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Sisters
of the Holy Cross in Utah Health Care and Hospitals and First Ministries |
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Reverend ( later Bishop) Lawrence Scanlan petitioned Mother Angela, the superior of the Sisters of the Holy Cross in Notre Dame Indiana, to send Holy Cross Sisters to Utah. His intent was to open a school - St. Mary's Academy - and he asked to open a hospital in response to requests from miners and smelter workers, many of whom were Catholic. The first sisters arrived June 6, 1875. School opened on September 6. Although the Catholic population of Salt Lake City consisted of nine or ten families, by the end of the first term, there were 100 day students and 6 boarders. Most of the students were Mormons or other denominations. Seven sisters staffed the school. |
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| In a letter to the Propagation of the Faith, Father Scanlan wrote in 1879: “through your contributions…we have been able to bring here a handsome colony of sisters who have already firmly established themselves in Salt Lake City…the outlook was wild and gloomy, but they were not discouraged…full of the spirit of their calling… they at once set themselves to the unpleasant work of collecting funds to make a commencement.” Mother Augusta commented on the fundraising and the generosity of the miners: |
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“Miners are not like fashionables, who sometimes think the name enough without the money.” Father Scanlan also writes that the sisters leased a building for a hospital for poor miners and opened the “St. Joseph’s School for Small Boys,” a “neat little building but sufficiently large to accommodate, in a healthful and pleasant manner, from fifty to one hundred pupils.” In Ogden, the sisters also ran the St. Lawrence Hospital, 1887-1898. “The Union Pacific Railroad provided the hospital with fuel, medicine, and surgical instruments for the railroad men needing care. The sisters provided the food, nursed the sick or wounded, saw to the yard, and the cleaning and kept the house in order." By 1880, there were over forty Holy Cross Sisters in Utah. |
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| Holy
Cross Hospital
Salt Lake City, Utah |
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Holy Cross Hospital opened on October 26th, 1875 with 12 beds. Doctor Fowler and Dr. Benedict offered their services except for private patients. Holy Cross quickly outgrew its first brick building. |
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Sisters often slept on the floor to make their living quarters available for patients. Railroad workers with frostbitten hands or feet, amputations from train or equipment accidents, miners with lead or arsenic poisoning, and “black lung” conditions were among their patients. Between 1872 and 1903, of the 20,00 patients treated in St. Mark’s Hospital and Holy Cross Hospital, 6,000 were admitted for lead poisoning. |
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Miners and railway workers paid monthly fees ($1.00 per month), which entitled them to free admission. It covered hospital stays ( $12-$20.00 per week) and major surgery ($10.00). Sisters continued to visit the mining camps to collect money for a new hospital, which was built in 1883, to accommodate 125 patients. It also housed a small school. Their charitable works included responding to the Governor’s call to help staff the City Quarantine Hospital during a small pox epidemic and providing meals out of the back door of the hospital in the Panic of 1907, a practice which endured through the Great Depression. Other major health problems at the time were typhoid, diphtheria, infections, traumatic injuries, and diarrheal diseases in children. As city sanitation and mine working conditions improved and immunizations demonstrated effectiveness, some of these conditions abated. Antiseptic procedures in hospitals improved and common procedures like appendectomies saved countless lives. |
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| Records of the Holy Cross Sisters’ assignments give an idea of how these women were able to respond to the needs of conducting a top rated hospital at the turn of the century when many women were shut out of administrative opportunities. Here is an account of how one sister was developed to support Holy Cross Hospital’s growing service needs; schooling for the new assignments punctuated the list: |
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Holy Cross Hospital stayed in the forefront of progressive health care and community service until 1994. |
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Holy Cross School of Nursing 1901-73: To meet the growing needs of health care facilities, the sisters opened the Holy Cross Hospital School of Nursing to carry on the high quality standards of nursing care, established in the very beginning of Holy Cross Hospital. In conjunction with St. Mary’s of the Wasatch College, students could opt for a 3-year diplomate or a five-year B.S. |
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St.John’s Hospital and School Silver Reef, Utah |
