A Single Act of Irish Mercy in Utah

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

During the early 1900s, my great aunt devoted her life to helping the “poor, sick and ignorant” in Burlington, Vermont. She was part of the Sisters of Mercy, an order of Irish nuns founded in Dublin a hundred years earlier. While I knew about my aunt’s work, until very recently I had no idea that one of her colleagues was doing the same thing, at about the same time, here in Utah.

The Sisters of Mercy started in 1831 when Catherine McAuley used her inheritance to assist the poor and the sick in Dublin and other places in Ireland. Irish nuns eventually brought the good work of the Sisters to America and then to Vermont in the late 1800s. In 1904, my twenty-two year old aunt, Mary Elizabeth (Sister Catherine) Gleason, look the vows that led her to spend the rest of her life teaching, visiting the sick, and caring for the poor in her hometown.

These vows, the promises made by every Sister of Mercy, seemed to grow organically from the experiences of Catholics in Ireland a half a century before. The vow to serve the poor responded to the injustice of the British penal laws, which made poverty inevitable for most Catholics. The vow to serve the sick recognized the widespread illness and malnutrition that plagued Catholics, not least of which was the great hunger caused by the potato famine. The vow to serve the ignorant reacted to the laws that forbade even elementary education to most of the poor.

At about the same time that my aunt Mary was working as a Sister of Mercy in Vermont, a young Irish-American woman named Elizabeth Mahoney (known as Mother Vincent de Paul Mahoney) came to Utah from Georgia. She arrived to operate the Judge Mercy Home, a Salt Lake City retirement center for aged and ailing miners that was funded by Mary Judge, the widow of silver miner and philanthropist John Judge, whose own work in the mines resulted in his early death. John Judge also was an Irish emigrant and survivor of the potato famine. Eventually, twenty other Sisters of Mercy were working with Mother Vincent Mahoney caring for the old miners in Utah.

The Judge Mercy Home lasted only about five years, and closed because other service organizations filled the miners’ needs. The building became the foundations of Judge Memorial Catholic High School, which each of my children attended and which in 2021 will celebrate its centennial anniversary.

The Utah Sisters of Mercy moved on to other charitable work, including starting the Mercy health care system in nearby Boise, Idaho. They all moved on, that is, except Mother Vincent Mahoney. One history of the order notes that she placed all her sisters in other jobs but “Like Moses of the Old Testament, the leader herself was never to reach that promised land. Anguish and anxiety hastened an untimely death at age 61 on September 9, 1916.”

Elizabeth Mahoney is the lone Sister of Mercy buried in the entire State of Utah, now fondly remembered only by a simple granite marker at Mount Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Salt Lake City, and by this simple blog article written by her religious sister’s Irish great nephew.