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Catholic Education in Utah: 1875-1975
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 43, 1975, No. 4
Catholic Education in Utah: 1875 -1975
BY ROBERT J. DWYER
THE YEAR 1975 MARKS the centenary of Catholic education in Utah. On June 6, 1875, two Sisters of the Holy Cross arrived by train in Salt Lake City, accompanied by the Reverend Denis Kiely, assistant pastor at the local parish, Saint Mary Magdalene's, who had traveled to Green River, Wyoming, to meet them and escort them to their new mission. On the depot platform they were greeted by Father Lawrence Scanlan, the parish priest who had arranged for their coming, and by Mrs. Thomas Marshall, wife of the federal district judge, in whose home they were to be received for a brief time as guests. Mother Augusta Anderson, superior of the new foundation, was a remarkable woman, intellectually gifted as well as an apt administrator, who had distinguished herself as a Civil War nurse and who later would succeed Mother Angela Gillespie, cousin of James Gillespie Blaine, perennial presidential aspirant, as superior general of the Holy Cross Sisterhood.
Scanlan, who had come to Utah two years previously to take the place of the Reverend Patrick Walsh, builder of Saint Mary's Church on Second East Street and whose pastoral charge embraced the whole of Utah Territory, had soon recognized the paramount need for schools for the education of Catholic youth in his far-flung parish. For this purpose he had been encouraged by friends to write to Father Edward Sorin, the American superior of the Holy Cross Fathers, who exercised supervision also over the rapidly growing Sisterhood. (Sorin lives on in history as the founding father of Notre Dame University, in what was then a wooded wilderness of northern Indiana.) Sorin reacted favorably to the plea of the young missionary in the Far West. Mother Angela, however, when apprized of the invitation, replied that she did not have sufficient Sisters to staff a school so far removed from the mother house, and above all in Brigham Young's mysterious Mormon kingdom. Writing Sorin from New York, en route to France to visit the parent house of the Holy Cross community in Le Mans, May 9, 1875, she reflected what would seem to have been a previously agreed decision. "I am so glad the Sisters did not go to Salt Lake City. I agree with you as to the importance of the foundation — had I the Sisters for it." But seemingly, with Mother Angela on the high seas, Sorin had his way and the Sisters were speedily on the road west. In the event, happily, Mother Angela, a great-hearted woman, was quickly reconciled to the idea of the new mission, as her letters to Mother Augusta during the latter's tenure in Utah testify.
A courtesy call on the great Mormon leader, Brigham Young, then in failing strength, was arranged and went off cordially enough, though the president refrained from any open encouragement of the project. Later on in the summer, when the school was about to be opened, it seems that a few of the local ward bishops fulminated against this invasion of the Latter-day Saint sanctuary and threatened dire punishment for any Mormon parents who dared send their daughters to the Sisters. On the whole, however, the reception of the nuns by the community at large was warm and heartening.
A woman of decision, Mother Augusta lost no time. With funds supplied by the Holy Cross community and minor sums collected from the Catholic mining men in the camps surrounding the city, she bought a piece of land located on what was then First West Street between First and Second South streets, on which stood a small adobe dwelling that she at once occupied as the first religious convent in Utah. Ground was broken for a three-story brick building, designed by Henry Monheim, a local architect, and, incredibly, the structure, though incomplete, was ready for occupancy on September 8. It was a typically Victorian schoolhouse, with tall, narrow windows and high-ceiled rooms. In later years additions were made to enlarge the classroom space and dormitories for the boarders as well as quarters for Sisters of the faculty.
The academy, named Saint Mary's, enjoyed an immediate success. Other Sisters arrived during the course of the summer to staff it, and it opened with some eighty-five pupils, day students as well as boarders. In the absence of precise records, it would seem that the majority of these were of Catholic parentage, young girls drawn from families scattered over the general area but principally from the mining towns, Park City in particular, that were springing up throughout the territory. As the first year drew to its close the Daily Tribune of June 10, 1876, announced a field day: "A grand excursion of the pupils of St. Mary's Academy is
... to take place on the 3rd of July" with "arrangements for recreation of every conceivable character not inconsistent with Christianity." Later, on June 29, the Gentile organ noted that Archbishop Joseph S. Alemany of San Francisco, within whose spiritual jurisdiction the Utah mission lay, would visit the city and preside over the commencement exercises. The single graduate, Louise Heffernan, daughter of the commanding officer at Fort Douglas, received her diploma and shortly thereafter left to enter the Holy Cross novitiate at Notre Dame as Sister Rita.
