In the summer of 1916, the Missionary Sisters Servants of the Holy Spirit bought a large house on 60 acres of woodland in what was then rural Hyattsville—not a single building stood between Hyattsville and Washington, DC—to provide a home for religious sisters who were studying at Washington's Catholic University. They also wanted to enjoy communal living in caring and spiritually nurturing surroundings.
To pay for the costs of maintaining the home and caring for themselves, they invited ladies who wished to live their remaining years in a religious environment to join them.
In the 1960's, after expanding and renovating the home several times, the Sisters decided they wanted to extend their caring hearts to the sick and the infirm, and Sacred Heart home became a Medicaid-licensed nursing home.
In 1998 the Missionary Sisters Servants of the Holy Spirit transferred sponsorship and ownership of the home to the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate, whose mission includes caring for those who can no longer care for themselves.
Today, Sacred Heart Home provides a nurturing community, in a brand new facility, opened in November 2023, which is expressed in our Caring Hearts philosophy, to some 44 residents, all of whom celebrate life and spirituality every day. We also provide care to each other, including friends, volunteers and staff, because that is our commitment to each other.
We will continue to provide an innovative, caring environment for everyone associated with Sacred Heart Home, including our partners and our community. We will continue to grow and change to meet the needs of our residents as well as our staff, volunteers and friends. Most importantly, we will continue to build a home for Caring Hearts.
The Sisters Servants find meaning and spiritual nurturing in the work they do at Sacred Heart Home and in their various facilities and programs throughout the world.
The Congregation of the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate was founded in 1878, when the Immaculate Virgin Mary appeared to three young country girls in Gietrzwald, Poland. The order came to America in 1934. In America, we have served both the old and the young, with both a pre-kindergarten program and nursing home in Baltimore and Sacred Heart Home, a nursing home community, in Hyattsville, Maryland. We also work with Catholic Charities doing outreach to the homebound elderly in Cleveland, Ohio, and we serve as sacristans at the National Shrine in Washington, DC.
Our goals are as simple as they are spiritual:
Besides the Motherhouse in Poland and our ministries in the United States, we also serve communities in Italy, Lithuania, Africa and Latvia.
Because visible religious communities were subject to suppression and dispersal at the time of the congregation's founding, the Sisters Servants did not initially wear a traditional, distinctive habit, and still do not today.