By Gary Topping–
(Editor’s note: The Boy Monk dedicates its April 2021 blogspace to Utah’s Catholic sisters and nuns.)
The Sisters of the Holy Cross came to Utah in 1875, responding to an invitation from Father Lawrence Scanlan to open a school for the children of Utah’s expanding Catholic population. The school they created, St. Mary’s Academy, was located where the Salt Palace presently sits. It was a large establishment and its huge success in part motivated the order to adopt Utah as one of its special projects. Like Fr. Scanlan himself, the Holy Cross Sisters were incapable of thinking small, and the subsequent history of the Diocese of Salt Lake City is in large part evidence, both tangible and intangible, of their ministries.
Undoubtedly the most arduous of their undertakings began in 1879 when Fr, Scanlan asked them to journey some three hundred miles southwest of Salt Lake City to the new mining town of Silver Reef, where he wanted them to support a parish he was creating there by adding to it a school and hospital. By the end of that year they had created St. Mary’s School, which met in the basement of St. John’s Church, and St. John’s Hospital across the street. They lived in the basement of the hospital. For the next six years, until the silver ore began to peter out and Fr. Scanlan closed those Catholic establishments as the population moved on to other digs, a total of nine Holy Cross sisters ministered at Silver Reef.
It requires a serious act of the imagination for us today, as we roar down I-15 at 85 mph with our air conditioner on and stereo blasting, reaching into our ice chest for a cool drink or a sandwich, to visualize what such a journey was like for those sisters in 1879. Scanlan’s successor at the end of the next century, Bishop George Niederauer, put it well: “Bishop Scanlan and I had to cover the same territory, but I have a Ford Taurus and he had a horse and buggy.” (Actually Scanlan had it worse than Niederauer, for until 1931 the Bishop of Salt Lake had to cover the eastern counties of Nevada as well.) The journey itself from Salt Lake City to Silver Reef took exactly a week (we know this from the 1878 journal of the trader Don Maguire who did it with freight wagons). And once the sisters had arrived at their destination, they had to carry out their daily tasks in their heavy black habits in summer temperatures regularly in triple digits with no air conditioning. Finally, just living a Catholic life in a wild western mining town would have reminded them constantly that they were on a moral frontier as well as a physical one.
The Holy Cross Order was originally a teaching order, and in Utah the sisters have been mostly involved in school teaching and administration. So how did they wind up running hospitals, both in Salt Lake City and Silver Reef? The question occurred to me once while I was recording an interview with Holy Cross Sister Patricia Riley. “Just what is the charism (the function or role) of the Holy Cross Order”? Her answer stunned me: “We meet needs.” I thought, “Wow, that’s a pretty big order”! Actually, history contains the answer to their taking up nursing and hospital administration, for they had “met the need” for nurses during the Civil War when no one else was around to do it, so opening a hospital in Silver Reef was not something new for them.
In the popular mind, the history of the western United States is largely a story of cowboys and Indians, miners and outlaws and Little-House-on-the-Prairie homesteaders. But let us not forget that it was also the story of a small group of dedicated religious women who helped bring Catholic Christianity, education and health care to part of that western frontier.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