The Daily Tribune, embarking on its long anti-Mormon crusade, was liberal in its notices of special events at Saint Mary's. On September 30, 1876, for example, it'headlined the "Sisters Fair," held in the "great hall" of the Wasatch Hotel, at which some twenty-seven hundred ballots, sold at fifty cents each, were cast in a popularity contest won by Miss Helena Gorlinski. The program was further marked by the appearance of "The Tennesseans," a traveling Black minstrel group scheduled to sing in honor of Mother Augusta who, it was claimed, had headed off a Negro massacre after the fall of Fort Pillow. The annual commencements were social as well as scholastic events of portentous length featuring the staging of such plays as Isabella (1878) or readings from Hamlet (1879). A visit of Mother Angela was duly recorded in 1877. "St. Mary's, of this city, may be described as her educational ward, and her visit here has been in its interest. The lady expresses herself as much gratified . . . and carries with her a number of rare specimens of Utah ores for the already large and valuable cabinet in Notre Dame." Under Mother Augusta's wing Miss Rose DeVoto, a war orphan whom the nun had reared at the mother house, came to join the faculty at this time, teaching art and literature.
From its first year's count the schools enrollment jumped to 150 in 1879 and during the 1880s and 1890s maintained an average of two hundred twenty-five to two hundred fifty, with a gradual preponderance of day students, corresponding to the growth of the local Catholic community. Nevertheless, to retire the indebtedness on Saint Mary's, Mother Augusta and her successors in office made periodic trips to Nevada and California, not only to enlist pupils but also to solicit funds in aid of the Utah missionary venture. These visits undoubtedly paved the way for subsequent expansion of the Holy Cross Sisterhood on the Pacific Coast. For approximately a decade, 1876 to 1885, when All Hallows College for young men was opened, the Sisters conducted a grade school for boys, using the adobe house which had served as the temporary convent.
In 1878, again at the instance of Father Scanlan, then vicar general of the archbishop of San Francisco for Utah Territory, Mother Augusta supervised the opening of a second academy, this one located in Ogden, which was developing into the principal railroad center of the area. Mother Charles was appointed to succeed her in Salt Lake, and Mother Francis was given the direction of the new venture named Sacred Heart
Academy and housed in a fairly commodious building on the corner of Washington Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street. Adjoining the academy in a smaller structure, a boys' school was opened, at first under the direction of Florian DeVoto, father of the brilliant historian and editor, Bernard DeVoto. Like most of Florian's undertakings, however, it failed to prosper under his tutelage, and was taken over by the Sisters. The academy flourished readily, jumping from an initial enrollment of 100, as reported in the Catholic Directory for 1879, to an average of two hundred twenty-five in the 1890s. Ground for a more ambitious structure on the then upper reaches of Twenty-fifth Street was broken on September 24, 1890.
The faithful Daily Tribune (November 7, 1880) had warm words to say of the Junction City venture:
Local pride aside, it is certainly true that a number of the Holy Cross Sisters who taught in Utah in those early decades were highly educated and well-poised women. Mother Augusta and Mother Annunciata were later to be named superiors general of their community, and Mother Pauline, who directed Sacred Heart for some years in the early 1890s, subsequently became president of the present Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana.
