By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
(Editor’s note: This is part three of a three-part series about how the Holy Cross Sisters were the face of the Notre Dame community in the Wild, Wild, West.)
The Holy Cross Sisters brought wonderful things to my home state when they arrived 150 years ago in 1875. One of them was Notre Dame.
Their guidance, friendship, and love proved invaluable to at least three members of the fledgling Notre Dame family living far from the shimmer of the Golden Dome. My last two posts discussed Ogden’s first Catholic school teacher Florian DeVoto and his son, Utah’s first Pulitzer prize winner, Bernard DeVoto.
Of course, such remarkable connections between Holy Cross Sisters and the Utah Notre Dame family were not limited to these two Ogden men.
The Holy Cross Sisters inspired many other Utah men and women too. One of their students joined their order even though Brigham Young was her great great grandfather.
The sibling of 1921 ND graduate and Utah Supreme Court Justice Roger I. McDonough was a Holy Cross Sister for almost 70 years. The Holy Cross Sisters taught 1937 Notre Dame graduate Jack Gallivan before he started his accomplished life as publisher of The Salt Lake Tribune and local civic leader. Two aunts of Utah businessman Phil Purcell (ND Class of 1964)—for whom the Notre Dame basketball arena is named—were Holy Cross Sisters.
And one other Ogden native also enjoyed a heartfelt friendship with a Holy Cross Sister who was the spiritual descendant of Mother Augusta and who trained at the Utah college led by Sister Madeleva.
Me.
Sister Patricia Ann and Michael Patrick
My old friend and teacher—Sister Patricia Ann Thompson—was born in Oxnard, California in 1925, the daughter of citrus growers in the Upper Ojai Valley. Her positive school encounters with the Holy Cross Sisters compelled her to join their order in the 1940s while enrolled at the College of Saint Mary of the Wasatch in Salt Lake City.
After also earning a master’s degree in Spanish from Stanford University, Sister Patricia Ann spent 32 years working in education, including two terms as principal at my St Joseph’s High School in Ogden. I met her in the mid-1970s when she tried to teach me Spanish.
Patricia Ann was extraordinarily supportive during my parent’s tumultuous divorce, and even created a special work study program to help my financially strapped family. I describe those difficult times in my 2021 memoir Monastery Mornings. I was not the only beneficiary of her kindness.
One day a father of three students at the school died in the parking lot after his car collapsed on him while he tried to fix it. Sister Patricia Ann comforted the stricken family, worked with the first responders, and cleaned up afterwards.
A friend whose father died in the accident later told me the Holy Sisters were regular and welcome visitors at her home thereafter. They held her mother’s grieving hands, cooked hot meals, cleaned the house, and did dishes.
The Sisters loved all creatures great and small, so when a scruffy dog started lingering around their Ogden convent right by our high school, they fed and cleaned him up. My classmate Shawn Alfonsi built the stray a dog house and the Sisters named him Benji.
Benji likely was a cocker spaniel, schnauzer, and poodle mix just like the famous film dog with the same name. Every class Sister Patricia Ann taught started with a report about Benji’s antics, and he even got his own page in the school yearbook that year.
Sister Patricia Ann and I stayed in touch after she retired from teaching, and we even went to a Notre Dame v. USC football game together. I never felt safer walking to the LA Coliseum than when I had a Holy Cross nun with me.
During those “retirement years,” Patricia Ann immersed herself in parish ministries with the Hispanic community, founding the Brother André Center in 1985 for outreach to the poor at St. Agnes Parish in Los Angeles. She also helped many people become citizens of the United States after Congress and President Ronald Reagan enacted immigration reform.
I don’t remember much of the Spanish Sister Patricia Ann taught me in high school. I will never forget, however, the moment when she gave the greatest compliment I ever received in that lovely language.
One day after class I asked her what one of our vocabulary words—“simpatico”—meant. She answered in English, “Likeable, sympathetic, agreeable.” And then she smiled and added, in Spanish, “Como tú.”
A century and a half of compassion
On a recent visit to Saint Mary’s College and Notre Dame, my wife Vicki and I visited Our Lady of Peace cemetery, just behind the convent of the Holy Cross Sisters. I paid respects at the final resting places of Mother Augusta, Sister Madeleva, and Sister Patricia Ann.
As I did, a soft white morning mist floated up from the nearby St. Joseph River and lingered on the outskirts of the sacred site. It felt like the simpatico spirits of the good sisters were there, watching us, curious and thrilled to have a few living souls stroll by.
During the last 150 years, those spirited Holy Cross Sisters have loved and cared for many, including three Ogden members of the Utah Notre Dame family—Florian DeVoto, Bernard DeVoto, and me. They reached out just when we needed it most. I think I know why.
When I graduated from Notre Dame in 1983, Sister Patricia Ann was living across the street at Saint Mary’s. To celebrate the grand occasion, she bought me a book—Compassion by ND priest Father Don McNeill. She even got him to sign it.
Whenever I open the now worn and tattered four-decades-old pages of this treasured book, one sentence inevitably leaps off the pages at me: “Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion and anguish.”
Compassion. It’s what the Holy Cross Sisters of Notre Dame do.
Even in the Wild, Wild West.
*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.
