By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
(Editor’s note: 2025 marks the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the Holy Cross Sisters in Salt Lake City. Their kindness, hard work, and devotion changed Utah history forever and touched countless Utah lives. Over the next year, I will tell some of those stories here in the blog.)
Perhaps nothing better reveals the unique relationship between Utah and the Holy Cross Sisters than the fact that Brigham Young’s great granddaughter joined the order of Catholic nuns.
The Holy Cross Sisters first arrived in Utah on June 6, 1875. Sister Raymond (Mary) Sullivan and Sister Augusta (Amanda) Anderson traveled to Salt Lake City via train and stagecoach from their convent in South Bend, Indiana at the invitation of Father Lawrence Scanlan (soon to be the local Catholic bishop).
Scanlan hoped the good order of sisters—originally from France but soon full of hardworking and devoted Irish Catholic nuns—would help him build schools and meet other local human and spiritual needs. With their trademark energy and industriousness, within just a few months the Holy Cross Sisters had started both a school and a hospital in Salt Lake.
Over the next hundred and fifty years, the Holy Cross Sisters also would create a dozen other Utah schools, found two other hospitals, start an orphanage, form a school of nursing, build a college, and start numerous other social service ministries. They’d also serve at or support almost every other local Catholic institution in Utah.
When they arrived, the first two Holy Cross sisters in Utah stayed with Thomas and Sarah (Hughes) Marshall. Marshall was a local lawyer and the nephew of the great Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, and Sarah was the daughter of a Missouri Congressman and a devout Catholic.
In between the sisters’ work assessing and strategizing about local needs (mainly involving health care and education), Scanlan introduced them to Brigham Young. Although in the last two years of his life, the Lion of the West who made the desert bloom was still quite vigorous.
By all accounts Young was very cordial to the sisters. He offered any assistance he could give, other than financial aid. The Latter-day Saint prophet also warmly greeted the two Catholic nuns whenever he met them in the streets.
There’s also an oral tradition, among the Holy Cross Sisters, that Sister Augusta and Sister Raymond taught some of Brigham Young’s children. Convent legend says he even asked Sister Augusta to be ‘sealed’ to him for eternity, so that even after death she could be part of the celestial kingdom.
She politely declined, but Young still accumulated 56 wives and 57 children. One of these family lines would prove to be a special blessing for the Holy Cross Sisters.
In 1832, Young’s first wife Miriam passed away from tuberculosis. Within two years, the widowed future church leader married Mary Ann Angell Morton. (Her brother Truman, an architect, would later design the Salt Lake Temple.)
Their only son—also named Brigham—was born in 1836 in Kirtland, Ohio. Like his famous father, Brigham Jr. went on to serve as a leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including as president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.
And like his father, he also practiced plural marriage and had 7 wives and 25 children. One of Brigham Jr.’s daughters from his first marriage was named Cora Young.
Cora married a man named James Rogers, had a son, and named him Jay Alexander Rogers. Although a Latter-day Saint, in 1928 Jay Rogers fell in love with and married a devout Salt Lake City Catholic girl named Mildred Mary Miles.
Their second daughter—born in 1937 and named Mildred Judy Rogers—grew up attending church at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic parish. She also graduated from the nearby Judge Memorial Catholic High School, which the Holy Cross Sisters staffed starting in 1922.
After high school, Mildred Rogers joined the order of women who had taught her—the Congregation of the Holy Cross Sisters—and took on the religious name of Sister Marie Bernadette. She professed her final vows on August 15, 1963.
Sister Marie Bernadette earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in education from the University of Portland and then a master’s degree in administration from the University of San Francisco. She focused her ministry in elementary education for three decades, working as a teacher and school principal in California.
Her obituary indicates she eventually moved back to Salt Lake City to care for her mother while working as a teacher at Our Lady of Lourdes School in Salt Lake City. She then worked for Catholic Community Services and helped start the Welcome Center in Salt Lake City to provide prayer, socialization, education, and celebration.
During her final years, Sister Marie Bernadette worked in Seattle’s Providence Hospitality House, a shelter for mothers and their children who were homeless. An unexpected illness forced her to return to Saint Mary’s Convent at Notre Dame, Indiana where her obituary indicates she passed away in October 2008.
Records show that over 1,300 different Holy Cross Sisters served in Utah over the past 150 years. So far as I know, only one of them descended from Brigham Young.
In a final tribute to their sister, her religious colleagues acknowledged Mildred Rogers’ special connections to Utah, “Sister Marie Bernadette always said her only claim to fame was that she was the great, great granddaughter of Brigham Young, the second and most powerful president of the Mormon Church.”
True to form, however, her fellow Holy Cross Sisters also saw so much more in Brigham’s great granddaughter: “[W]e know from experience, that her real claim to fame is based on her gentle attentiveness to each and every person she met.”
(Note: The CommonSpirit health system chose to honor the legacy of the Sisters of the Holy Cross by naming their Utah hospitals after them. The current Holy Cross Hospitals in Utah are no longer affiliated with the Sisters. The Sisters’ only remaining sponsored social justice ministry is Holy Cross Ministries of Utah, a local nonprofit organization that provides health, education and justice services to the underserved communities here in Utah.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
