Emma McCornick Bird: Prominent in early Utah's Catholic Church

Friday, Jan. 15, 2016

When writing Catholic history, it is all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking the Church and the hierarchy are one and the same, and that Catholic history is mostly about popes and bishops and Church councils and the like. As a matter of fact, we lay Catholics comprise all but a tiny minority of the Church, and I am always looking for ways to tell our stories. So it is with great pleasure that this month and next I am able to write about not only lay Catholics but lay Catholic women, whose stories are the most neglected of all.  

This month we will look at the life of Mrs. Emma McCornick Bird, first president of the Catholic Woman’s League, and next month we will sketch the history of the League itself, in preparation for the celebration of its 100th anniversary on March 20.

As important as Mrs. Bird was to Utah Catholic history, we do not know as much as we would like, but here is what we do know. Her father, William Sylvester McCornick, grew up on a Canadian farm but was attracted by mining opportunities on the Comstock Lode in Nevada, where he spent 11 years building a large fortune from lumbering and mining. It was in Austin, Nev., that his daughter Emma was born in 1869, one of 10 children.  

By the time Utah mining development had tempted the McCornicks to move to Salt Lake City in 1873, William had established McCornick & Co., which became the largest banking house between the Missouri River and California.

Emma began her education, with her siblings, in St. Mary Academy, founded in 1875 on the site of the present Salt Palace by Mother Augusta Anderson CSC, whom one historian has characterized as “an intellectually gifted, big-hearted and apt administrator who had distinguished herself as a Civil War nurse.” It is easy to imagine that Emma imbibed from Mother Augusta her ethic of self-denying service and her commitment to education. 

The McCornick fortune enabled Emma to study outside Utah, for two years in Dresden, Germany, one year in Paris and eventually in New York City.

At age 29, she married Arthur Bird who, like her father, had made a fortune in mining in Nevada and Utah. Their 13-year marriage produced three daughters before her husband’s untimely death. At one point, when an automobile accident put one of her daughters through the windshield (not fatally), Mrs. Bird stopped driving, and became a well-known figure on the city buses and sidewalks: Every day she would walk the two miles from her home to the Cathedral of the Madeleine for the 8 a.m. Mass.  

Recording her services to Church and community would generate a long list of projects, for she spent her money and her energy tirelessly. In addition to her work with Catholic Woman’s League, Emma helped create a kindergarten for Mexican-American children that grew into the Guadalupe Mission; she worked to raise funds for the Salt Lake Public Library, which was constructed in 1905; and she was a stalwart in many community organizations like the Family Service Society, Community Chest, the Red Cross and the Ladies Literary Society.

For her services to the Church, Pope Pius XI in 1924 awarded her the Pro Ecclesiae Pontifice and made her Commander of the Ladies of the Holy Sepulchre.

Despite all these accomplishments, like the lives of many lay women, “Emma Bird’s was not fully recorded,” one historian laments.

Another, Bernice Mooney, pointed out that such imperfect documentation leaves us the poorer: “We lose part of the inspiration that we need all of the time to keep us going.” But we are fortunate to know as much as we do, and our community and Church are much the better for her life of faith and generosity.