Years in Utah 'the happiest' for renowned Holy Cross sister who carried on the work of her order

Friday, Dec. 12, 2014

(Editor’s Note: As the Catholic Church celebrates the Year of Consecrated Life, the Intermountain Catholic continues this series about the religious women and men who contributed to the faith in the Diocese of Salt Lake City.)

This is the story of a remarkable assignment and a remarkable woman, both part of the history of the Holy Cross Sisters in Utah.

A very large part of the early history of Utah involves mining, and many of those miners were Catholics. The story of the Silver King mine in Park City, which made huge fortunes for the Catholic mine owners Thomas Kearns and John Judge is well known, as is the story of the benevolent uses to which much of that money was put, like the Kearns-St. Ann’s Orphanage and Judge Memorial Catholic High School. But there were other strikes in more remote parts of the territory which, while not as rich or as long-lasting, drew large numbers of miners and necessitated extension of pastoral care to those who were Catholic. One of them was Silver Reef in Washington County near St. George – almost 300 miles from Salt Lake City.

Father Lawrence Scanlan’s 1873 arrival in Salt Lake City was still a recent memory in 1876 when the Silver Reef boom occurred, handing him the biggest pastoral challenge of his life.  Silver Reef was never a large town, but it contained a large Catholic contingent to which he felt obligated to minister despite the obvious challenges. He himself visited the town and had a church erected by 1879. He found a succession of Irish priests to staff the parish, but perhaps not to his surprise, none of them seems to have been willing to stay longer than a year.

Much more long-suffering were the nine Holy Cross Sisters who served in Silver Reef, some of them for all or a large part of the history of the parish, from 1879-1885. One can only imagine the ordeal they underwent, of that long buggy ride and the summer heat while clad in those heavy habits. But endure they did. They first established a school in the basement of the church where they also lived, providing not only academic instruction but even piano lessons as well.

Mining is an infamously dangerous occupation, so they constructed a hospital across the street from the church, where health care was provided through a group insurance plan – Utah’s first – devised by Fr. Scanlan, who later was ordained the first Bishop of Salt Lake.

A far more elaborate Holy Cross foundation was Sacred Heart Academy in Ogden, where one of the faculty members from 1919-1922 was Sister Mary Madeleva Wolff, CSC, a truly remarkable woman in an order where individual distinction is never sought, and humbly and quietly getting the job done is the goal. Despite this, Sr. Madeleva became a renowned literary scholar, with a Berkeley Ph.D. A widely published poet, she counted among her friends C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden and Edith Wharton. She also became a great educational administrator who was the founding president of St. Mary of the Wasatch, and later president of St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame.  

In her autobiography, My First Seventy Years, Sr. Madeleva remembered her seven years in Utah at Sacred Heart Academy and St. Mary of the Wasatch as the happiest in her life. It is worth noting, too, that the joys she found here were not all academic ones. The beauty of the Wasatch Mountains held a grip on her heart that began when she first got off the train in Ogden and stayed there, despite her extensive travels to the great cultural sites in Europe. She was an avid hiker with a collection of walking sticks that she and her faculty members plied on every available occasion on the trails of the Wasatch. Catholic education in Utah is fortunate to have been touched by such a person.