Sister Mary Lawrence Kilmer recently celebrated 60 years in the Congregate of Saint Catherine of Sienna of the Dominican Sisters of Kenosha, Wis. The chapel in which she sits is part of the convent at Our Lady of Fatima Villa in Saratoga, soon to be torn down.
Photograph by George Sakkestad
Layman's Terms
The nuns of Our Lady of Fatima Villa have given way to lay staff as the facility faces a transformation
By Sandy Sims
Photographs by George Sakkestad
Saratogans will soon hear the sound of bulldozers knocking down the small convent and the simple chapel at the front of Our Lady of Fatima Villa on Saratoga-Los Gatos Road.
Those sounds and the accompanying cloud of dust will signal the end of an era at the villa and the convergence of two major social trends.
In place of the villa, builders will construct a three-story assisted-care facility.
For decades, nuns in starched white habits and black veils rustled down the halls of the convent to the chapel every morning and afternoon. There they knelt in prayer and then headed off to the adjoining extended-care facility to care for their residents.
These Dominican Sisters of the Congregate of Saint Catherine of Sienna of Saratoga, of the Dominican Sisters of Kenosha, Wis., arrived here in 1947 with a mission-to care for frail elderly women. This was to be their expression of "the healing hands of Jesus."
The sisters were meeting a critical need because there were few options available for seniors who could no longer live without assistance. Nursing homes (also called rest homes) were often a senior's final living quarters.
Future is Now: The need for assisted living has arrived in full force.
The sisters purchased the land above the stone wall on Los Gatos-Saratoga Road in 1948 for $75,000. At that time, the property contained five small cottages, which had served as housing for mildly mentally ill women. There was a lot of work to be done.
The sisters managed to raise enough money and cajole willing helpers from the community over the years to put together an impressive quadrangle of two-story extended-care buildings with 85 beds, including a section for patients with dementia and Alzheimer's disease. The villa became so popular that applicants came from as far away as San Francisco, and many waited on a list for an opening.
The sisters had high standards for care. "We never had a bedsore," Sister Esther said in an interview four years ago. She was the director of nursing at the villa in the late 1960s and again in the '70s. "I made sure the girls turned the ladies properly every night, and we changed them every two hours. That's why there was never a bad smell there," she said.
Residents often came in ambulatory and stayed for years-some for 10 or 15 years or more-until they died. The staff who assisted the sisters also stayed for years and bonded with the patients.
Changes in the church
During the 1960s-when the Catholic church reviewed its ancient practices at Vatican II and changed some of the old rules-a trend began that deeply affected the villa.
Nuns and priests from all Catholic orders began assessing their own ties to the church. Many left.
Since that time, the numbers of men and women entering religious life in the Catholic church have slowly dwindled. The youngest nun in the whole St. Catherine of Sienna of Wisconsin order is 54 years old.
Sister Mary Lawrence Klimek, 83, who is one of only two sisters living at the villa, says there are only about 22 nuns in the congregation today. Almost all of them are retired and living in facilities in Chicago and Merced.
Those who stayed with their religious vocation remained devoted to their work. But fewer and fewer people were entering the religious life.
Lawrence is one of those who remained.
Today, Lawrence sits in her room in a wheelchair, wearing her white habit and black veil. A game of solitaire is laid out before her. Pictures of Jesus and Mary hang on her wall, and a blanket with a horse design given to her by her brother, a priest, lies neatly across her bed.
Born in Wisconsin, Lawrence was raised in a devout Catholic family. "My parents got on their knees after dinner every night and said the rosary," Lawrence says, then laughs. "Mother wanted to get the boys to do the rosary before they went out for the night."
Lawrence dreamed as a girl of becoming a nun. Out of this family of 12 siblings, five became priests and nuns.
In February, the villa celebrated Lawrence's diamond jubilee, honoring her 60 years as a nun. She retook her vows on that day. "It meant a lot to me," she says. "If I had to live this life over, I would choose being a nun again."
Lawrence, who trained as a registered nurse and later decided she didn't like nursing, spent 17 years teaching elementary school in Hanford, Calif. "I loved teaching," she says.
Retired and in need of care, Lawrence came to the villa six years ago. By then the villa had changed considerably. There were no Dominican nuns on the staff. A handful of elderly nuns were residents cared for by a lay staff. A man had taken over as CEO. And plans for changing the focus of elderly care were in the works.
Time for change
Change had come slowly.
As more and more nuns left their positions at the villa, more and more lay people were hired.
Saratogan Peggy Corr recalls being on the villa's lay advisory board for years when there was a separate governing board predominantly made up of nuns. Corr says members of the advisory board, including herself, slowly replaced the nuns on the governing board. Today, only one nun serves on the board, and that is Sister Alice R. Armato, who is from a different order but serves as a friend to the sisters who own the villa. The governing board has become ecumenical, with members from the Federated Church across the street. The lay advisory board no longer exists.