An episode of four years, 1879-83, recounts one of the heroic missions of the Holy Cross Sisters in the Far West, in maintaining a hospital, and school at Silver Reef, a mining camp situated about sixteen miles north of St. George, in the isolated and broken land bordering Nevada. Here ore had been discovered a few years previously by a Kentuckian prospector with the appropriate name of Judge William Tecumseh Barbee. Father Scanlan, alerted to the fact that a fair number of Catholics, Irish miners for the most part, had been attracted to the bonanza, had visited the camp and gauged the needs of the argonauts. Once again he turned to the Sisters, who responded by sending four of their number to serve the mission. By all counts this was one of the most challenging of the assignments of the period. A primitive hospital was opened, a frame church built, and in the basement of the church structure a little school was opened. Sadlier's Directory for the years indicated reported that some fifty children were enrolled in the school. In the October 1930 issue of Utah Historical Quarterly, Mark A. Pendleton recalled his boyhood days in Silver Reef: "Fond memories rushed upon me as I paused at the foundation of the Catholic church where I had often heard Father Scanlan preach and where the Sisters' school was held. Sister Bonita, the kind, the cultured, has been a blessed memory all these years, and Father Scanlan was beloved by all." The sudden exhaustion of the drift in 1883 caused Silver Reef to become a ghost town almost overnight.
In 1882 two other Catholic schools were opened in Utah, again with the Holy Cross Sisters as teaching staff. One was in Holy Cross Hospital, Salt Lake City, which had been founded in 1876 and later built on a block facing First South Street between Tenth and Eleventh East where the present plant stands. The school was designed to serve the children of the neighborhood and, from various indications, accommodated a limited number of orphans, likely waifs from the nearby mining camps. The other was a parish school for Park City, where Saint Mary-of-the- Assumption served the largest Catholic concentration in the territory, far outdistancing in parishioners the parent foundation in Salt Lake City. Under two devoted pastors, Father Patrick Blake and Father Thomas Galligan, the school flourished, reaching in the 1890s a peak enrollment of close to two hundred, though later, reflecting the vicissitudes of the industry, declining to something like half that figure. Another parish school, serving Saint Patrick's, Eureka, and the Tintic district, was opened in 1886 with a layman, William J. Bogan, in charge. For a time he also conducted a night school for the benefit of the miners. In 1887 the Holy Cross Sisters assumed the staffing of the little school.
A major decision of Father Scanlan, taken in 1885, was the launching of a school for boys, named in honor of the priest's own alma mater in Dublin, All Hallows College. With such limited resources as he possessed and with so few priests at his disposal, the move might well have seemed foolhardy. His determination, nevertheless, brooked no obstacles. The Daily Tribune for April 29 of that year carried the notice, "The Catholic Church has purchased a fine lot on the corner of 2nd South and 4th East for the purpose of building a school for boys and young men." The site was later identified as "Mother Sayer's lot." Construction got under way that summer with Henry Monheim again as architect. On May 31 a visiting notable, Monsignor George Capel (formerly rector of Cardinal Edward Manning's abortive attempt to make a success of a Catholic university for England, at Kensington), lectured in the Opera House on the theme "Is Religion Opposed to Science?" for the benefit of the proposed institute, with Territorial Governor Eli Murray in opulent attendance. Progress dallied through the year, however, and it was not until September 19, 1886, that the school's doors were opened, with some ninety students registered. The Reverend Patrick Blake, formerly pastor of the Park City parish, was named president of this "preparatory college," designed as the equivalent of the modern high school and junior college on the typical European six-year plan. Scanlan himself took up residence there, and in spite of his multiple pastoral duties undertook some classroom teaching himself.
The first commencement, June 20, 1887, was noted in the Tribune: "The four-act drama of Henry VIII was a trifle heavy for school boys to handle, but they pulled through it in pretty fair shape." The following year saw an enrollment of sixty boarders and seventy day pupils with an Italian priest, the Reverend Edward M. Nattini, who had recently come to Salt Lake City from the Idaho vicariate, in charge. He was credited, according to the Tribune announcement, with "twenty-four years' experience teaching in America and five in Europe." During the summer of 1887 Scanlan had been consecrated bishop as vicar apostolic of Utah Territory, with Laranda in Asia Minor as his titular see [Tribune, June 29, 1887). Returning to Salt Lake from the consecration ceremonies in San Francisco, the pioneer prelate continued his residence at the college for a short time.
