Holy Cross Ministries celebrates 150th anniversary of sisters’ arrival in Utah

IC photo/Marie Mischel

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During a presentation at the June 20 celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Holy Cross sisters’ arrival in Utah, Roger McDonough points to a photo of the first board of directors of the Park City Miners Hospital, whose members included his great-grandfather, Barley McDonough. The celebration, sponsored by Holy Cross Ministries, was held at the historic Miners’ Hospital.

SALT LAKE CITY — It was story time at the historic Miners Hospital in Park City on June 20, as Holy Cross Ministries celebrated the 150th anniversary of the arrival of sisters of the Holy Cross in Utah with an event titled “Sisters, Silver & Service.”

Holy Cross Ministries offers health, education and justice services to people who are poor and marginalized, according to its website. The sisters founded the nonprofit organization in 1994 with the proceeds from the sale of Holy Cross Hospital. 

“I like to think of them as icons of the old American West,” said Mike O’Brien, a member of the Holy Cross Ministries’ Board of Trustees who has written extensively about the sisters’ history in Utah.

To set the tone for his talk, O’Brien mentioned several notable events that occurred during the era in which the sisters arrived in Utah: the transcontinental railroad was completed six years before, Wyatt Earp was a deputy marshal in Dodge City and “the Lion of the Lord, Brigham Young, was just starting to make the desert bloom in what was known as the Utah Territory.”

At the time, Utah “was known as a rough-and-tumble and maybe a bit of an unforgiving place, and I like to think that the Holy Cross sisters balanced that out with grace, with beauty and with compassion,” he said.

One of the first two sisters to arrive in Utah, Sister Raymond Sullivan, was an Irish immigrant to the United States, O’Brien said. The other, Sister Augusta Anderson, traveled as a child from Virginia to Ohio in a Conestoga wagon.

Within six months of their arrival, the Holy Cross sisters built two schools and a hospital, O’Brien said. Over the years, they would establish numerous schools in Utah, from Ogden to Silver Reef, as well as several hospitals. The first three sisters who led Holy Cross Hospital in Salt Lake City were all immigrants to the U.S., O’Brien said, noting that over the space of their first 150 years in Utah about 1,300 Holy Cross sisters ministered in the state.

“They had incredible ties and devotion to the underserved, immigrant and mining communities,” he said. “As I mentioned, several of them were immigrants themselves, but they helped whoever needed help.”

Roger McDonough, whose great-grandfather helped build the Miners Hospital and was a member of the first board of directors, noted that both his great-grandparents were Irish immigrants who met in Park City. 

When the Mormon pioneers arrived in Utah in 1847 the area was still part of the Mexican territory; the Treaty of Hildalgo, which transferred the land to the United States, was not signed until 1848, McDonough pointed out.

“It was into this often rough and vibrant melting pot that the sisters of the Holy Cross arrived 150 years ago, and to me it is just deeply inspiring to think about these strong, determined women of the Holy Cross order – many, as Mike pointed out, themselves Irish – stepping into a world that needed both comfort and courage,” McDonough said. “They understood the challenges of these immigrant families, because often their own stories mirrored them. … The story of Park City and of Utah and the West has always been driven by successive waves of immigrants, each bringing their hopes, their struggles and their unique contributions, and 150 years in, the sisters of the Holy Cross have been there for these communities, offering education, healing and spiritual guidance. Their enduring legacy of compassion, service and resilience continues to inspire all of us, and reminds us that we all share roots and journeys taken and comfort found, often far from home.”

The last speaker of the evening was Emmie Gardner, CEO of Holy Cross Ministries, whose father was a Mexican immigrant and her grandparents were from Italy, she said. She attended Holy Cross College in Indiana, and first came out to Utah as a Holy Cross associate.

While Holy Cross Ministries was founded by sisters with the money from the sale of Holy Cross Hospital, the last sister left last year, and now the staff of the organization feels “it is our obligation to maintain this incredible legacy of social justice and compassion,” Gardner said, adding that “we want to be here to support the immigrant community and to empower them to self-sufficiency.”