Remembering Archivist Bernice Mooney, Author of Diocesan History 'Salt of the Earth'

Friday, Dec. 30, 2016

During the Advent and Christmas seasons, most of us slip into a certain sentimentality as we travel to visit family members, receive Christmas cards from friends we love but seldom see, and remember loved ones who have passed on to eternity. 

My own sentimental thoughts lately have focused on a particularly wonderful friend, my great predecessor as archivist for the Diocese of Salt Lake City, Bernice Maher Mooney, who passed away three years ago on Dec. 22. Although she received repeated honors and awards, her quiet and self-effacing personality deflected the acclaim she really deserved for her energetic and creative career, and I’d like to bring her before the public attention one more time.

I don’t remember when Bernice and I formally met; we just sort of drifted into each other’s sphere during the early 1980s when I was Curator of Manuscripts at the Utah State Historical Society and she was in the early stages of organizing what has become the diocesan archives.  We were both members of what is now called the Utah Manuscripts Association, and would sometimes run into each other at morning Mass at the Cathedral of the Madeleine and exchange a little shop talk in the parking lot before running off to work. I visited her archives a couple of times during those years to do research on my own projects, so I knew what she was doing and greatly admired it.

At that time, unlike today, archives education was almost nonexistent, so most of us in the field learned our craft on the job, from senior colleagues and from the limited body of theoretical literature. But I was taking over a program that had already been set up, while Bernice was creating hers from absolute scratch. 

She was fortunate, though, in attending the annual meetings of the Association of Catholic Diocesan Archivists (yes, there is such an outfit!) where she came under the tutelage of Jac Treanor, who had created a state-of-the-art archives program for the Archdiocese of Chicago. 

Still, adapting a sort of Dewey Decimal cataloguing system for the archives and finding places in it for the multitude of different types of records in her custody was an act of awe-inspiring creativity. I am today the grateful beneficiary of that system, but I never could have invented it.

To be sure, the system was not without its glitches, and I used to tease her – gently – about some of the six-legged catalog numbers she used, particularly in the papers of Bishop William K. Weigand, where one finds such curiosities as “265.3A” and “265.3B2.” Lest I risk hurting her feelings, I would hasten to assure her that the nature of the box number didn’t matter in the least, so long as it was the only box with that number.

Although self-taught as an archivist, Bernice was a professionally trained historian with a master’s degree in the field. She was a prolific and graceful writer as well as a tenacious researcher. Her lovingly constructed The Story of the Cathedral of the Madeleine (1981) was not only a masterful survey of the art and architecture of the cathedral, but almost a history of the entire diocese as well. Although I attempted to update it in 2009, it will never be surpassed. The same is true of her Salt of the Earth (1987, 1992, 2008), an exhaustive history of the diocese (the third edition in collaboration with Monsignor J. Terrence Fitzgerald, vicar general emeritus), an indispensable reference source, which I always keep within easy reach.

Despite all those accomplishments, though, what I most vividly remember about Bernice was her deep generosity and spirituality. During my early months as archivist, I kept the phone line ablaze with questions about where to find a certain record or how to handle a certain problem, and I could always hear her mentally scurrying around to figure out how best to bail out her bewildered successor. Although her brand of Catholicism was more old-fashioned and conservative than mine, my spirituality was ennobled by contact with her. She lived her life right out of the Beatitudes.

Requiescat in pace, Bernice; may you rest in peace.