Until the commencement of 1889 Scanlan continued the struggle to maintain the school under his own auspices, but the chronic shortage of personnel, especially of priests fitted or able to manage an institution of its kind, dictated its transfer to a religious community of men. During the summer of 1889 arrangements were made with the Marist Fathers (Society of Mary). This was a religious community of priests and brothers, missionary in inspiration — founded in Lyons, France, in the 1830s by Pere Claude Colin — that had spread to the United States following the Civil War and was established in Maine and Louisiana. The Marists took possession of All Hallows that fall, with Father J. J. Fox, a graduate of the National University of Ireland, as president, and a competent staff of priests. Fox's health proved unequal to the task, however, and he was shortly succeeded by Father J. B. Chataignier. In the later 1890s Father Thomas Henry held office for a four year period, and at the close of the decade Father Thomas Larkin took the reins. Under the last-named, ambitious plans were developed for a much more advanced school, actually a full college, on a site "east of Liberty Park."
More circumspect counsels prevailed, however, which called for the enlargement of the existing plant by the building of a companion structure and a connecting chapel (1902). About the turn of the century All Hallows attained its highest enrollment, counting some 120 boarders and 60 day pupils. The figures do not clearly differentiate the classes, though a note in the Catholic Directory for 1902 specifies "105 collegians." Intimate touches of a bygone and less sophisticated era are found in occasional Tribune notices, such as that the young gentlemen of All Hallows who had sisters boarding at nearby Saint Mary's Academy might visit them once a month, or an account of a hilarious afternoon when the boys took turns riding on the newly installed Second South streetcars before returning for the usual late afternoon collation of sweet rolls, from which the school derived its familiar name of "Bun House."
A final educational project undertaken by Bishop Scanlan was an orphanage. The high mortality rate among the miners ("miners' con") had created a rather serious problem in the diocese of children orphaned or semi-orphaned, dependent upon charity. There is evidence that the Holy Cross Sisters, in their academies and in the school maintained at Holy Cross Hospital, had quietly cared for a number of these abandoned or neglected waifs. The problem weighed on the bishop's conscience, however, and in 1891 when he and his clergy moved into the present rectory of the Cathedral of the Madeleine, he turned the house he had been occupying on First South and Third East into a makeshift orphanage, managed again by the ever-faithful Holy Cross Sisters. Within a few years the facility was badly outgrown. Through the gift of $50,000, tendered by Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Kearns, formerly of Park City, whose wealth derived from the Silver King mine, a more adequate structure was assured in 1898. It was completed and occupied in May 1899. The average roll of the children cared for and taught there, including a few day pupils from Catholic homes in the vicinity of what was then Thirteenth South (now Twenty-first South) and Fifth East, approximated one hundred.
In all, by the time Bishop Scanlan had reached the scriptural threescore and ten and could survey his life work as a missionary prelate, say in 1913, he could count a student enrollment nearing the thousand mark in the schools he had founded, though the figures varied from year to year reflecting the economic conditions of the times. This speaks remarkably well for a diocese as widespread and i:hinly populated as his, with a census report for that year of twelve thousand five hundred. With only one institution did he experience disappointment, All Hallows College. The cordial relations that had existed when the Marist Fathers assumed its direction in 1889 deteriorated during the first decade of the new century and finally reached a point of almost total estrangement. Who must bear the blame for this unhappy development is impossible to determine at this remove. Father John Guinan, who headed the school from 1902 to 1911 and who supervised the construction of the addition and the chapel, was a strong and positive character, eager to advance the welfare of the school and his religious community. Like his predecessor, Father Larkin, he dreamed of a greater All Hallows and despite declining enrollment purchased acreage on Salt Lake's East Bench (Thirteenth South and Sixteenth East) for the purpose. However, he was soon at loggerheads with Scanlan's vicar general, Father Denis Kiely, who was popularly thought to have swayed the aging bishop's mind against the Marist Fathers. With no official support from the diocese, the Marists were forced to recruit boarding students from neighboring states, but with the growth of Catholic colleges in California, the Pacific Northwest, and Montana, the field was straitly narrowed. By 1914, wdien the last president was named, the Reverend George Rapier, a man of extraordinary culture but of little administrative ability, All Hallows was in rapid decline. Its closing was deferred until after Bishop Scanlan's death, May 10, 1915.
