing each patient’s wife before he went home, as she had in Akron, and at her urging Cleveland’s first Al-Anon family group met on January 14, 1955. She came to its Friday-night meetings for almost ten years. At first she took the husbands’ side, until one wife told her, “Well, Sister, you didn’t have to live with him.” While she was learning, Darrah writes, she turned to Lois W. for guidance.
Priests came too, mostly from other cities and in secret, and she gave them the same pajamas and the same rules as everyone else; The hardest nuts to crack has their stories. Honors she mostly turned away. She accepted the St. Catherine of Siena Medal in 1954, giving the credit to her community and “the hundreds of men and women who have been helped.” When admirers proposed her story for Loretta Young’s television show in 1955, she stopped it, and they had to wire the show’s story editor: “SISTER IGNATIA OPPOSED TO ANY TYPE OF PUBLICITY.” In 1961 the White House wrote that the President had learned of her work, in a letter signed by an aide, Frederick L. Holborn.
From about 1958 she was often ill, with pneumonia, ulcers and high blood pressure, and she got about on canes and walkers and finally in a wheelchair. “Time is running out and I must work while I can,” she said. In 1963 a priest about a year sober in AA, Father John M., was sent to Cleveland by his superior, who hoped a good AA town would keep him sober, and before long she was handing him the morning talks: “Father John, you talk to the men.” Around 1964 Sister Victorine Keller, who had run Charity’s first alcoholic ward, came back to help.
Bill W. came to Cleveland for her fiftieth year in the order, in March 1964, and gave her a scroll at a small dinner (Stow it in her trunk). In May 1965, too ill to carry on, she retired to the order’s motherhouse at Mount Augustine, in Richfield. “I now enjoy that rare and precious thing called leisure time,” she wrote to Bill that month. She died there a little after 9 a.m. on Friday, April 1, 1966. She was seventy-seven.
It’s 1953, at Rosary Hall, in Cleveland. A new patient has been here a few hours. Other men help him into hospital pajamas and sit by his bed and tell him how they got sober.
Every morning, a tiny nun gives a talk. At three in the afternoon, they all say the rosary together, for the alcoholics still out there.
There’s no radio here, no newspapers, no telephone. There is always coffee.
On the fourth day, she tells him to think of the people he has hurt, and to ask their forgiveness. And she tells him what she tells everyone. Eternity is now. Right now, this very instant. Today is all you have.
On the fifth day he goes home, with a sponsor, and a little badge in his pocket. If he ever wants a drink, he has promised to return it to her first.
Reception to Plans for the Future
She set out the stay a day at a time in a 1951 speech to the Catholic Hospital Association, describing St. Thomas, and gave each day a name. A reporter found the same five names in use at Rosary Hall in 1956.
From her 1951 speech, which Mary C. Darrah’s biography (1992) quotes at length, and Gerard E. Sherry’s profile in The Sign, May 1956. By the 1960s the stay at Rosary Hall had grown to ten days. Quotations are short excerpts.
“Nothing is left undone to make the new man feel at home.”
He tapers off, is fed and rests, and other patients come to his bed with their stories. At St. Thomas it was the other patients who got him out of his clothes and into hospital pajamas.
Her 1951 speech, in Darrah, chapter 3.
AA visitors tell him how they made it, some of them men he used to drink with, and he begins to admit that he can’t drink like other people.
Her 1951 speech, in Darrah, chapter 3.
“I am an alcoholic, what a joy to be honest!”
He looks back over his life and finds the traits that did him the most harm.
Her 1951 speech, in Darrah, chapter 3.
“Eternity is now. Right now. This very instant. Today is all you have.”
He leaves the past behind and thinks of the people his drinking hurt, so he can ask their forgiveness; she believed making amends was what set an alcoholic free. Darrah gives the saying as one she repeated often, with no source.
Darrah, chapter 3.
“guard against pride, self-pity, resentment, intolerance, and criticism”
He makes his plan for living sober outside. At his last interview she gave him that warning, along with a Sacred Heart badge he was to return to her before taking any drink.
Darrah, chapter 3.
Eternity is now
Three people wrote her saying down, each a little differently. An AA she had helped, in the Grapevine in 1964: “Now is eternity; this very moment is eternity.” Bill W., closing his memorial in 1966: “Eternity is now.” And Darrah, in 1992, with the end of it: “Today is all you have.”
For a closer look
The scroll Bill W. gave her, the priests she treated, and the week she died.
For her golden jubilee, in March 1964, Bill W. had her arrange a small dinner for his visit with a few of her AA friends, without telling her it was for her, Darrah writes. She could barely walk. After an evening of stories about St. Thomas, Anne and Dr. Bob, Bill stood and read aloud a scroll he had brought from New York, written as a letter from him on behalf of AA everywhere. She could scarcely speak. They told her it need not be made public, and that if she wanted to “stow it away in her trunk,” they would understand. Then, tired as she was, she led them all upstairs for one more round of the ward, late as it was.
The scroll is dated March 25, 1964, and begins: “We of Alcoholics Anonymous look upon you as the finest friend and the greatest spirit we may ever know.” Darrah’s copy ends that sentence “we have ever known.” By 1966, Bill wrote, it was on view at Rosary Hall.
Most of the priests she treated came from other cities, Darrah writes, and local priests were not reported to their bishops. A Cleveland priest remembered her entering him as an insurance salesman so the other patients wouldn’t know: “When you’re not drinking, you insure people’s souls against hell, don’t you?” On his fifth day she told him that “the hardest nuts to crack in this business were clergy and doctors,” and kept him eleven days. And when he started going to open AA meetings, she told him to wear his collar: “You are a priest. An alcoholic priest.”
Not every cleric took it. A bishop from another city, drunk and bound for a convention, was brought to her saying he was ready for the cure. She asked him to hand over his collar and breviary until he left, and told him he would be in hospital pajamas like any other patient. He left for a hotel, and some of the sisters were shocked at her nerve.
For a time after her move to Cleveland, Archbishop Edward Hoban and Mother Clementine, by then head of her order, would not let her speak in public about alcoholism. When Archbishop Richard Cushing of Boston asked in 1953 for her to address a national conference of priests, Hoban said no, explaining that she “makes no pretense of being a speaker.” She talked to priests one at a time instead.
Bill W.’s memorial, as reprinted in The Language of the Heart, says she died on Friday, April 2, 1966. The original August 1966 Grapevine says “Friday morning, April first,” and April 1 was the Friday; the reprint has a typo. Darrah agrees: a little after nine that morning, at Mount Augustine.
The next day the sisters opened the motherhouse, and within two hours more than a thousand visitors had signed its guest book, Bill wrote. At the wake on Sunday afternoon the sisters served more than 6,000 cups of coffee, by some visitors’ reckoning, Darrah writes. The funeral was moved from the convent chapel to the cathedral in Cleveland, where on Monday at noon, Bill wrote, there was hardly a seat to be had. A Cleveland radio man, Ed Fisher, told his listeners that morning it had “long been a saying among Alcoholics Anonymous” that if her own church didn’t declare her a saint, the Protestants would. (Darrah dates the funeral April 4 in one place, but elsewhere calls a letter of April 6 “written one day after her funeral.”)
Her superior chose a grave in Calvary Cemetery, a sister told Darrah, so that it could be reopened easily if the Church ever moved to make her a saint.