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With two young visitors after starting her ministry in Baltimore.

4. Beginning Something New

In 1964, at age 50, Mary Elizabeth was beginning a new life. A friend came to pick her up at the gatehouse and took her to her apartment, where Mary Elizabeth stayed temporarily. The two made a pilgrimage to St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal. There Mary Elizabeth placed her desires to help the poor under the patronage and care of St. Joseph. 

After retuning to the States, Mary Elizabeth moved in with her brother Robert and his family in Baltimore. She began to explore different ways of how she could put into practice her desires to help the poor. Her thoughts were guided by a powerful experience she had before leaving the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Something kind of wonderful happened to me before I got to the gatehouse. During the times when I was under "house arrest," I wanted to spend my time in a positive way, though it was a rather negative experience. I found a book called The Mystical Body of Christ. I think it was written by someone named Doyle or Boyle. I had a wonderful, wonderful meditation each day walking in the part of the garden that I was allowed to frequent. This book gave a really in-depth description of what is meant by the Mystical Body of Christ.

One day while I was under the influence of this meditation, I was walking in the garden and I suddenly had an intuition of the depth of this mystery of the Mystical Body. I saw how Christ bridged all time and that not only had He been crucified at one point, but that He is still being crucified, that He was born and is still being born. I realized the clarity of this, that Christ was being born, suffering, and dying and it was going on as if no time existed at all. It was so clear that I couldn't understand how I didn't realize that before.

It was such a tremendous mystery and a wonderful insight. It really was what held me up during that process of going out and getting back into the world.

I never had a desire to be outside or to associate with lay people, and I was wondering how I was going to bridge that. The minute I stepped out into the street, however, I felt so much love for each person who passed me by. They were my brother or sister. I had no problem whatsoever. I just felt like I had stepped from one part of life in which I belonged to another part of life in which I belonged. It was really the grace of God because I went through nothing. That made it much easier for me to begin to look into how to carry out my plan.

But my plan I never did carry out.

The plan was, I wanted to find a church that would buy three or four city blocks and open up a little city of God. All the work would be done voluntarily for these people and with these people. We would have four or five homes in these blocks that would be for the aged, four or five homes that would be for children. We would have job placement and all that kind of stuff in other homes. 

And this whole thing would be built up around the church with the lay people in the church being the volunteers who would help to do all of this. It would all be done simply by charity out of love for the Lord.

Even the children, for example, would find women or men who were sick in bed or were crippled and needed someone to go shopping for them each week. We thought high school kids could take their turns going to these people and finding out what they wanted and then go to the store for them and bring it back. A real living part in the Mystical Body of Christ would be lived by all the people in this parish through this little city of God. That was my first intention.

But I couldn't find any pastor who was interested. [laughter]

I looked up all the pastors around that area because it seemed to me like it was a very poor area. I went to see Fr. Knox, C.M., at Immaculate Conception Church on Mosher Street, in Baltimore. He was the third priest I went to see, the other two were very happy about what I was trying to do, but didn't feel that they could start it in their parish.

When I told them my plan they didn't see that it was a possibility for them. Their churches were too poor to begin with. So by the time I had gotten to my third explanation I had toned it down a good bit. I made Fr. Knox realize that all I wanted to do was what I could in his parish without any particular costs to him, and that I did not expect a salary.  

Father Knox didn't quite understand how we would go through this, but he said, "First, you have to get a place to live. I'll give you a place in my basement to start your work. It's not too great a gift because I haven't been down there since I've been pastor, and I've been pastor here for 11 years."

So I got a fellow named Fred Jackson who wanted to volunteer and do something. He was a school teacher at Mt. Carmel in Essex. He got his class to come one day and clean this entire cellar and white wash it for me. And we had to let them take showers before they could go out into the street because it hadn't been used in all that time, and it was thick with dust and coal soot and everything under the sun.

So that was how I first started.

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