The Immaculate Heart Center for Spiritual Renewal

A feeling of tranquility and peace welcomes visitors as they enter the grounds of Montecito’s historic estate, La Casa de Maria, and head up the oak tree-lined driveway to the grand stone house in the center of the 26-acre nonprofit interfaith retreat and conference center. Once considered holy ground by the Chumash nation, today La Casa de Maria offers a quiet destination for people of all faiths to escape the stress of everyday life and deepen their spirituality through individual and couples retreats in the intimate surroundings of the Immaculate Heart Center for Spiritual Renewal, or in group gatherings throughout La Casa’s campus.

La Casa’s property was originally part of the San Ysidro Ranch; then became El Prado Rancho, the first lemon orchard in the area; then later became Rancho El Bosque, which brought the addition of the estate house, designed by architect Mary Craig. The home, which now houses the Immaculate Heart Center, remains mostly intact today, featuring stone quarried from nearby San Ysidro Creek, hand-carved teak ceilings, distinctive Italian fireplace mantels, and courtyard tiles from Spain.

“It is a very prayerful surrounding,” says Carol Carrig, the center’s director since 1997. Offering a spiritual bed and breakfast getaway, with delicious organic meals made from produce grown on the property and prepared by the Immaculate Heart Community of former nuns, guests often start out visiting for a few days, then come back again for longer retreats. “They realize that they’re getting in getting in touch with the deeper things that are going on within themselves,” says Carrig.

But beneath the peace and solitude of the center lies a long and storied history, not just of faith, but also of integrity, determination, and vision.

In 1943 Novice Mistress Mother Regina McPartlin, along with 12 novice Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, turned the estate into a Novitiate, where young women train to become nuns. While they pursued religious life on La Casa’s grounds, the peaceful surroundings were also gaining a reputation in Hollywood. Stars such as Irene Dunne, Loretta Young, and Ricardo Montalban came for retreats, holding prayer services in the Novitiate by day, while staying overnight at the Biltmore. In 1955, La Casa de Maria Retreat House formed and became the first retreat center for Catholic married couples. “Every weekend for probably 15 years, 40 married couples came to La Casa. The priests said mass for them, gave them conferences, they renewed their marriage vows, and had wonderful weekends,” says Stephanie Glatt, director of La Casa de Maria.

During the 1960s, there were conflicts between James Francis McIntyre-the Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles who oversaw the Immaculate Heart community-and the sisters’ understanding of the Vatican’s directive to update the church for contemporary times. “McIntyre said, ‘either follow what I say or give up your vows,'” recalls Carrig. “So that’s what we decided to do. To remain a community and to follow what we believed should be the right direction-but everybody had to give up their vows.”

The sisters took the revolutionary step of evolving into the Immaculate Heart Community, an ecumenical group of men and women, both single and married. Rather than fall apart, as many predicted, the Immaculate Heart Community has stayed together and thrived, with almost 200 members still active around the world. The community has operated the Immaculate Heart Center for Spiritual Renewal since 1974, opening its doors for private retreats for people of all faiths.

“It feels like a holy land. Not like Christian, I mean it just feels that the meditation, the peace, the quiet there is special,” says author/psychotherapist Alyce Faye Cleese, one of La Casa’s patrons. She calls the sisters “renegade nuns,” adding, “their story, for their day as women, was an extraordinary piece of women’s lib really-their courage and their bravery and their saying, ‘We’re women, we can do this and we will survive.'”

Today La Casa offers a wide array of programs, such as 12 Step Retreats; the Sacred Art of Living and Dying (for caregivers); Kaballah (Jewish Mysticism) (Jewish Mysticism); Waking up on Earth: Spiritual Life in a Time of Crisis; Centering Prayer Practice Retreats; Recovering Religion as a Work of the Imagination; and Capacitar, which combines Tai Chi, meditation and other practices that integrate spirituality and body wisdom.

In 2005, the Immaculate Heart Community bought back the entire property and is now in the process of a $7.7 million capital campaign. In addition to paying off the mortgage, they also plan to renew the conference buildings, preserve the ecology of the site-including the creating a sustainable agricultural site that protects native plants; developing an organic orchard/garden to provide the produce for the dining rooms; and improving the overall health of the citrus orchard and native Coast Live Oak grove-and develop additional La Casa-sponsored programs. “Part of that is our plan to integrate La Casa de Maria with the greater community and have more people understanding what we’re doing and supporting our program,” says capital campaign chair Christine Garvey, a retired banker. “We’ve mobilized a lot of the neighbors.”

One “neighborly” recruit is capital campaign cabinet member Joan Kreiss, a physician who did AIDS research in Africa before moving to town seven years ago. “What I love about La Casa de Maria is its rich sense of history,” she says. “For our family-and this is particularly important for my children-living next door to La Casa de Maria… gives a sense of context, a sense of being part of a historical continuum.”

“It’s kind of like Peter Pan, you have to believe,” says Cleese. “Not in God, just believing in the goodness of people and the goodness of nature and that something (like La Casa de Maria) is worth existing.”

For more information on La Casa de Maria, call Stephanie Glatt at 969.5031 ext. 204 or visit www.lacasademaria.org.

Originally published in Santa Barbara Magazine