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FMOL: Six Sisters and a Century of Healing
by Karen Stassi
Precisely one hundred years ago, six nuns sailed from France toward a new life. At the request of the clergy in North Louisiana, the Sisters, members of the Franciscan Sisters of Calais congregation, had been assigned to provide healthcare to rural Pineville. While the assignment might seem unusual, the United States was, and still is, considered a mission for the French order, established in 1854 from an amalgamation of seven different Franciscan communities. Other than modeling their lives after St. Francis, the congregation had no specific ministry. They simply responded to needs in their community and their missions around the world, operating orphanages, schools, clinics, and hospitals, or carrying out social work and other parish work.
So, speaking little English and possessing scant knowledge of the climate, landscape, and culture, these six brave Sisters, clad in wool habits, arrived in Monroe on September 30, 1911. A local priest, Father Enaut, bid them good luck
in Pineville, but asked them to return to Monroe if all did not go as planned. Perhaps he knew something of the situation, because it did not. Although the original assignment was to work with a local physician to establish a hospital
in Pineville, misunderstandings surfaced almost immediately and just a few weeks later the Sisters found themselves back in Monroe.
While French speaking Catholics might not have been an oddity in South Louisiana in 1911, they certainly were in North Louisiana, not to mention French-speaking nuns. However, need soon trumped curiosity and suspicion and the Sisters ministered to the sick through visits to patients’ homes. “Even today, in the Baptist belt they might still believe that maybe we’re using witchcraft, but if you are sick and someone’s helping you and comforting you, you kind of overlook a lot of that,” said Sr. Kathleen Cain, provincial of the Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady. The nuns’ pay, from those who could afford it, came in the form of chickens and eggs. True to the agreement that brought them there, the Sisters asked for nothing for themselves. Eventually, with a gift of land and $50,000, the Sisters were able to establish the St. Francis Medical Center in Monroe. For some, the mission would appear to be complete, but not for these ladies.
Not long after the Monroe hospital was up and running, an accident occurred in South Louisiana and the absence of a Catholic hospital in the area was noted. The Sisters were asked by Monsignor Francis Leon Gassler and area physicians to come and look at property and consider establishing a Catholic hospital in the state capital. Initially, the plan was to build on the spot currently occupied by Rabenhorst Funeral Home downtown. However, Mother Marie de Bethanie Crowley pointed instead to an old mule yard and briar patch near what is now Capitol Lake and declared that to be the spot. In 1923 the Sisters established a new four-story, 100 bed hospital there, appropriately dubbed Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium. The facility, which cost just $250,000 to build, was greeted on opening day by more than half of the Baton Rouge population.
Over the next several years, the nuns at the hospital by the lake witnessed and were part of some of the most colorful days of Louisiana and American history. When Governor Huey Long was shot in the hallways of the new State Capitol in 1935 he was rushed to nearby Our Lady of the Lake, but he could not be saved. Legend has it that one of the Sisters in the surgical suite pocketed the bullets removed from the Governor, but the secret of what Sr. St. Michael did with them died with her.
Sometime in the 1940s, a priest in Lafayette was involved in an accident. Wishing to be treated in a Catholic hospital he was brought to Our Lady of the Lake in Baton Rouge. Once again the Sisters answered the call, recognizing that Lafayette, too, could use a Catholic hospital. In 1949 Our Lady of Lourdes was built. “That’s how we came,” said Sister Kathleen. “It was always responding to a need.” The 1940s also brought changes to the Sisters’ congregation, the
Franciscan Sisters of Calais. The blitz bombing of World War II destroyed their home in Calais, eventually driving the Sisters to Paris. With the move came a name change to better reflect both their calling and their new home. “Obviously ‘Franciscan’ because we are following the role of St. Francis, but also ‘Missionaries’ because that’s the spirit of the congregation. And then Our Lady of the Blessed Mother which was always very important in our life,” said Sr. Kathleen. The new name, Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady, is the one we now associate with Louisiana’s largest health system.
As the Sisters built hospitals, they remained integrally involved in running them, but also recognized that they couldn’t do it all. Schools to educate both nuns and lay people as nurses were established along with each hospital to keep them staffed. In 1919 one of the Sisters graduated from the school of nursing in Monroe. In 1926, Sister Marie Madeleine Lemoine was in the first graduating class of OLOL’s nursing school. “The Sisters knew they couldn’t do everything themselves. There weren’t enough of them and that’s how we came to have a school of nursing,” said Sr. Kathleen. Now that commitment to medical education has grown to include not only nursing schools, but also allied
health and expanding graduate medical education through a partnership with LSU.
