Monumental Sister Mercedes

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.)

The Holy Cross Sisters have been in Utah 20 years longer than Utah has been a state. One of them was here for well over a third of that historic and evolutionary time period.

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. 

One of these amazing pioneer nuns was Sister Mercedes. She was born Mary Halligan in Flint, Michigan in 1855 and joined the Holy Cross order in her early twenties.

She came out west in 1880 to work at the first Catholic school in Utah. The Holy Cross Sisters had built it five years earlier on a site now occupied by the Salt Palace convention center in downtown Salt Lake City.

Sister Mercedes never left. For the next 57 years, she taught or worked in administration at St. Mary’s Academy, Sacred Heart Academy in Ogden, St. Mary of the Wasatch in the Salt Lake City foothills, and other Utah schools. 

It was a pivotal time of transition and change.

When Sister Mercedes arrived in Salt Lake City people got around in horse drawn carriages. By the time she died in 1937, they were driving motorized cars.

In 1880, the predominant Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was still reeling from the death three years earlier of Brigham Young, the man who led them west. Sister Mercedes witnessed the fulfillment of his greatest dream—the completion and opening of Salt Lake Temple in 1893.

Utah became a state in 1896, and completed work on its historic capitol building in 1916. Sister Mercedes saw all of it, including the 1899 election of Thomas Kearns, the first Utah Catholic in the United States Senate.

Sister Mercedes also watched the construction of the historic First Presbyterian Church on South Temple in 1905 and attended the first Catholic mass across the street in 1909 at the brand new Cathedral of the Madeleine.

She also later joined her fellow Holy Cross Sisters at the landmark Cathedral for the May 1915 requiem mass of Bishop Lawrence Scanlan, the man who had brought them all to Utah.

Sister Mercedes was close friends with General Edward O’Connor, who during the Civil War established Fort Douglas on Salt Lake City’s East Side. According to an archived newspaper report, Sister Mercedes also knew  “most of the [state’s] principal business men” as boys and could “call many of them by their first names.”

Another newspaper article described her this way: “A typical nun, she could adapt herself to any call of duty or any assignment of tasks…a serene and saintly sister.”

During the early twentieth century, the Utah Pioneer Trails and Landmarks Association (UPTLA) started placing markers at significant sites of Utah pioneer history. In 1932 the association placed one for the Holy Cross Sisters.

This decision recognized the Sisters’ rightful place in the history of Utah and in the old American West. Other UPTLA markers note where Brigham Young first arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, the Mormon Pioneer Trail, the ill-fated Donner Trail, the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and a Pony Express station.

Over 2,000 people gathered at Salt Lake’s Holy Cross Hospital for the unveiling of the granite and bronze marker in mid-September 1932. Catholic Bishop Duane Hunt and Utah Governor George Dern attended, as did George Albert Smith—a future president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Sister Madeleva Wolff—a renowned poet and scholar—spoke for the Holy Cross Sisters. And Sister Mercedes—the oldest and longest serving sister in Utah—unveiled the monument.

The bronze tablet on the monument reads: “In June 1875 in answer to the appeal of the Rev. Lawrence Scanlan, two Sisters of the Holy Cross, Mother M. Augusta and Sister M. Raymond, came to Salt Lake City. In August they were joined by Sisters M. Pauline, Anna, Josepha, Holy Innocents, and Petronella, and in September they opened St. Mary’s Academy at 152 South First West Street. In October of the same year Sisters M. Holy Cross, Bartholomew, and Bernard opened Holy Cross Hospital at 50 South Fifth East Street. The hospital was established on the present site in 1882. The College and Academy of St. Mary-of-the-Wasatch and Holy Cross Hospital stand today as monuments to mark the trail of these Pioneer Sisters.”

St. Mary of the Wasatch now is gone and replaced by upscale housing, although a street near the old school campus is named Mercedes Way. Holy Cross Hospital also has new owners. 

And Sister Mercedes is gone too.

When she died in 1937, Bishop Hunt presided over her funeral mass at a packed Cathedral of the Madeleine. Her final resting place is at Salt Lake City’s Mount Calvary cemetery, on a peaceful hillside overlooking her adopted Utah home.

She did not write books, win elections, paint paintings, make great scientific discoveries, or design important buildings. She never did any of the things that typically make people famous or immortal or important. 

And yet, she was beloved. Why? 

“Mercedes” is Spanish for “mercy” which comes from the Latin word for “compassion.”

An unknown admirer’s brief newspaper tribute from 1937 explains why it was the perfect religious name for Holy Cross Sister Mercedes Halligan—“I don’t believe the little lady has ever been guilty of an unkind thought, much less an unkind deed.”

I think that’s what really made the Holy Cross Sisters monumental.

*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.