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.)
Salt Lake City’s Purcell family produced three generations of highly successful businesspeople. Two family members—female siblings—followed a radically different path, however, and joined the order of Holy Cross Sisters.
The Holy Cross Sisters first arrived in Utah from their convent in Notre Dame, Indiana on June 6, 1875. Sister Raymond (Mary) Sullivan and Sister Augusta (Amanda) Anderson traveled to Salt Lake City via train and stagecoach at the invitation of Father Lawrence Scanlan (soon to be Utah’s 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, in just a few months the Holy Cross Sisters had started both a school and a hospital in Salt Lake.
Over the next 150 years, they 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.
In the 1900s, the Purcells witnessed (and probably even financially supported) that good work. When they were sick, they went to Holy Cross Hospital in Salt Lake City.
They attended the local Catholic schools run by the Sisters, including Judge Memorial High School and Saint Mary of the Wasatch. Several family members even attended the University of Notre Dame, run by the Holy Cross fathers and brothers and closely affiliated with the Sisters.
The two Purcells siblings who joined Holy Cross had a father, a brother, and a nephew all named Phil Purcell. Each “Phil” distinguished himself in the business world.
Their father Phil (born in 1889) started and built a lucrative insurance agency in Salt Lake City named Continental Agency, and served as Director of the Salt Lake Metro Water District. He passed away in 1947 at just age 58.
Their older brother Phil (born in 1914) graduated from Judge Memorial and the University of Notre Dame, and expanded the business his father started. After running one of the oldest and largest independent agencies in Utah, he died in 1992 at age 78.
Their nephew Phil played multiple sports at Judge Memorial and was teammates and lifelong friends with legendary JM basketball coach Jim Yerkovich. He also attended ND and then went on to a successful career on Wall Street.
Perhaps the most successful in business of them all, he served as board chair and CEO for both Dean Witter and Morgan Stanley. Under his watch, the popular Discover credit card products were launched.
Since retiring, the nephew Phil Purcell has been a generous philanthropist. He donated a large gift to renovate the Notre Dame basketball arena, now known as Purcell Pavilion.
Other Purcells not named Phil, both women and men, have led wealth management companies or banks. And the more recent generations seem to be continuing the family knack for success in business. Yet, two of the Purcell sisters—Maybelle Elizabeth and Pauline Virginia—chose a radically different path.
Why make such a choice?
At the turn of the century, a few decades before the Purcell sisters, Utah’s Holy Cross Sister Sienna explained why in an interview with a reporter for the Salt Lake Herald.
The news reporter, identified only as “a Protestant,” noted that the daily life of the Sisters’ “is a constant rebuke to every form of selfishness.” And yet, it was a life of joy: “No long-faced school girl ever became a nun.”
The reporter further observed, “[The Sisters] are almost always attired alike, in black serge gowns with capes of the same material, large flowing sleeves, white collar, fluted cap and coifette or band across the forehead…[and] a black veil.”
Once so attired, what did they do?
“Early rising, early mass, early breakfast, followed by strict attention to the allotted stint of the day, varied only by the two other meals and a brief time of recreation constitute the changeless routine. It may be that the duty is caring for the sick, it may be teaching the young, but it is one that must not be shirked.”
And then the Salt Lake Herald reporter asked Sister Sienna the big question—why do young women become nuns?
“The answer was a smiling one, as were all the remarks that preceded it. ‘Because they believe they are called of God to that kind of service. We believe in vocation; that is that God has destined us for some particular life work, and that we who are religious believe we were called to labor in this part of the Master’s vineyard.’”
The Purcell sisters chose to work in that vineyard.
Sister Stephen Purcell (Maybelle Elizabeth) was born in Salt Lake City in 1920, the fifth of eight children. She joined the Holy Cross Sisters in 1940. (Her younger sibling/sister joined six years later.)
Sister Stephen graduated from both St. Mary’s Academy and Saint Mary of the Wasatch College in Utah. She then earned a master’s degree in science from Creighton University and devoted her life to teaching both elementary and high school students in Utah, Washington, and California.
Sister Philippa Purcell (Pauline Virginia) was born in Salt Lake City in 1926, the youngest child in the family. Her family moved to Pasadena in 1942 when she was a teen.
She joined the Holy Sisters in California in 1946, and earned degrees in history and religion from Saint Mary’s College in Indiana and then a master’s degree in scripture and theology. She taught school and worked as an administrator in Utah (at Judge Memorial), as well as in Idaho, and California.
Although they carved out devoted lives as teachers in different places, the sister/sisters reunited for a time in the 1980s. They lived with and cared for their mother, at the family home in San Marino, before she died in 1983.
Sister Philippa got sick herself soon after and died in California in 1992 at age 66 after a long illness. She is buried in the Holy Cross Santa Clara cemetery. She is remembered as an outstanding teacher.
Sister Stephen enjoyed better health for a few more years but eventually retired and then moved from California to the St. Mary’s motherhouse in Indiana. Ever solicitous of the woman they saw as the family matriarch, the Purcell family flew her there in the company plane to ensure her comfort.
Sister Stephen was known at the Indiana convent for her love of lively discussions as well as her “quick wit and instant repartee.” She told others she was “an authority on a broad spectrum of subjects.” She was loved for her humor and bringing laughter to her fellow retired sisters.
She passed away in June 2008 at age 87, the last living Purcell of her generation, and is buried at Our Lady of Peace cemetery near the convent.
I know of only one other set of Utah siblings who joined the same religious order. That’s just one of many things that made the Holy Cross Purcells so special.
(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.
