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.)
“[These] devoted creatures in the Catholic Church [could be seen] leaning over the bed of the suffering, wiping away the sweat of death from the pale forehead of the dying man, soothing his declining moments…alleviating his suffering in life…all these acts performed for no earthly reward, but through love of humanity…”
Utah Catholic Bishop Lawrence Scanlan used these words in October 1876 to describe the work of the Holy Cross Sisters. He could just as easily have been writing about the Sisters’ work treating AIDS/HIV patients over a century later.
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 then-Father Scanlan.
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 (trained as Civil War nurses) 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 was the old Holy Cross Hospital in downtown Salt Lake City. Even a century later, the hospital still reflected the original Sisters’ core values—find a need and meet it.
In the early 1980s, that need was a strange and terrifying new disease, later known as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome from the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (AIDS/HIV). At about the same time it emerged, a young doctor named Kristen Ries started practicing medicine in Salt Lake City.
Because of her strong intellectual curiosity, Ries took a keen interest in the new infectious disease. It’s challenging enough to study infectious conditions because people already fear them, but this illness—which initially infected mainly gay men—carried an extra-large dose of social stigma due to the so-called “sin” attached to it.
Because of her strong sense of compassion, however, soon Ries was one of the few Utah doctors willing to treat patients with the new condition, which at the time was almost always fatal. In a wonderful 2018 Sundance documentary called “Quiet Heroes,” Ries explains how that decision changed her life and Utah forever.
Early on, she lost many other patients because she treated AIDS/HIV victims. Former Utah state Senator Jim Dabakis confirms the scope of the stigma, describing how he took an infected friend to doctor after doctor and no one would treat him except Ries.
But she could not do it all alone.
Fortunately, she had physician privileges at the old Holy Cross Hospital in Salt Lake City. With the consent and support of the Holy Cross Sisters, Ries started admitting her patients there when needed. The Sisters created a special treatment unit.
Because the work was overwhelming, Ries and the Sisters convinced a young Holy Cross nurse named Maggie Snyder to attend physician assistant school so she could help too. Snyder eventually became Ries’ partner in the work as well as in life.
Their jobs were hard work. In “Quiet Heroes,” Synder sums up the usual grim prospects for many of their early patients, “Sometimes our only treatment was a hug.”
Despite the grave challenges, Holy Cross Sister Linda Bellemore (1938-1922) rolled up her sleeves and got right to work when asked to help start the AIDS/HIV clinic. Why?
In “Quiet Heroes” she explains, “There was a need, so that’s what we do. The Sisters of the Holy Cross are not here to try to convert people to be Catholic. We’re here to say what are your needs and what can we help you with.”
An Indiana native as well as a trained educator and nurse, Sister Linda developed a comprehensive care program for the patients of the Holy Cross AIDS/HIV ward. The program tried to address the full spectrum of painful needs—housing, food, education, emotional and medical support, crisis intervention, and funeral planning.
Sister Linda knew very little about AIDS/HIV when she first got involved. She says she let those with the condition teach her.
In “Quiet Heroes,” she describes a particularly difficult situation for one dying patient who yearned to see his parents one last time and say goodbye. The parents, however, refused his calls and ignored Sister Linda’s pleas that they visit.
Despite such heartrending moments, Sister Linda has said, “It was the most blessed time of my many years of service in various ministries.” She also has said her AIDS/HIV patients “left deep footprints on my heart,” and she called it a blessing and privilege to “walk that road with them.”
Nebraska/Idaho native Sister Bernie Mulick (1938-2024) served as another of Ries’ physician assistants. In “Quiet Heroes” she describes how doctors and others warned the Holy Cross Sisters not to get involved with treating AIDS/HIV patients.
Sister Bernie says, however, that the Holy Cross Sisters felt it would be “irresponsible not to care for these men and women that were so sick at the time, that nobody was accepting, [and who] were kind of the lepers of the world.”
A 2024 tribute from her fellow sisters wonderfully describes Sister Bernie’s pluck and fearlessness—“There is no joy losing her to this life, but it bears repeating that she was a hopeful, faith-filled rascal, an advocate who sought to bring a spirit of joy into the lives of those pushed to the back of the line.”
Numerous other Holy Cross Sisters ministered to this marginalized AIDS/HIV population in Utah too. They include unit secretary Sister Roberta Bennett (1942-2023), hospital administrator Sister Olivia Marie Hutcheson (1917-2008), and leaders of the religious order like Sister Suzanne Brennan and Sister Joan Marie Steadman.
In a 2018 interview, “Quiet Heroes” producer/director Amanda Stoddard provided some interesting perspective about the Holy Cross AIDS/HIV clinic, which the new hospital owners closed when the Sisters sold their facilities in 1994.
“[T]here are no places like Holy Cross hospital anymore. Not in Salt Lake. There’s nowhere that anyone can go and get treatment and have people treat them out of the goodness of their hearts anymore. Like, we’re in dire straits when it comes to healthcare and so this kind of shows a compassionate care model and why we need healthcare for all, and those nuns, I mean, they were really, really special and I think when we talk about the film being about quiet heroes, it’s not just Kristen and Maggie. There were a lot of people that kind of stood up.”
Stoddard explains, “[P]eople who went in and did the work at their own personal expense.” Similarly, “Quiet Heroes” speculates that the AIDS/HIV clinic may have been the beginning of the end of the old Holy Cross Hospital. Apparently, some doctors and patients started to avoid the place due to fear of the disease.
I don’t know whether or not all that is true, but I do know the Holy Cross Sisters never looked back nor second-guessed their compassionate decisions. Sister Linda is the perfect example.
Before she died in 2022 —in the middle of another viral epidemic—she enjoyed a happy reunion with Ries and Synder, which is shown in “Quiet Heroes.” There was no handwringing or statements of regret.
Instead, Sister Linda did exactly what I would’ve predicted a Holy Cross Sister would do. She thanked the other two remarkable women for allowing the Holy Cross Sisters to join them in creating a “community of love and caring.”
(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.)
(Photo: Holy Cross Sister Linda Bellemore ministers to an AIDS/HIV patient in Salt Lake City in the 1980s.)
*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.