By the 1970s, Our Lady of the Lake had outgrown its space and a decision was made to rebuild in a new location. Once again, Mother Gertrude Hennessy defied common wisdom and announced the new hospital would be built on a small road called Essen Lane on the outskirts of town. “When we moved out here to Essen Lane, they told Mother Gertrude at that time, ‘You’re a foolish lady, there’s no way OLOL is going to make it out in the boondocks. You’re way too far out of town,’” said Sr. Kathleen. “But the women who first came here were very, very visionary. They knew what they wanted, they had great faith.” Now, laughs Sr. Kathleen, people blame OLOL for the heavy traffic on Essen Lane, “But we were the first ones out here. It wasn’t us.” The new six-story Our Lady of the Lake Medical Center opened in 1977.
In the early years, it seemed the circumstances chose the Sisters, rather than the other way around, but each time FMOL responded and each time the communities rose up to support them. “I think religious communities who have been missionaries, in my experience, while they are active in the community, they really are there to serve and the people respect that,” said Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System (FMOLHS) President and CEO John Finan. “They are not trying to influence politics or get engaged in local battles, they’re really just there to serve the people. As a result, that generates a lot of community support and respect.”
Some of that respect also comes from the fact that the Sisters, both then and now, are a formidable force. Stories are still told about Sr. Julie who had a degenerative eye condition. Despite her impaired sight, she could tell though hearing and touch when a patient in the nursery was in distress. “The pediatricians said when she called and said, ‘you need to come,’ they knew they needed to go,” said Sr. Kathleen. Mother Gertrude worked in the operating room and not only kept the surgeons on their toes, but was known to make them blush. She was also said to begin directives to Finan with, “John, wouldn’t it be nice if...” According to Sr. Cain, that really translated to, “John, figure it
out and get it done.” Then there was Sr. Liguori in Monroe who held an angry lynch mob at gunpoint to protect her patient. The sheriff had handed his gun to her and skipped town to avoid the confrontation. “Sr. Liguori once belonged to the Irish Republican Army,” said Sr. Kathleen. “You didn’t fool with her.”
She might deny it with a twinkle in her eye, but nobody fools with Sr. Kathleen either. With advanced degrees in business and law, she not only knows her stuff, but she knows her mind. Questions posed to the health system are sometimes simply answered with, “Because Sr. Kathleen wanted it that way.” But the Sisters do not operate in isolation. Although FMOL and FMOLHS are two separate corporations, the congregation sponsors the health system. And, while the Sisters are for the most part, no longer engaged in the day-to-day operations of the hospitals, they remain very involved in the vision, planning, and discussions with the board and leadership about the strategies used to achieve their mission. “We’ve got this idea. Finan figures out how to do it,” laughs Sr. Kathleen, sounding a lot like Mother Gertrude.
While FMOLHS is not the only health system sponsored by a religious order, it is perhaps unique in that the corporate headquarters are located within the provincial house or convent. Finan thinks the arrangement is key to keeping the health system’s mission top of mind. “We are a ministry of the church first. We don’t exist for the commercial reasons. We just have to live in the commercial world because that’s where the ministry happens to be,” said Finan. “The fact that we have more than 10,000 team members, and $1.4 billion in net revenue, 1900 physicians on our staffs, 25 joint ventures, we’re in all these multiple markets, all that’s interesting from an MBA standpoint, but it’s not why
we are here.” OLOL CEO Scott Wester also believes the constant interaction of health system leadership with the Sisters keeps everyone on mission. “Through the stewardship of our Sisters and our partners on our boards they’ve educated us really on how we should act and behave in accordance with the mission and the values of what the Sisters want us to do.”
Sr. Kathleen believes that’s what makes patients feel different when they step into an FMOLHS facility. “It’s not that the other hospitals aren’t good, but hopefully you’ll feel the difference because of who we are and who our team members are. I truly believe that they embrace what we are doing. They’ve accepted our way of life, not the vowed life, but our way of doing business. We are very Franciscan in how we operate our system, with an emphasis on caring for those most in need. We look at the bottom line, but we also look at how much community benefit are we providing, how much care to the poor are we actually giving? Are we doing services simply because they make money or is there really a need?” she explained. “I have a business background. The more money we make the better I feel, the more comfortable I feel, but the flipside is it’s not the only scenario. That’s a little bit different from some of the other entities out there.”
