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.)
At three distinct times during the past 30 years, I’ve spent some poignant moments in the old Holy Cross Hospital Chapel in downtown Salt Lake City.
I was oblivious then to the Chapel’s historic nature and wonderful back story, but I had a good excuse. My visits coincided with the birth of our three children at the Hospital during the 1990s.
During each round of childbirth, I set aside a little time to sit in the small but lovely Chapel.
I gave thanks and contemplated the awesome adventure and daunting responsibility that is fatherhood. And I wondered. Will this child of mine thrive? Will I know how to help this child thrive?
I am not the only one to seek and find peace in that wonderful place.
The Holy Cross Chapel has been an oasis for thousands since 1904, making it the oldest Catholic building in Salt Lake City. People of all faiths have passed through its doors while confronting pretty much everything that life and death can offer and yet, they still found a little comfort there.
I’m not surprised, knowing now that the woman who built it was “beloved” because of her “kindly and gentle nature” and for “self-sacrifice in her ministrations to the sick and afflicted.” That’s what The Deseret News wrote about Holy Cross Sister Lidwina Butler when she passed away in February 1913.
Sister Lidwina was born as Annette Butler in 1844 in County Carlow, Ireland. Archived newspaper reports say she was part of an “old Irish family.”
She lost her mother at a young age and helped her father manage his estate and household. In the process, she learned executive and administrative skills that likely came in quite handy during her later years.
The young Annette attended the school run by the Sisters of Loreto at Rathfarnham in Ireland, the same institution that (Mother) St. Teresa of Calcutta also later attended. In 1876, Annette left Ireland to join the Holy Cross Sisters and took her final vows three years later at Notre Dame, Indiana.
Perhaps prophetically, Annette took on the religious name of Sister Lidwina. St. Lidwina was a fifteenth century Dutch woman who suffered from many health problems and now is known as the patroness of those with chronic illness.
The Holy Cross Sisters first arrived in Utah just a few years before Sister Lidwina took her vows. 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 Utah’s bishop).
Scanlan hoped the good order of sisters—originally from France but soon full of hardworking and devoted Irish Catholic nuns like Annette Butler—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, 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.
Two of those wonderful places they started were the old Holy Cross Hospital in downtown Salt Lake City and St. Lawrence’s Hospital in Ogden, where Sister Lidwina was first assigned. In 1895, her fellow sisters asked Sister Lidwina to run Holy Cross Hospital.
Although the Salt Lake hospital building was just a dozen years old when Sister Lidwina arrived there, she basically rebuilt it. She added two wings, re-did the plumbing, added hardwood floors, and started the Holy Cross School of Nursing.
Several studies I’ve read also conclude that Sister Lidwina was a model for female business leadership in the United States at the turn of the century. She stood up to male doctors who demanded patriarchal control over the institution owned by the Sisters and she kept the Hospital on sound financial footing.
Early on Holy Cross had established a unique financial model, including an insurance program where persons could pay ahead—at one point just a dollar a month—for future admission to the hospital if needed. The Sisters also struck deals with mining companies to pay into a fund for care of their employees.
Sister Lidwina also planned for and started building the Holy Cross Chapel in 1901. She hired Carl M. Neuhausen for the project, the same architect who designed Salt Lake’s Cathedral of the Madeleine, the Kearns Mansion (now home to Utah’s governors), and the historic St. Ann’s Orphanage.
Construction took three years. Bishop Scanlan dedicated the Chapel in April 1904, fittingly on the Feast of St. Lidwina.
After dedication, The Intermountain Catholic called it “a veritable gem of grandeur and neatness.” The small chapel includes an altar made from Carrara marble from Italy, the stuff from which Michelangelo’s La Pietà and David were sculpted.
An Italian artist later frescoed the walls with images of the Holy Family and angels. New Orleans painter Achille Peretti, who trained in Rome and in Milan’s Accademia di Belle Arti, lived and worked at Holy Cross Hospital for six months in 1909 while completing the commission.
Sister Lidwina also had the windows painted with colorful depictions of angels and saints. One of them, of course, shows St. Patrick wearing green robes and holding a shamrock.
Thereafter, while serving as space for worship and contemplation by the Holy Cross Sisters, the Chapel also was open to patients and the public. It is the only building still standing today from the original Holy Cross Hospital campus that Sister Lidwina knew and loved.
Local newspapers ran banner headlines and there was an outpouring of grief and sadness in February 1913 when word spread that Sister Lidwina had died of pneumonia at age 69. Tributes hailed her “life of loving devotion” and noted that her “good deeds” made her “widely known throughout the west.”
Her fellow sisters held her funeral—quite fittingly—at the Holy Cross Chapel Sister Lidwina built and loved.
A spray of lilies of the valley graced her coffin. Mourners filled the place and spilled out into the hallway, straining to hear as the Holy Cross chaplain eulogized her, “[N]o more honest, devoted, sincere, courageous and high-minded woman ever entered a convent.”
Sister Lidwina never left her adopted Utah home. She is one of 90 Holy Cross Sisters buried at Mount Calvary cemetery in Salt Lake City.
I found a few moments to visit the Holy Cross Chapel again recently, thanks to the kindness of the current owners at CommonSpirit. They even let me climb the balcony and ring the old church bell.
Much has changed there, but the Hospital’s president Bryan McKinley still feels the spirit of the Holy Cross Sisters. He says it gives him comfort and strength to know “we are not alone.”
The Chapel—now an interfaith haven—was damaged in a 2020 earthquake and needs some tender loving care. Jeremy Bradshaw, President of the CommonSpirit Utah Market, says they are working diligently to restore the “sacred space.” You can learn more here.
Much has changed for me too.
My fatherhood adventure is in its golden years, and my children are grown. But the worries and uncertainties of parenthood do not dissipate with age.
Thus, during my recent visit, I paused briefly inside the old Chapel and prayed for my children once again, just as I did when they first embarked on their life journeys. I wondered, again…will this adult child of mine thrive? Will I know how to help this person thrive?
And I thanked the remarkable Irish nun who built the place that at critical life moments has brought peace to me, and to so many other persons she never met.
When Sister Lidwina passed away over a century ago, her fellow Holy Cross Sisters composed a sonnet for their beloved leader. As I walked through the Holy Cross Chapel again recently, I could almost hear the good sisters reciting it once more:
Like sturdy pine on snow-capped mountain height,
She faced the icy winds of anxious care;
Clear, honor, charity, and humble prayer –
The deathless flowers that speak, her gentle might –
Unswerving, fearless, eager for the right.
She held a giant’s power to do and dare;
Her heart was tender as her soul was fair,
A loyal friend in joy and sorrow’s night.
While treetops o’er the Rockies’ summit sigh,
And gratitude dwells within the heart,
Her name and memory shall never die –
Self-sacrifice, the lessons they impart.
“Grieve not,” she pleads, “nor count my death a loss.
From Heaven I shall guide, dear, Holy Cross!”
(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’ 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.
