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| Sr.Dr.Mary Litty, House of Providence, Kunnanthanam, Mallappally, Pathanamthitta |
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For 25 years she and the congregation founded by her have been running homes for the mentally retarded and discarded children, where compassion and prayer are the hallmarks of cure. But what is more interesting is that Sr.Dr.Mary Litty has been able to do it in relative anonymity all these years.
Based on an inner urge to do something concrete for the lowest of the lowly, she stepped down from the relatively easier life of regular congregational activities and chose to begin her ministration with an empty hand and purse, relying completely on the Grace of God. She did that in 1978 by starting the home with 1 inmate in a small thatched house on rent.
“On the first day we did not even have a kerosene lamp. A poor women from the neighbourhood gave us one. For 2 days, the neighbours fed us. On the 3rd day we bought ½ kg of rice and were struggling to cook it in the absence of firewood when a woman brought a headload of wood and placed it on our doorstep and left without uttering a word,” says Sister Alphonsa, who had come to help the Mother on the 1st day itself.
Slowly such stories repeated. If earlier kerosene lamp was given, now they got generator, instead of headload, they got lorry load of firewood and so on. Father Monsignor Augustine, with the help of a few others, constructed a 3-story building for the home. The Changanacherry diocese gifted 1 acre of land to the Mother. And now at 10 places in Kerala, such homes are working under Sr. Mary Litty with more than 100 nuns.
She was inspired to take up this task by the example of Cotholonga, a saint from Italy, who had started a home for uncared for patients. As a student of medicine in Rome, Sr.Litty had a chance to visit this home of 1000 patients. If the saint could do so much, could I not do atleast a little bit of it, she had thought.
That intense yearning and constant prayer have resulted in all this.
Courtesy: Saji James, Malayalam Varika, November 21, 2003
Contributed by: Administrator
