Center Treats Nuns’ Alcoholism by Providing a New Self-Image : Recovery: By mixing with lay women, the sisters let go of their traditional role of self-sacrifice and ministering to others to learn how to ask for help.

FAIRFAX —  The hard-drinking Catholic priest, tumbler of whiskey in hand, is a familiar stereotype, captured time and again by Hollywood and bolstered by real-life examples. But for most people, the idea of a nun with a drinking problem is incongruous.

Casting off those preconceptions with the same zeal with which some nuns doffed their habits in the late ‘60s are the sisters in an alcoholism treatment program housed in an old convent at St. Mary Magdalen Parish, near Pico and La Cienega boulevards.

Called the Center for Renewed Life, the facility houses a mix of nuns and non-clergy women who spend six months to a year overcoming addictions. The 1 1/2-year-old center, just south of Beverly Hills, is the first of its kind for sisters in Southern California and is believed to be the first in the nation to mix recovering nuns with lay women.

Run by Sisters of the Holy Faith, a congregation whose motherhouse is in Dublin, Ireland, the center is directed by Sister Ada Geraghty.

“It has been said to me by someone, ‘It’s OK for a priest to drink, but not for the sisters,’ ” Geraghty said. “That’s the general attitude. Our traditional image and role has always been one of perfection, holiness and self-denial. But we’re subject to the same diseases as the rest of the population.

“If we had cancer or diabetes, it’d be no problem to admit,” she said. “But because it is alcohol, it is looked upon as a moral problem. It’s the equivalent of admitting you’ve fallen from grace or that you’re a weak person.”

Geraghty, 50, speaks from experience. She is, she said, a recovering alcoholic whose drinking problem developed during her 10 years as principal of a school in New Orleans. Four times she completed a monthlong residential treatment program for her addiction, she said, and four times she relapsed.

In fact, she said, the incidence of relapse among sisters after treatment has been disturbingly high. And that is why Geraghty set out to create a program tailored to the special needs of nuns.

“I relapsed because I wouldn’t do the (follow-up) support program,” said Geraghty, who earned certification from UCLA’s yearlong program in chemical dependency followed by an internship at Exodus Recovery Center at Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital. “And there was a collective denial in the (religious and secular) community about sisters having a drinking problem. Finally, after 10 years of that, I’d finally had enough of the pain (and attended regular recovery meetings).”

The tendency in religious life to isolate oneself, and to be non-confrontational and self-sacrificing under the guise of ministering to others, aids and abets alcoholic behavior, Geraghty said. Compounding the problem, she said, is nuns’ complicity in one another’s denial of a problem.

Treatment at the Center for Renewed Life is conventional in many respects, based on a standard 12-step recovery program. It includes group and individual psychotherapy sessions, medical evaluation, community support living, prayer and an after-care plan.

But there are some key differences. Although most residential treatment programs last for a month, this one extends at least half a year. To ensure proper follow-up, the center’s staff goes into a sister’s religious order to educate her fellow nuns and superiors.

And by mixing nuns and lay women together in a treatment program, Geraghty said, nuns learn from non-clergy women honesty about their addiction, how to ask for help and how to stop sublimating their feelings and needs. All of the sisters at the center, ranging in age from the mid-30s to 60s, have emotional problems rooted in childhood sexual, physical or psychological abuse that they are only now facing, Geraghty said.

Sister Mary, who asked that her full name not be used, belongs to an order of nuns in Ireland. Sitting in a pink-on-pink living room in the Spanish-style recovery house, she talked about her struggle with alcoholism and of her childhood memories of her father’s alcohol-induced violence and abuse. Although the Catholic church has never had a prohibitive stance on alcohol, she said it wasn’t until the church liberalized its rules for nuns in the late ‘60s that she was even exposed to it.

“At the time, there wasn’t a lot of joy in the convent,” said Sister Mary, who is in her late 40s. “It was all so dreary. So I got in the habit of going out with friends and family and topping off my glass on the quiet if no one else was doing it. I was deceitful about the amount I was drinking, experienced blackouts and was unable to remember how I’d gotten to bed.”

