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.)
When Marie McDonough took her first vows as a Holy Cross Sister just over a century ago in 1924, she forever wedded together two fascinating strands of Utah history—a prominent local Irish Catholic family and a landmark religious organization with Irish women at its core.
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, 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.
One of those wonderful places they started in 1882 was St. Mary’s School in Park City. During the early 1900s, a young girl named Marie McDonough walked to St. Mary’s each day to learn from the Holy Cross sisters working there.
The McDonough family was making its mark on Utah too. Marie’s father Bartley arrived in Park City in 1884 from Ireland’s County Galway.
By the turn of the century, Bartley was an old time miner, union leader, civic leader, and a twice-elected public official (county commissioner and town marshal). He also helped start the Park City Miners Hospital—a union-built-and-operated facility.
Roger McDonough, Bartley’s great grandson (and one of Marie’s great nephews), shares this wonderful description of the family patriarch with anyone interested: “I’m quick to tell them that my own great-grandfather was Park City town marshal before the turn of the last century and later marshal for all of Summit County; that he rode horseback to chase down outlaws and that he operated a stable and a bar; that he was a hard rock miner and mining union leader who was a pivotal force in the building of the camp’s miners hospital – where he could easily have died of the black lung that killed him.”
Archived local newspapers report that when Bartley McDonough died in 1910 at age 56, he got the largest funeral in town history. Bartley’s death at a relatively young age left the care of the large McDonough clan in the hands of his widow—Minnie Power McDonough.
Originally from Ireland’s County Waterford, Minnie was one of the first students the Holy Cross sisters taught in Park City. Minnie lived on for three decades after Bartley passed, and during that time helped guide her seven children along the path of community service her husband had blazed.
Minnie’s son and Marie’s brother was the Chief Justice of the Utah Supreme Court (and a Notre Dame grad). Another son/brother served as a prominent lawyer in both public and private practice.
Several McDonough grandsons/nephews also were/are lawyers. Two were partners at my old Jones Waldo law firm. Bartley’s McDonough descendants—many whom I’ve known—have worked successfully in other professions too, including business, jewelry, journalism, and architecture.
Marie chose a different path of service. After attending the University of Utah and then teaching school in Park City for a few years, she joined the Holy Cross Sisters in 1924 and took on the religious name of Sister Marie Camille.
During the next fifty years, Sister Marie Camille taught in Utah, California, Arizona, Idaho, and Washington, mainly at the junior high level. She retired from full-time teaching duties in 1973, and returned to her native Utah to live at the Our Lady of Lourdes Convent in Salt Lake City.
During the next five years of semi-retirement, Sister Marie Camille taught remedial reading at Our Lady of Lourdes parochial grade school. From 1978 until she suffered a stroke in 1987, she conducted a pastoral ministry to the elderly.
Roger McDonough remembers his Aunt Marie as a warm, funny, and loving human being. In many ways, Sister Marie Camille was one of the last of her kind…a beloved family member consecrated and set apart for the religious life, but also a welcome fixture at routine family events.
My own mother had several such family members. I had one. My children? None.
Sister Marie Camille and her peers also were a unique sight in mid-twentieth century Utah. Another one of her nephews, local bard and actor Gerald (Gary) McDonough, explains why in “Porch Nuns,” a poem he recited to the Utah Hibernian Society when they named him poet laureate many years ago.
In his poem (see below, reprinted with permission), Gary explains that during his boyhood, there “were not many Catholics on the east bench, And fewer still on Harvard Avenue.” He says his “Mormon neighbors” knew not what to make of “the large Irish family in their midst” that was “not abstemious, and openly smoked in broad daylight.”
When Gary’s aunt Sister Marie Camille visited the McDonough home in the summer, he says “She would often bring other nuns to our home, For an afternoon tea or luncheon” on the front porch. During those visits in the 1940s or 50s, the Holy Cross Sisters still wore their distinctive long black habits.
Gary recalls how the robes included “corrugated halos that circled their heads, Like broad white walled tires…” Gary writes how his LDS neighbors, intrigued by the sight, would emerge from their homes to see “the giant emperor penguins, Milling about the McDonough’s front porch.”
Although admitting the annual porch nun spectacle embarrassed him as a boy, Gary’s poem concludes with a note of appreciation for the Holy Cross Sisters, who he says gave him “a profound sense of who I was, And where I lived…”
Almost 50 native Utahns like Sister Marie Camille joined the Holy Cross order. She died on April 6, 1992, at Notre Dame, Indiana and is buried in the St. Mary’s convent cemetery, aptly named Our Lady of Peace. You can read her obituary here.
Sister Marie Camille McDonough’s quiet presence there, although far from the Utah porches that she loved, is one of the last and most poignant tangible reminders of the historic and perpetual bonds between Utah families and the Holy Cross Sisters.
(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.)
(Note: photo from Roger McDonough, picturing Roger and his sister Molly with their great aunt Sister Marie Camille.)
*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.
Porch Nuns
By Gerald M. McDonough (about 2000)
I
There were not many Catholics on the east bench,
And fewer still on Harvard Avenue.
The word: “C a – t h o – l i c” fell strangely
On the tongues of my Mormon neighbors.
They uttered it with the same thick unfamiliarity
That they used when they said, “Li-quor” or “Tob-bac-co,”
And I knew they thought the three words were synonyms.
But the large Irish family in their midst
Was not abstemious, and openly smoked in broad daylight,
Both sins against the “Word of Wisdom,”
Not to mention the dictates of propriety.
In social and religious matters, as with words,
‘Free association’ has a logic of its own.
II
In the summer, when school was out,
And Sister Marie Camille came to visit,
She would often bring other nuns to our home
For an afternoon tea or luncheon.
In those days, the Sisters of the Holy Cross
Still wore the long black robes
And the corrugated halos that circled their heads
Like broad white walled tires
Lifted from forty eight Packards.
Their habits, like the Latin they recited,
Seemed as stiff and permanent
As their starched cardboard collars,
Bulwarks against the whims of fashion,
And the heresies of change.
III
Our nun soirees were held on the front porch
And attracted no little attention
From our neighbors who suddenly took to the sidewalks,
Or watered their lawns, or drove slowly to the market
In order to better take in the view
Of the giant emperor penguins
Milling about the McDonoughs’ front porch.
On that Street, in that town, at that time,
We could not have been more exotic
If we had roasted a pony on the parking strip.
IV
As a child I was embarrassed by the scene
Of the nuns waving and smiling politely
To the slowly passing spectators.
It was as if our home were a float
That having been excluded from “The Days of 47 Parade”
Had drifted from the established route,
And ran aground at Fifteenth East and Harvard.
I gradually came to appreciate
These yearly experiments in pageant theater,
And I know now that I am much the better for them.
They gave me a profound sense of who I was
And where I lived, and they freed me forever
From all hope, desire or obligation
Of ever fitting in.