With the succession of the Most Reverend Joseph Sarsfield Glass, CM., as second bishop of Salt Lake, June 1, 1915, Catholic Utah received a chief shepherd whose previous career had been largely educational. As a priest of the Congregation of the Mission (Vincentians) he had been appointed president of Saint Vincent's College, Los Angeles, California, at the startlingly young age of twenty-six and had successfully headed it for ten years when the decision was made by his ecclesiastical superiors to withdraw from Los Angeles in favor of the Society of Jesus and concentrate their educational apostolate in Dallas, Texas. (The present Loyola University, Los Angeles, is the result of this transfer.) After four years of pastoral work in Los Angeles, Glass was appointed to the Utah diocese and immediately manifested his concern for Catholic education. However, the decision of the Marist Fathers to abandon All Hallows frustrated his efforts to reach an agreement, and reluctantly he accepted the fait accompli of their withdrawal at the close of the school year of 1917-18.
To supply the want, especially for the boys of the city itself, Glass purchased a property on South Temple between Tenth and Eleventh East streets, and plans were drawn by the noted architect John Comes of Pittsburgh, whose genius had been employed by the bishop in the remodeling and redecorating of the Cathedral of the Madeleine (1917- 18). Judging from the blueprints, still extant, this would have been an exceedingly handsome structure. But financial stringency dictated otherwise, and it was not until 1920 that the empty pile of the Judge Memorial Hospital was commandeered for a school serving the parishes of Salt Lake City. This impressive building, occupying a half-block between Tenth and Eleventh East streets and bounded by Seventh South, had been designed as a hospital for disabled miners and was the gift of the John Judge family, who held title to the property. For some years a group of Sisters of Mercy, a branch from the Sacramento, California, foundation, attempted to maintain the facility, both for its original purpose and as a general hospital, but lack of sufficient patronage forced its closing in 1915. Essential repairs were made during the summer of 1920, and in September the staff — eight Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul from the Saint Louis province of the community — greeted an enrollment of some one hundred seventy-five youngsters, among them the writer, a seventh grader with a shining morning face.
In Ogden the gradual growth of the Catholic community, largely connected with rail transport, called for a more adequate parish school to replace the makeshift frame boys' school, Saint Joseph's, which, since the relocation of Sacred Heart Academy, had been maintained on the old site with the Sisters of the Holy Cross in charge and an enrollment of about a hundred youngsters. In 1920 the revered parish priest of Saint Joseph's, Monsignor Patrick M. Cushnahan, whose pastorate spanned over four decades, undertook the construction of a more modern and spacious building for both sexes, situated on Lincoln Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street where it still servesthe same purpose. In subsequent years a. junior high department was added and was continued until the opening of the present Saint Joseph's High School.
As though to compensate for the failure of All Hallows College, the Holy Cross Sisters during the early 1920s, with the cordial encouragement of Bishop Glass, determined on a new plant for Saint Mary's Academy and the launching of a full liberal arts college program. The Gilmer property at Eleventh East and Ninth South streets was originally contemplated but (perhaps regrettably) passed over in favor of a site at the base of the Wasatch range to the east of the city. At the projected termination of Thirteenth South Street, this barren land, covered in the fall with golden sunflowers, commanded a magnificent view of the valley, the distant lake itself, flaming in the sunset, and the purple mountain ranges to the west. The academy's design was the familiar Tudor schoolhouse Gothic of the period, centered in a tower of strong proportions. The building was ready for occupancy in September 1926 as Saint Maryof-the-Wasatch College and Academy for Women. By then death had taken Bishop Glass (January 26, 1926), and it was Utah's third bishop, the Most Reverend John J. Mitty, who presided over the dedicatory ceremonies following his installation in the cathedral on October 7, 1926.
During the four decades of its existence the college, while making a useful if modest contribution to the cause of Catholic education in western America, fell short of the high hopes entertained initially for its success. Not that the Holy Cross Sisters scanted any effort to make it a school worthy of the great tradition, but circumstances, geographic as well as economic, militated against it. The first president, Sister Madaleva Wolfe, was an accomplished scholar, a gifted poet, and a competent administrator, as her later career at the head of Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana, was to amply demonstrate. But in Utah the Catholic population was much too small (some sixteen thousand in 1925) to support an independent college, while the multiplication of Catholic colleges for women in larger communities east and west, together with the pull of secular education in the state colleges and universities, kept student rolls at a depressing low. Never did the college enrollment reach the one hundred mark. Another weakness, caused by sheer financial necessity, was the continued operation of the academy and grade school departments under the same roof, a situation that was at first deemed only temporary but became a fixture. The college won its accreditation nevertheless, and if good teaching imprints something of a permanent mark on culture, the effort of Saint Mary-of-the-Wasatch was not in vain.
