Near the intersection of College Avenue and Frazer Road in Malvern, Pennsylvania, you will find the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary cemetery. It is an impressively sloping site, quite large, with more than 2000 graves arranged in parallel rows, like rows of student desks in an old-fashioned classroom. The IHMs are a teaching order. I doubt that it was intentional, but the stones even have slanted tops much like student desks.
Because of the uniform simplicity of the stones and their precise arrangement, in some ways it resembles a military cemetery. It is not a historic cemetery, the oldest inscription only goes back to 1943. Before that the Sisters were buried in other cemeteries, including a large, crowded plot at the parish cemetery of St. Agnes Parish in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Many years ago, when some graves were being moved a coffin collapsed. It became obvious to the workmen that although the Sister had died many years previously, her body was intact. They contacted the then-Superior General Mother Alma. “We think you have a saint,” they said. “What do you want us to do?” Mother Alma’s response was, “They’re all saints; just rebury her.”
I wonder if the people taking the Frazer Road shortcut between two busy roads ever pause to think about the lives represented by all of those individual stones; on each simply a name, a date and a cross.
Practically every Sister buried here spent most of her adult life teaching in Catholic Schools. Over those years, how many children did each one teach their prayers — Our Father, Hail Mary, Act of Contrition? How many did each one prepare for first communion or confirmation? How many Baltimore Catechism questions did she make sure the children could answer from memory? Whatever number you arrive at in answer to those musings and calculations, multiply it by 2000.
All that activity had something deeper behind it, of course. There was a special motivation. Each Sister walked her own vocation path, and they came from different nationalities. Each believed she a call that had been given to her from God to serve Him and the Church through educating the children. And the energy that fueled that zeal for Christian education came from multiple hours spent in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, and from the support and encouragement of belonging to a community of like-minded Sisters.
There is one Columban Father buried in the IHM cemetery. Father John Kerr, a former missionary to China, has a place in one of the rows. He was chaplain at the Sisters’ infirmary when he died in 1965.
Now together they await the last trumpet and the appearance of the Lord of Life.
Columban Fr. John Burger lives and works in Pennsylvania.