As Church Leaders Talk, Sister Eustace Answers Call
/The Boston Herald
Hundreds of people could tell this story, maybe thousands. It could be told in Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese, Korean, English - the kind the queen speaks - and the language of the streets. Old people could tell it and young people, too, and though the words would be different, all the stories would be the same: ”This is how Sister Eustace helped me," each would begin.
The Archdiocese of Boston's newspaper, The Pilot, is wringing its hands over the words of Worcester Bishop Daniel Reilly, insisting on blaming a media "misinterpretation" of what was truly the bishop's humanity. But at the same time, Sister Eustace Caggiano, a 90-year-old nun known as the Mother Teresa of the South End, continues to do what Jesus Christ urged: Love thy neighbor. Never mind who the neighbor is or what he says or what he believes. Love him.
Sister Eustace has been loving and feeding and helping her neighbors for 32 years, out of a no-frills building that wasn't worth much until the revitalization of the South End. A few weeks ago, the church pulled the rug out and sold off her life's mission, never bothering to pick up the phone and say, "Hey, Sister, we're getting $ 2.14 million for that suddenly prime piece of property you inhabit, which we now need because of the priests and the lawsuits, you know?”
Sister Eustace had to learn about the sale in a local paper. But she continues to go to work every day and to trust in God that things will work out.
Marty Murphy, 62, has known Sister Eustace for 35 years and has seen this trust before. Murphy used to be a Sister of St. Joseph, and lived at the Cathedral Convent in the South End with Sister Eustace in the late 1960s.
"I remember how she strung up a tire for the neighborhood kids because we had a small back yard and they didn't. So they'd come over and swing on this one rubber tire. It was like 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.' One day, one of the kids came to the door and rang the bell. 'I'm hungry, Sister,' he said. So Sister Eustace, who cooked for the whole convent, fed him. After that she started putting all the leftover food in milk cartons so that whenever a kid came knocking, she had the food ready."
Some of the kids didn't have coats. So she started collecting sweaters and jackets. Then she began checking to make sure the kids were in school.
"She started seeing all the levels of need. It was never just about giving a piece of bread to the hungry," Murphy said. "Sister Eustace cared about their whole lives.”
So she began to hold rummage sales and Christmas bazaars so the poor could buy nice things at a price they could afford. "Take what you like, dear. And just give what you can." That's what she told people. These little donations added up, and with them she helped people find jobs and homes and pay for their kids' schooling.
Then people with resources started getting involved. They gave money and what they produced. And they gave their time. And the Cardinal Cushing Resource Center grew.
"As soon as you work with Sister, you forget the material things," Murphy says. "You want to help. 'Help someone, dear. You'll feel better.' That's what she told me once. And to this day, that's what I do."
Murphy says God always puts people in Sister Eustace's life to help her when she can't do something herself, and that all the people who work with and for her are her lifeline. As she is theirs.
"I remember one March we had back-to-back snowstorms that crippled the city. I called Sister Eustace from Boston City Hospital where I was working and where we were short-staffed and I said to her, 'I need your help.'
"And she came. She walked up those snowy streets to bathe and shave patients. Someone else would have said, 'I can't do that.' She said, 'OK, dear. I'll be right up.' “
Even at age 90, she still works from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday, and visits the sick on her days off. She has no computer, no cash register and no bottom line. "Give what you can afford, dear," she continues to tell people who come to the center for clothes, appliances, food and bedding.
" 'Take what you like, dear,' she always said whenever I came looking for sweaters and jackets for kids who came to school in shirtsleeves. Boston Public Schools have gone to her for bread and clothing for years," says Murphy, a school nurse for 17 years.
"There isn't anyone who knows her who doesn't love her. She listens. She doesn't judge. Everyone's important. 'I'm praying for you, dear' is what she always says.”
How much more Christlike are these words than the words from the archdiocese and The Pilot?