Bishop Mitty, born and reared in New York and a former seminary professor, was equally concerned to advance Catholic education in his diocese, insofar as his restricted resources would allow. His attention was quickly drawn to the school operating in the former Judge Memorial Hospital, under the name of the Cathedral School. With the consent of the Judge family, who ultimately deeded the entire property to the diocese, he undertook a radical rehabilitation of the structure, obviously not originally designed for classroom use. Under the supervision of a talented priest-administrator, the Reverend Joseph Sydney Keefe, significant improvements were made and the decision taken to institute a formal coeducational high school program to replace the somewhat haphazard junior high school curriculum then in effect. This move involved the replacement of the Charity Sisters by the Sisters of the Holy Cross and was carried out in 1927.
A further effort to service the Catholic community of Salt Lake City with adequate Catholic schooling had led Bishop Glass in his last year as ordinary to open a facility in the spacious basement area of the Cathedral of the Madeleine with, once again, the Holy Cross Sisters in charge. When the Sisters of Charity relinquished their role at the Judge Memorial School they briefly replaced their companions of the Holy Cross order at the Cathedral School, but the operation was closed in 1930 when it became evident that the growing economic depression of the day called for consolidation rather than duplication.
In Carbon County, eastern Utah, a fairly strong nucleus of Italian and Croatian Catholics had been attracted to the coal mines or were employed by the railroads. The building of Notre Dame School in Price was sparked by a dynamic pastor, Monsignor Alfredo Giovannoni, who prevailed on the Sisters of Charity, then in charge of the Cathedral School in Salt Lake City, to take over instruction in this new area in 1927. In later years a junior high program was added to the curriculum.
Construction of a standard gymnasium for the Judge Memorial plant, built with funds largely collected by Bishop Mitty himself from benefactors in eastern America and completed in 1930, rounded out his educational effort in the diocese. On January 29, 1932, he was promoted as coadjutor archbishop of San Francisco to assist the aging and ailing Archbishop Edward J. Hanna. His successor, named that summer, was the Most Reverend James E. Kearney, a New York priest of great charm and vigor. As it happened, however, the five years of Kearney's episcopate in Utah, 1932-37, coincided with the Great Depression in its most acute stage, and the best Catholic education could hope for during those lean times was survival. Two small schools, Saint Mary's in Park City and Saint Patrick's, Eureka, closed their doors in 1932, reflecting the straitened circumstances of Utah's mining industry. Unquestionably, but for the self-sacrifice of the Sisters, who subsisted on exceedingly meagre salaries, and the unflagging support of the bishop, his clergy, and a devoted laity, the remaining schools of the diocese might well have followed suit.
In the summer of 1937 Bishop Kearney was transferred to the vacant See of Rochester, New York, and Monsignor Duane G. Hunt, vicar general of the Salt Lake Diocese, was notified of his appointment as Utah's fifth Catholic bishop. By then signs of economic revival augured renewed hope and prospects for advancement, but the outbreak of the Second World War two years later and America's entry into the conflict after Pearl Harbor precluded further educational expansion even though financial pressures were gradually relieved and enrollment in the schools began a steady upward climb. Not until 1948 was it possible to plan new facilities, and the first, appropriately, was a parish school for the Cathedral of the Madeleine. The edifice, opened in September 1949 and staffed by the Sisters of the Holy Cross, remained in operation for over two decades until population shifts within the area, coupled with the decline of religious personnel for the faculty, forced its closing.
