What Would I Find at Holy Angels?

I kept putting off my visit, worried that I’d be haunted by what I saw. But I knew I had to visit that amazing angel Maria.

By Elizabeth Sherrill

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Forty-one years is a long time, I thought as I waited in the motel lobby for the nun who was coming to pick me up.

I'd last come here to Belmont, North Carolina, back in 1965 to report for Guideposts on Holy Angels, a home for infants born with multiple handicaps. Though readers had been asking for an update ever since, I kept putting off a return.

I knew why. For months after that first visit I'd been haunted by the memory of those tiny innocent little people, born so injured—did I really want to put myself through that again?

There were good memories too, of course…the kindly nuns in their stiff wimples and long black habits, bending so tenderly over each crib. Most of all, a bright-eyed nine-year-old girl whose ruffled blue dress hid the arms of her small wheelchair.

Maria, born with mere vestiges of legs, a hydrocephalic with a tumor on her back as large as her oversize head, was the first handicapped baby the sisters had taken in. They were running a day nursery for children of mill workers when the local hospital asked them to take an infant just born there. A "vegetable," hospital doctors told them, who couldn't live more than a few weeks.

But Maria did live, and by age two, hints of an alert and eager mind appeared. The sisters took her to a surgeon: Within two years, both the tumor and her head had shrunk dramatically and Maria's bright chatter was the nuns' delight. The little girl's great dream was to wear shoes. So the surgeon shaped a place on the unformed legs for shoes to go. The very first thing nine-year-old Maria had said to me was, "Do you like my shoes?" (I did indeed!)

Meanwhile, seeing Maria as God's call to a new kind of ministry, the sisters had taken in scores of other handicapped infants. Over the years since my 1965 visit, I'd kept in touch with an occasional phone call.

Because of her precarious health, I always hesitated to ask about Maria. But each time I was told that she was not only alive, but the can-do spirit behind all they did at Holy Angels. Now that little girl was 50 years old, and I couldn't turn down the invitation to come see what had grown from those early beginnings.

A brown SUV pulled up to the motel entrance, but instead of a nun at the wheel it was a woman in a bright red pantsuit. She came into the lobby and looked around.

"Elizabeth? I'm Sister Nancy."

In the decades since I'd been here, the nuns’ severe black habits had obviously been exchanged for up-to-date outfits! Another change was the greatly enlarged facility that came into view as Sister Nancy followed the winding drive up the hillside.

Welcoming one-story brick-and-wood buildings connected with walkways were set in manicured lawns amid colorful gardens. In the central building, an attractive woman wearing a wide-collared cream-and-pepper sweater and a mass of auburn curls was handling calls at a reception desk.

Putting the phone down, she whipped her electric wheelchair around the desk and held out her hand. "So you finally came back! I'm Maria."

The same smile, the same impish brown eyes. When I complimented Maria on her hair, Sister Nancy laughed. "It's her natural color too, for a miracle! She's had black hair, red hair, yellow hair—I've waited years to see the real thing."

Leaving a replacement at the desk, Maria led me on a tour, Sister Nancy and I trotting to keep up with her chair. We started in the well-equipped medical wing. In a tile-floored room we watched a motorized sling lift a woman gently onto a cushioned bath table. The biggest surprise to me was finding adults here in place of infants: Most of the residents I saw ranged from pre-teens to mid-sixties.