Catechetical orders contributed to diocese's life of faith

Friday, Mar. 13, 2015

(Editor’s note: This is one in a series of articles in recognition of the Year for Consecrated Life that the Intermountain Catholic is featuring about the religious orders that contributed to the faith in Utah.)

The history of the Diocese of Salt Lake City offers eloquent testimony to the importance of religious orders – particularly those of women – in extending Catholic ministries to our often sparse and widely scattered people. Even to this day, we have always had to borrow priests from other parts of the country and the world just to provide minimal pastoral care in our parishes, and arduous travel has been required of many of those priests to bring the sacraments to our missions and stations. Fortunately, we have been the beneficiaries of the generosity and dedication of religious orders that have filled what would otherwise have been many gaps in pastoral care.

Many of those gaps have been filled by three Catechetical Orders of Women who have ministered in our diocese: the Franciscan Sisters of the Atonement, the Sisters of the Holy Family, and, most notably, the Our Lady of Victory Missionary Sisters, popularly known as the Victory Noll Sisters. Since Dec. 28, 1939 when the Victory Noll Sisters first stepped off the train at Salt Lake City’s Union Pacific depot, almost 180 of them have served the diocese. Their primary role here has been to go out, two by two, to offer catechism training to Catholic children in places where there is no Catholic school and perhaps not even a parish.

The Victory Noll order was founded in 1922 by a Chicago priest, Father John Joseph Sigstein, with the blessing and assistance of Archbishop John Francis Noll of Ft. Wayne, Ind., who was also the founder and publisher of Our Sunday Visitor magazine.  

Despite its Midwestern origins (its headquarters are in Huntington, Ind.), the Victory Noll order has always had deep roots in the Southwest: it was conceived when Fr. Sigstein was moved by the poverty and lack of religious ministry on a visit to New Mexico. So when the Victory Noll Sisters accepted Bishop Duane Hunt’s invitation to open up a ministry in Utah, they were stepping into a region and a set of challenges with which they were already familiar.

The Victory Noll Sisters’ first assignment in Salt Lake City was Saint Patrick Parish and its associated Our Lady of Guadalupe Mission, where they took up residence in some primitive conditions. There they taught catechism under the supervision of the energetic Father James Collins, who had already become a diocesan legend for his austere way of life and his dedication to improving conditions among the poor Hispanic residents of the city’s west side. One of those first sisters, Rosario Lara, has left a humorous memoir of Fr. Collins’s teaching style: In a staff meeting after morning Mass, he would, out of the blue, announce the subject the sisters were to teach that day, and they would have to improvise their lessons as they went along.

In 1943 the sisters took up residence in the old Fisher mansion on Second South beside the Jordan River, which they christened the Queen of Peace convent. They remained there until 1970, when the mansion became St. Mary’s Home for Men, and the sisters moved into the Cathedral of the Madeleine complex. From that convent, they ranged far and wide throughout the diocese, from Logan to St. George, offering catechetical instruction and home visits to far-flung Catholics who otherwise might have had little or no instruction in the faith and pastoral care.

Sr. Rosario’s ultimate demonstration of her dedication was to come not in the Diocese of Salt Lake City, where she was assigned for two years, but rather in Ely, Nev.; when she was transferred there it had only recently been made part of the newly created Diocese of Reno.  

Ely was and is one of the most isolated communities in the American West. When Sr. Rosario’s Superior visited them in Ely and asked her how she liked her new assignment, she replied, “I always knew two things would happen to me before I died. One was I would get leprosy and the other was I would go to Nevada.” She never did get leprosy, but we can be certain that the Ely Catholics were as grateful for the dedicated ministries of the Victory Noll Sisters as we Utahns are.  

In 1947, on the 25th anniversary of the order, Bishop Hunt was able to write to the Mother Superior, “I take this occasion to tell you how happy we are to have your Sisters with us. They are doing magnificent work for the Church here in Utah.  I only wish we had more.”