Commentary: For 150 years, Utah’s Catholic schools have been teaching the three R’s and a whole lot more

One of the most significant institutions in Utah history — Catholic schools — started here 150 years ago this month.

In 1875, a young Irish priest (and later bishop) named Lawrence Scanlan — who had been living in Salt Lake City for only two years — asked for help educating some 800 Catholics living in the sprawling Utah Territory. The Holy Cross Sisters from Notre Dame, Indiana, answered the call.

Sisters Raymond (Mary) Sullivan and Augusta (Amanda) Anderson traveled to Salt Lake City via train and stagecoach and arrived in Utah on June 6, 1875. They stayed with lawyer Thomas Marshall (a nephew of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall) and his wife, Sarah, a devoted Catholic and close friend of Scanlan.

Sometimes accompanied by the Marshalls’ huge St. Bernard dog, which had bonded to them, the two Holy Cross Sisters traveled by coach and horseback across Utah to raise funds for their endeavors. Within just a few months, the sisters started Holy Cross Hospital and St. Mary’s Academy for girls in Salt Lake City.

St. Mary’s Academy, built where the Salt Palace now stands, opened in August 1875. Back then, a Salt Lake Tribune article announced that girls attending would be educated “without interfering in the least with the religion of anyone.”

Some 100 pupils and 25 boarders enrolled even though there were fewer than a dozen Catholic families in Salt Lake City. Pleased with the response, the sisters then started a school to help boys — according to a November 1875 Tribune article — with “moral habits, cleanliness, and general deportment.”

In 1882, the Holy Cross Sisters also started a school for orphans in the basement of their hospital, which, in 1900, became the St. Ann’s Orphanage and School in South Salt Lake. After the dedication, the Deseret News wrote, “Whether in Catholic or Protestant, in Jew or gentile, in saint or sinner, the love that prompts such deeds as those that establish institutions [such as St. Ann’s] for the benefit of any race, is divine in its nature and splendid in its display.”

Scanlan and the Holy Cross Sisters were onto something. Today, a dozen Catholic preschools, 13 elementary/middle schools, and three high schools educate more than 5,000 students a year. They are diverse, inclusive and seen as some of the state’s best academic institutions.

Alums include a virtual who’s who of Utah business and public life: former Utah Supreme Court Justice Roger I. McDonough; former Tribune Publisher Jack Gallivan; Phil Purcell, an investment banker for whom the University of Notre Dame’s basketball arena is named; former University of Utah basketball star player Jimmy Soto; and Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of Bumble, a highly successful female-focused dating app.

Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks even attended Judge Memorial Catholic High School for a short time in the 1960s before her family moved to California. In September 1997, Nicks told The Tribune, “I was absolutely devastated when my dad told me we were moving.”

Gospel message of love

All three of our children went to Catholic school, too, graduating from Judge Memorial. For perspective on the anniversary, I asked our 27-year-old son, Danny, to interview his former school principals and teachers — Patrick Lambert and Mark Longe — and ask them to define the essence of a Catholic education.

Lambert (from Judge Memorial) told Danny he tries to help young people realize “there’s something out there that’s bigger than just me.” He teaches his students to “be builders of a more just society, to take this knowledge and actually make this world a better place.”

Longe (former St. Vincent de Paul Parish School principal and retired Catholic schools superintendent) said, “We teach our students to be lifelong learners.”

“It really comes down to the gospel message of love one another as I have loved you,” Longe said. “Christ is that example of love, and through Christ, we’re called to action…in how we think, how we behave, how we treat others.”

Although educators like Lambert and Longe today grapple with new challenges involving technology, cellphones and social media, they also approach Catholic education the same way as did their predecessors.

One of those predecessors — the teacher I remember best — was Holy Cross Sister Patricia Ann Thompson. She was born in Oxnard, California in 1925, the daughter of citrus growers in the Upper Ojai Valley.

Her own positive encounters with the Holy Cross Sisters persuaded her to join them and she enrolled in their St. Mary of the Wasatch College in Salt Lake City. She also earned a master’s degree in Spanish from Stanford University.

Sister Patricia Ann spent 32 years teaching and served as principal of my St. Joseph’s High School in Ogden. I met her in the mid-1970s when she tried to teach me Spanish.

She was extraordinarily supportive during my parent’s tumultuous divorce and even created a work-study program to help my financially strapped family. I was not the only beneficiary of her kindness.

One day a father of my classmates died in the school parking lot when his car collapsed on him as he tried to fix it. Sister Patricia Ann aided the first responders, comforted the stricken family and cleaned up afterward.

One of those classmates later told me the Holy Cross sisters were regular and welcome visitors at her home thereafter. They held grieving hands, cooked hot meals, cleaned the house and did dishes.

‘Simpatico’

The sisters loved all creatures great and small, so when a scruffy dog lingered around their Ogden convent, they fed and cleaned him up. My classmate Shawn Alfonsi built a doghouse, and the sisters named him Benji.

Benji was a cocker spaniel, schnauzer and poodle mix like the famous film dog with the same name. Sister Patricia Ann started each class with a report about Benji’s latest antics. He even got his own page in the school yearbook.

I don’t remember much of the Spanish Sister Patricia Ann taught me. I will never forget, however, the moment she gave the greatest compliment I ever received in that lovely language.

One day I asked her what a vocabulary word — “simpatico” — meant. She answered in English, “Likable, sympathetic, agreeable.” And then she smiled and added, in Spanish, “Como tú” (like you.)

We stayed in touch after she retired from teaching and even went to a Notre Dame-USC football game together. I never felt safer walking to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum than with a Holy Cross nun.

Sister Patricia Ann immersed herself in service to the Hispanic community and outreach to the poor at St. Agnes Parish in Los Angeles. She helped many people become U.S. citizens after Congress and President Ronald Reagan enacted immigration reform.

Utah’s Catholic schools taught me reading, writing and arithmetic. But I learned something else important there, too.

When I graduated from Notre Dame, Sister Patricia Ann lived at the nearby Saint Mary’s College. To celebrate, she gave me a book — “Compassion,” co-written by Holy Cross Father Don McNeill and that I reread to this day.

One line always reminds me of her and what she showed me: “Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion and anguish.”

Utah’s Catholic schools teach that same lesson today, 50 years after I was there and 150 years after they first started.

Michael Patrick O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City who frequently represents The Salt Lake Tribune in legal matters. His book “Monastery Mornings: My Unusual Boyhood Among the Saints and Monks,” about growing up with the monks at an old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, was published by Paraclete Press and chosen by the League of Utah Writers as the best nonfiction book in 2022. He blogs at https://theboymonk.com.