IFTTT Autopost 
This Friday’s mission hero is an American woman of the 20thcentury who did all her mission work at home in northeastern Ohio. Her name was Sr. Ignatia.
Sr. Ignatia was a member of the Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine, the religious order who taught me in elementary school. Sr. Ignatia taught music for twenty-one years, but at the age of 39, when she was recovering from a nervous breakdown, she was assigned to be the registration clerk at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, Ohio, birthplace of Alcoholics Anonymous.
In the summer of 1939, a man named Dr. Bob Smith, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, came to Sr. Ignatia. He wanted to have a detoxification center in the hospital where alcoholics could get medical help while coming off of alcohol and then learn a new way of life. Sr. Ignatia was all for the idea, for like Dr. Bob, she knew what suffering and compassionate treatment were all about.
The hospital administration, however, was quite against the idea. They told Dr. Bob, himself a recovering alcoholic, that they did not want alcoholics at St. Thomas Hospital. Sr. Ignatia and Dr. Bob ignored the administration, and they cooked up different schemes to get alcoholics admitted. Sr. Ignatia would, for example, admit alcoholic patients during shift changes while nursing supervisors were busy getting report. Or, the alcoholic patients would be admitted under different diagnoses such as gastritis.
Eventually, though, Dr. Bob and Sr. Ignatia had to confront the issue openly. By their firm stance, the hospital administrator, Sr. Clementine, agreed to open the first alcoholic unit that had Alcoholics Anonymous as its basic treatment strategy. Between 1939 and 1950, more than 5,000 alcoholics were treated at St. Thomas Hospital.
Then in 1952, Sr. Ignatia was transferred to St. Vincent Charity Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. She was 63-years old at the time. Immediately she began making plans to build a new alcoholism treatment center in the hospital, which she named Rosary Hall Solarium, a ward that had the same initials as Dr. Bob—Robert Holbrook Smith.
Just as in Akron, Sr. Ignatia had to fight for what she wanted, but was always successful. Sr. Ignatia got her way by putting love above law, compassion above rules.
And for the alcoholics who were served at Rosary Hall, she gave them a badge of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The people who accepted the badge promised to return the badge to her before taking another drink of alcohol. This custom survives down to this day in the form of tokens marking anniversaries of sobriety in AA, though the tokens are not of the Sacred Heart.
Sr. Ignatia, often called the Angel of Alcoholics Anonymous, died on April 1, 1966 in Cleveland. At her funeral, the church was overflowing with people, and television crews were all trying to get the best views.
Mary Darrah wrote a beautiful book about Sr. Ignatia called, Sister Ignatia: Angel of Alcoholics Anonymous.