After drinking excessively at a hotel one night, Sister Mary said the police stopped her for driving erratically. They forced her to spend the night at a convent nearby and called her mother superior, who confronted her the next day. After going through a treatment program in Dublin, Sister Mary resumed her vocational life in Ecuador, where she lived without any kind of support program.

Shortly thereafter, she began drinking wine, beer and later, from a bottle of brandy that was kept in a medicine cabinet. She was once again reported to her mother superior and sent to the Center for Renewed Life. She said she will not be allowed back into her religious community unless she faithfully attends post-recovery meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.

If there is a factor that appears to have coincided with the numbers of clergy seeking treatment for addictions, it is the enactment of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) reforms that modernized the Catholic church. Along with changing the Mass from Latin to the vernacular and allowing nuns to shed their habits and mingle among lay people regularly, came the increased exposure to alcohol for all clergy at church and social gatherings.

Before Vatican II, Geraghty said, “Alcohol was not available to us. . . . Sisters who had a genetic predisposition to alcoholism would have never known about it before the rules changed.”

The center receives no funds from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles or Catholic charities, Geraghty said. It operates on money obtained from private philanthropists and from its own fund-raising efforts.

David L. Murphy, head of the Exodus Recovery Center at Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital, is the medical director of the center. He said treatment is based on the premise that alcoholism is a disease and that it is, to a great degree, inherited--a theory strongly supported by studies involving twins and adopted children.

“Alcoholism runs in families,” he said. “Scientists don’t deny that there are social, cultural and environmental factors, but a big input is genetic predisposition--the inherited ability to become addicted.”

Father Terry Ritchie, a priest who directs a substance-abuse ministry for the archdiocese, said there are no reliable studies that track the incidence of alcoholism among clergy. But Ritchie, who has worked with alcoholic clergy for 17 years, said his work suggests that the rate is comparable to that of the general population. (The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence puts the average rate of alcoholism in the general population at 1 in 10.)

Sister Kathleen, a Mission San Jose Dominican who is a resident at the Center for Renewed Life, talked about the shame religious women feel about their problem. After being treated for bulimia, Sister Kathleen, who said that she had been drinking excessively for about five years, was advised to go into treatment for alcoholism.

“That was a big shock to me,” said Sister Kathleen, a schoolteacher who has been in the program for five months. “I just couldn’t admit it. I just wanted to keep up this image that I was a good sister and that I was in control. People have certain expectations that sisters don’t drink and that we rely on our God to solve all our problems. I did most of my drinking in the open and the other sisters noticed, but didn’t say anything. There is a charity among sisters . . . the average sister wouldn’t confront another.”

At a recent weekly group session, psychotherapist Kristine A. Kepp sat amid a circle of 12 women, six of whom were sisters. The sisters sat on the overstuffed furniture as if they were afraid of taking up too much space--hands folded in their laps, feet together and flat on the floor and eyes cast down. The lay women looked more relaxed, arms draped over the back of couches and legs crossed. During the two-hour session, each woman had an opportunity to talk about their feelings and struggles with their sobriety.

Sister Nora, a schoolteacher in her 60s, said: “I am so thankful to have the freedom to relate my brokenness to these (non-clergy) ladies and to let them see that we’re just human beings and not one step above them. It’s nice to know I’m surrounded by all these lovely people and that I won’t shock them by anything to say. There’s no need to run.”

Rhonda, a lay participant who asked that her real name not be used, responded: “It was really hard for me to come into a convent full of nuns. I thought, ‘How am I going to do here with my past (as an alcoholic since the age of 14)?’ My ideas of nuns was that they had a special contact or line to God. But what I found was these really beautiful women and I was really struck by their humanness.”

Even after months in treatment, director Geraghty said, the participants find themselves bumping continually into myths and stereotypes that have trapped sisters for years.

“It’s hard to shake off the old training,” she said. “In the past, we didn’t think much of ourselves. It was self last and others first, go it alone, remain in isolation and sweep it under the rug. The old idea was love God and love thy neighbor before yourself. When in reality the commandment says, ‘Love God and thy neighbor as thyself.’ ”