Whatever happened to the Sisters of St. Francis?

St. Francis Medical Center in Lawrenceville closed five years ago this summer, after more than a century of firsts, from the first hospital in the nation to admit female psychiatric patients (1873) to the first CAT scan in Pittsburgh (1975).

The first that most people cared about, though, was its being the first place an ambulance driver would go when he discovered an accident victim had no insurance. These sisters believed in healing body, mind and spirit long before those concepts became new-age buzzwords. The leveling of their convent was a sorrow hard for others to imagine. One sister had been on the hospital campus for 63 years.

Sister Ann Carville -- a distant relative of James Carville, the political talking head -- was telling me this as we sat one recent afternoon at the sprawling Motherhouse in Millvale. Sister Carville has the smarts of her more famous relative, minus the cynicism.

The sisters are older, poorer and fewer than they were 30 years ago, but they're still managing little Mount Alvernia High School, a thriving day care center, a Montessori preschool and a senior high-rise on the 32-acre campus. They also have a wellness outreach program that sends a sleek, 31-foot van into the neighborhoods for blood tests and such. ("The Spirit of Health'' was parked in front of Christ Lutheran Church in Millvale yesterday and was so inviting I didn't know whether to get my cholesterol checked or drive it to Yellowstone.)

A quartet of sisters moved to St. Bartholemew parish in Penn Hills after the hospital closed, but 25 moved to the Millvale campus. These women were in their 60s, 70s, 80s and older, bringing the number of sisters at the Motherhouse to about 85. You live a long time when you have a reason to get up in the morning.

The sisters are doing what they can to "go green" at the leafy, hilltop campus, planting wildflowers to cut down on hired lawn mowing. Inside, carved chestnut is everywhere, product of a time when the wood was cheap and plentiful, and the sisters' brothers, most of them German immigrants, were skilled carpenters willing to lend a hand.

"In convents, things don't wear out; they get scrubbed away," Sister Ann said, and recalled how, as a teenager coming into the order, she had to use a thin wooden skewer to clean the crevices in the carved pews of the Gothic chapel.

The convent is not a womb or a cocoon, she said. "Our greatest fear is to lose a sense of mission.'' They are part of the Millvale community, as even the shortest visit shows, with more than 200 children enrolled in the day care program -- "those little short legs every morning and afternoon.'' There are also more than 30 children in the Montessori preschool, and 17 women graduated from the high school this spring. They come from Millvale, the North Hills, Penn Hills and city neighborhoods north of the Mon, and claimed $925,000 in college scholarships at graduation.

Retired men and women climbed into "The Spirit of Health'' van yesterday for their checkups. John Goodman came in and wanted to be clear he wasn't the actor John Goodman, declaring, "I'm not stuck with Roseanne.''

Tracy King, a doctor of pharmacy with a fellowship from Duquesne University's pharmacy school, knew Mr. Goodman from his last visit and asked about his garden.

"Oh, you remember that,'' he said, and was soon talking about how, as a kid, he tended John Heinz's grandmother's flowers at her Squirrel Hill estate. "If it grew, I took care of it.''

The banter was easy, even after Mr. Goodman registered a blood sugar count that he promised to relay to his doctor.

The van has regular stops in Millvale, Carnegie, Lawrenceville and the South Side Slopes once each month, and makes occasional visits to high-rises, too. The program's coordinator, Joanne Bedillion, thought she had retired from nursing after 42 years at St. Francis Medical Center, but she went to lunch two years ago with her Holy Family grade school classmate, Sister Lorraine Wesolowski, and was recruited for this new vocation. The mobile wellness program teams with Duquesne University and the Mercy Parish/Congregational Nurse Program and, in addition to testing, gave 200 flu shots last winter.

On Monday, Aug. 6, the third annual golf tournament to benefit these ministries will be held at Treesdale Country Club. For information, call Michon Kerlin, director of development, 412-821-2200, extension 217, or go to millvalefranciscans.org. If you have the cabbage, there are a lot worse reasons to chase a ball around.