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Father Scanlan opened a church and asked the sisters to provide health care and education in Silver Reef, another mining area Southern Utah in 1879. Silver Reef was a short-lived silver boomtown. The sisters served there until 1885. The building they lived in was “very simple. The main room had five beds and for a time had to serve as a dormitory, parlor, sitting room and community room. A hall separated this from a room to be used as a hospital ward…classes were taught in the basement of the church. Later the sisters lived in the”full basement” of the wooden frame hospital. One sister wrote: There was not a blade of grass or a leaf of tree, and not a bit level ground on three sides…everything looked like the former bed of an ocean which had been converted to a rocky sandy surface.” |
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| The
Sisters of the Holy Cross in Utah: Education Ogden, Utah |
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Sacred Heart Academy opened in Ogden, Utah in 1878 with 150 pupils; 15 boarded at the school. It closed in 1937, and the buildings were used for the western provincial house of the Sisters of the Holy Cross for many years. The sisters also staffed St. Joseph’s parochial school in Ogden 1875-1979. |
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Park City, Utah |
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| Park City, a “mining camp” with a population of 2000 had over 20 Catholic families. Mother Angela, the superior of the congregation, declined a request from Father Scanlan to staff a school in Park City. "Rev. Dear Father, In order that you have no false news, please let me state emphatically that we cannot take the school in Park City. Do not think of getting our Sisters for it. With great respect, your sincere friend in J.M.J." Sister Angela. |
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The next year, Father Scanlan then wrote to Father Edward Sorin, superior general of the congregation at Notre Dame. Sisters were sent, but the school burned to the ground after the first year. It was rebuilt with stone and ready for September 1884. The Catholic families in Park City contributed greatly to the development of Catholic and of civic life in Utah. An apt quote for St. Mary’s in Park City is from T.S. Eliot: “You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid.” The sisters remained throughout the ups and down’s of the silver market, and the school was closed during the depression in 1933. Sister Rose Veronica Mattingly CSC was one of the sisters who staffed the school when it closed. Sister is 93 and enjoys painting watercolors at St. Mary’s Convent, Notre Dame, Indiana. Sister celebrated her diamond jubilee of 75 years as a professed religious this past summer of 2006. |
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Eureka, Utah |
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St. Joseph’s School, 1891-1941. While active, the Tintic mining district, attracted a large number of workers, and the sisters were asked to establish a school. Declining enrollment forced the closure of the school in 1941. |
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St. Mary’s of the Wasatch College/St. Mary’s Academy |
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After passing over an opportunity to purchase the Gilmer property on 9th East and 11th South in Salt Lake City, a site at the base of the Wasatch Range was decided upon by Bishop Glass in the early 1920’s for a college and academy. Bishop Glass returned from the ground-breaking saying, “Brigham Young is not the only one who said ‘This is the place’.” The 400 acres were purchased from the Country Club. The Tudor style buildings were ready by 1926 and offered a Catholic secondary and college education for 33 years. Sister Madeleva CSC, a poet who later served as president of St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, wrote of her time as president of the Wasatch school 1926-32: “We had often been cold, sometimes hungry. Coyotes cried under our windows at night. Water shortages left us parched and unwashed during all but unbearable months in summer, Once at least every winter, we were snowed in…frequently, we walked in groups up the mountainside and back, returning in the evening to make hot chocolate in the social hall. The amenities of our lives would have been impossible anywhere else.” |
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| Kearns-St. Ann’s Orphanage |  |
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Although the orphanage opened in 1899 through the $50,000 gift of Jennie Judge Kearns, wife of Thomas Kearns, later to be U.S. Senator, the sisters had already been caring for orphans in an adobe house formerly occupied by the bishop. Patrick Phelan, a miner, left his estate to the orphanage in 1902 and Kearns-St. Ann’s Orphanage was able to accommodate 66 residents by 1926. In addition, 50 day students attended the school. In 1953, the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word helped transition the orphanage and in 1955, converted the facilities to a grade school. |
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| Sisters of the Holy Cross also ministered in: | ||
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and did pastoral ministry in parishes in
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| Sisters of the Holy Cross currently serve in: | ||
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