The transition to a health system scenario began once Sister Brendan Mary Ronayne took over as provincial and FMOLHS was established in 1984. Our Lady of the Lake had become the largest of the institutions and Mother Gertrude had established the provincial house on Essen Lane, so Baton Rouge became the logical headquarters for the health system. In 1996, John Finan became the first lay CEO of FMOLHS, taking over from Sr. Brendan Mary. However, the Sisters were ahead of their time in hiring lay administrators for their hospitals. In 1967 Mother Gertrude Hennessy, provincial of the Franciscan Order and administrator of Our Lady of the Lake Medical Center handed over the reins of the hospital to J.B. Heroman. Most Catholic systems did not follow suit for another 10-20 years. “We were one of the first congregations in the country to bring lay leadership in,” said Sr. Kathleen. “We knew, based on our size, that we needed to develop lay people.”
The Sisters have had no problem recruiting lay people to buy into their mission, but recruiting young women to join their congregation has been much harder. The recruiting of priests and nuns has struggled in the era of smaller families andincreased options for women. It is even harder when you are
limited to healthcare, said Sr. Kathleen. “Teaching congregations
at least have contact with young women. With us, unless
you are a student nurse, we just have incidental contact.”
The congregation has strengthened its ranks with international
recruits; the last two Sisters came from Ethiopia. Within the
Baton Rouge house they have Vietnamese, Ethiopian, Irish,
and American Sisters. In the past they have also had French
and Brazilian nuns. “And Cajun,” added Finan, laughing. There
are currently just 18 Sisters in the North American province
of FMOL; thirteen in Baton Rouge, three in Monroe, and two
in Lafayette. Over the years they have served the hospitals as
nurses, finance people, administrators, pharmacy techs, pastoral
care, and more. The province also operates a mission in
Haiti. Internationally, the Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady
number fewer than 500 and can be found in 18 countries.
Despite their small numbers, their accomplishments have been
extraordinary and not without sacrifice. Most of the Sisters
who came from other countries to minister to those in need
have stayed here, often with limited visits to their own families
and countries. “These were women that made incredible
personal sacrifices to be here, especially the ones that came
from Europe. They didn’t go home for years,” said Finan. Some,
like Sr. Maggie spent 10-20 years here before returning to visit
families that had sprouted a whole new generation in their absence.
Eventually the nuns were granted permission to return
home every three years.
“You look at 1911 with the original Sisters coming and opening
a hospital in 1913, then World War I started. We come down
here to Baton Rouge, we open up another hospital, and we go
into the Depression. When we opened Our Lady of Lourdes we
had the Korean War right afterwards,” said Sr. Kathleen. “We
could have folded at any one of these times and we didn’t. We
found ways to keep the doors open. We quit opening a lot of
hospitals because we got tired of all these wars!” she joked. Yet,
they didn’t stop. In addition to building a new hospital on Essen
Lane and numerous clinics and residences for those is need,
FMOLHS acquired St. Elizabeth Hospital in Gonzales in 2000.
“It was a great opportunity for the Sisters and for the health
system to extend its ministry into the Ascension market,” said
Wester. “But I think more importantly, what we’ve received back
from the people at St. Elizabeth was so contagious about how we
should act and behave with each other and with our patients.”
Most recently, FMOLHS has been contracted to manage the
hospital going up in St. Bernard Parish and selected to manage
the old Methodist hospital in New Orleans East, which the city
owns and will reopen as a Hospital Service District hospital.
Both Finan and Sr. Kathleen acknowledged that it was never
a plan to venture into the New Orleans market, but when they
saw the need post-Katrina, they felt compelled to get involved.
“At any one of those times when this nation was having difficulties
we could have said enough is enough. We could fold
up very easily and get out of healthcare today. We would be
smart to do that, but ‘no’ is not part of our vocabulary,” said
Sr. Kathleen. “Our older sisters, the Gertrudes, the Corcorans,
the O’Donovans, these women worked hard. They had an extremely
deep spiritual faith life and ‘no’ was not in their vocabulary.
When you look at our staffs, and our hospitals, and
our leadership within our systems, it’s the same thing today.”
Sr. Kathleen said the Sisters’ plan is to continue to strengthen
their foundation and the education of their lay counterparts.
“We are 10,324 now. That’s a lot of people when you realize we
started with six Sisters who ran the whole hospital. We are at a
totally different perspective but we believe in the ministry and
we hope that’s part of what the next 100 years is going to bring
about: stronger and stronger lay commitment to our values,”
said Sr. Kathleen. “We don’t have the same visionary women
as we did in the past so we take what we have. We will be here
a hundred years from now.”
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