The villa brought in two Notre Dame sisters who job-share as pastoral counselors for the residents. These two sisters come from the Notre Dame convent in Saratoga that closed in recent years. Notre Dame Sister Andrea Mendoza says her order is building an administration and assisted-care facility in Belmont for the Notre Dame nuns.
During the 1980s, things at the villa came to a head. With few sisters left to do the work and the cost of running the facility going up, the villa was facing a financial crisis and needed help. In 1988 the sisters brought on help in the person of Preston Wisner, who has a Ph.D. in finance, is a Vietnam War veteran with a sense of humor and you-know-exactly-where-he-stands way about him. As a financial advisor and interim CEO, Wisner found that the accounts were running in the negative.
Corr recalls Wisner and other businessmen on the board having to convince the sisters to raise their rates. "The sisters didn't want to raise the rates," Corr says. "They were dedicated to nursing and to their patients." She says, "But the nuns were operating in a bigger, more sophisticated world than when they started the villa."
Photograph by George Sakkestad
Sisters Celine Nola and Mary Lawrence Kilmer attend Mass at Our Lady of Fatima Villa, where both nuns are residing in the extended-care facility.
"At one time the villa was an institution strictly dedicated to taking care of women," Corr says. The sisters only took in an occasional priest who needed care. It was Wisner who got the nuns to take lay men into the villa.
"That had always been a controversial issue," Corr says. People wanted their fathers who needed care to be able to live at the villa with their mothers. Corr says that one day Wisner announced to the board that the villa had a male patient. He assured the board that the man was not very visible.
"The sisters were perturbed," Corr says. But she says the villa is not supposed to discriminate against anyone. Slowly more men came in.
In the meantime, a second social trend had been taking place.
Seniors were living longer and healthier. Society was setting up facilities and services to help frail seniors remain independent as long as possible-home health workers, visiting nurses, Meals on Wheels and so on. Senior housing with assisted care was beginning to sprout up, which not only helped seniors stay independent, but it was also cheaper and homier and offered more appropriate care than skilled-nursing facilities.
As a result of these changes, residents started coming into the villa older and sicker and staying a shorter time. Where the villa's 85 beds had once been filled all the time, the average number of residents was around 65. Where once the average stay was years, more and more residents were staying just a few months. Wisner says there are still some longtimers. One 102-year-old woman has been at the villa since 1988.
Community connection
Wisner got the villa more connected with the Saratoga community, encouraging various community organizations to use the villa's meeting room. For the first time, the villa even built a float for the Celebrate Saratoga parade. More important, Wisner got the finances back in the black.
But Wisner and the governing board realized in the early 1990s that the villa would have to make some changes in order to survive. Research showed that stand-alone, extended-care facilities could not last, that a facility needed at least two levels of care. The board began laying the groundwork for adding an assisted-care facility on the grounds.
One of the hurdles Wisner and the board faced was the Catholic Health Initiative, which had been managing the villa's money. "CHI services were costing the villa $140,000 a year," Wisner says. According to Wisner, CHI is a very conservative organization and didn't like the new project.
Vic Lo Bue, the chairman of the board at the villa, says CHI didn't understand the needs of the villa because it was too far removed from Saratoga. "They deal with much larger programs," Lo Bue says. "They were holding us back, but we were going ahead anyway with our plans, getting permits and so on."
Lo Bue says the word "nonprofit" is a misnomer. "You have to make money to survive," he says. "The sisters ran this place on a shoestring, but those days are gone."
He says, "We can't let the place self-destruct."
Eventually, the villa severed ties with CHI. "It was a draining experience for us," Lo Bue says. "But now the place is back in the hands of the sisters."
After what Wisner calls having a lot of "brickbats thrown at us," the villa got plans for an assisted-care facility approved by the city of Saratoga.
Lo Bue says the new assisted-care section means the villa can survive and thus carry on the villa's mission beyond the life of the nuns. "The sisters are concerned about that," Lo Bue says.
Sue Mallory, who's been on the board for many years and has just resigned, says Sister Susan, the prioress general of this congregation of nuns, is very supportive of the new plans for the villa. Mallory says Saratoga needs this kind of facility. In fact, she says, the board has even talked about someday adding an independent section for seniors and creating a three-level facility. "Saratogans need a place like this," she says, "so they can stay in the community."
Lo Bue also says, "These changes are not just hammer and nails. If that were true, why not just sell the place?"
"The sisters' mission has to be the most important thing we do on the board," Lo Bue says. "Otherwise nothing would set us apart from the other places."
When the new facility is completed, Catholic Mass as well as other religious services will be held in the multipurpose room on the garden floor.
And the stained glass windows from the old chapel will be placed there ... preserving the memory of the small convent and of the nuns who came to Saratoga in 1947 to serve the frail elderly.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
