In memorandum: Diocesan benefactor Irene Sweeney remembered on her 100th birthday

Friday, Feb. 27, 2015

SALT LAKE CITY — March 2, 2015 may not be a date that looms large in the minds of most Utah Catholics, but perhaps it should, for it would have marked the 100th birthday of Irene Sweeney. As the date approaches, it seems fitting that we reflect upon the life of a great woman, a great Catholic, a great friend and colleague, and one of the greatest benefactors in the history of the Diocese of Salt Lake City.

Irene’s father ran a grain elevator business in the tiny community of Green Isle, Minn. It was a potentially lucrative endeavor in that wheat-rich region, but Irene’s portion of the inheritance was not much after it was divided among eight siblings. Although she eventually became very wealthy, it was money she herself saved, invested well, and guarded by frugal spending. However, she gave it away generously: “I don’t need money and I like to share it,” she said. “I can give it away now and choose whom it benefits.”

Irene was a person of endless energy and organizational skill. 

“When people used to ask me what the toughest part of my job was, I would tell them, ‘It’s trying to keep up with Irene,’” remembers Jennifer Carroll, director of The Catholic Foundation of Utah, and a person less than half Irene’s age.

When Irene herself was a young woman, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, she enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps. She was put in charge of ensuring that user’s manuals were available for every piece of army equipment from an automatic pistol to a tank, and she succeeded so impressively that by the end of the war she had reached the rank of lieutenant colonel. Encouraged to make the Army a career, she declined; the war was over and it was time to do something else.

That “something else” included a baffling array of involvements, most of them in various philanthropic or church organizations. If something was worth supporting, Irene believed, it was worth getting directly involved with. She supported the Girl Scouts, for example, and became their director for the entire upper Great Plains region. It was her involvement with the League of Women Voters that brought her to Utah, where she served as their regional director and lived roughly the last 50 years of her life. 

For a time she worked at the Newhouse Hotel as their banquet organizer, but her most lucrative employment was as one of the directors of FHP International Corp., a health management organization, which included stock options that made her a wealthy woman.

But it was her church involvements that we memorialize the most. In more than 50 years as a Cathedral of the Madeleine parishioner, she touched every aspect of parish life, most notably during the renovation of the 1990s, when she worked as an equal with Bishop William K. Weigand, Monsignor M. Francis Mannion and the architectural firm; she  also contributed immense financial support. She was one of the creators of the Madeleine Choir School and served on the Board of Trustees of the Catholic Foundation of Utah, where she created several of its endowments. 

The Church was not unmindful of her service, awarding her the pontifical honor Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice and inducting her as a Dame in the Order of Saint Gregory the Great.

Everyone who knew Irene well remembers that she was FUN. She was the liveliest party guest or host at her Emigration Canyon home, for she believed that for people to work together effectively they needed to know each other socially. 

Late in life, as congestive heart failure and macular degeneration limited her mobility, she refused to remain homebound, and she was grateful for the friends who made the trek up that canyon to help her with her hair and makeup and to bring her to committee meetings or social gatherings.

Irene Sweeney earned for herself a special place in the history of the Cathedral of the Madeleine and the Diocese of Salt Lake City. She never wrote a book, she never painted a picture, she never sang in a choir or designed a cathedral. But she provided encouragement and the financial infrastructure for those who were able to do those creative things. Surely she deserves to be remembered alongside the great patrons of the arts and charities throughout history.

Happy 100th, Irene. And thank you for the 50 you shared with us.