During the decade of the 1950s several further educational advances were registered, as the Catholic population of the diocese edged up to the fifty thousand mark. Provo, where nearby industrial plants had concentrated numbers of Catholic workers, had its grade school, built in 1955 by the Franciscan Fathers in charge of the parish and staffed by a community of Franciscan Sisters. For a period of eleven years, 1961-72, a high school department was added. To service the west side of Salt Lake City a grade school named in honor of Bishop Glass was opened in 1954. In Ogden overcrowded conditions at Saint Joseph's School made the building of a separate high school facility imperative, the more so since Sacred Heart Academy, going the way of many such institutions catering exclusively to girls of high school age, had closed its doors in 1938. (The structure was then utilized as a western province headquarters for the Holy Cross Sisters who continued for some years thereafter to conduct a kindergarten in the former classrooms.) The new Saint Joseph's High School, with a faculty made up of diocesan priests, Jesuit Fathers, Holy Cross Sisters, and lay teachers, is handsomely located at the base of the mountains rising to the east of the city and is a monument to the zeal of the long-time pastor of the mother parish, Monsignor Patrick Kennedy. The construction of the Cosgriff Memorial School serving the Salt Lake City parish of Saint Ambrose, a gift of the Cosgriff family in honor of the late J. E. Cosgriff, and a school for Saint Olaf's Parish, Bountiful, were a crowning grace of Bishop Hunt's educational effort during his episcopate of twenty-three years. Both of these schools are staffed by the Sisters of Charity.
At the death of Bishop Hunt, March 31, 1960, his coadjutor, the Most Reverend Joseph Lennox Federal, became the sixth ordinary of the Salt Lake Diocese. During his years in office parish schools have been built in Our Lady of Lourdes, Salt Lake City, and Saint Vincent's, Murray. On the debit side must be recorded the closing of the College of Saint Mary-of-the-Wasatch which conferred its last degrees in June 1965. The academy continued in operation for six more years, when the community administration decided to discontinue the operation altogether and to dispose of the extensive property for building purposes.
In large measure, the closing of the academy was a consequence of the reconstruction of the Judge Memorial as a separate high school facility, with the relocation of the grade school as serving Our Lady of Lourdes Parish contiguous to both. The new high school, built facing Eleventh East Street, utilizing the existing gymnasium, was a major undertaking sponsored by Bishop Federal. For its faculty he was able to enlist the services of the Oblates of Saint Francis de Sales, a Delawarebased community of priests and brothers primarily dedicated to Catholic education. Initially the plan envisaged the Judge Memorial as a boys school, with Saint Mary's Academy serving the girls of the area. However, the separation of the sexes did not prove to be a popular move, and in 1971 the Judge Memorial became coeducational with the Holy Cross Sisters assisting on the faculty together with a number of lay persons. The current enrollment is over seven hundred students.
In all, the Catholic Directory for 1975 reports a total of 2,773 young people under formal instruction in the Catholic schools of the Salt Lake Diocese, 863 in high schools, 1,910 in primary and grammar schools. In comparison with more than eight thousand Catholic youth listed as enrolled in the public schools of the state but registered for catechetical instruction at the various centers maintained in connection with the parishes, it would seem evident that the Catholic schools are fulfilling a minor, albeit important, role in the educational work of the Catholic church in Utah.
The Newman apostolate, named in honor of the great English churchman of the nineteenth century, convert and theologian John Henry Cardinal Newman, a mission to Catholic young people studying in the state or non-Catholic colleges or universities, aimed at their spiritual care and their instruction in religion in a manner suited to their educational advancement and interests, owes much to the pioneer work of Bishop Duane G. Hunt. A graduate in speech and dramatics of the University of Chicago, and himself a convert to the Catholic faith, he joined the faculty of the University of Utah in 191.5 and taught there for a year before beginning his studies for the priesthood in Saint Patrick's seminary, Menlo Park, California. Ordained in 1920 and assigned to the cathedral as an assistant pastor, he devoted his spare time to the needs of the Catholic students at the University of Utah, few in number though they were. Later, as pastor of the cathedral and as bishop of the diocese, he continued his interest and advanced the work as he could. In 1948, through the generosity of the late Walter Cosgriff, the Emery House, a former Episcopal youth facility adjoining the University campus, was purchased and has served since as the university Catholic center. At Utah State University in Logan a similar center was built, serving both the parish and the university community under the direction of Monsignor Jerome Stoffel who for many years has devoted himself to the work. Weber State College in Ogden now has a full-time chaplaincy, while other colleges throughout the state are served by the local priests who maintain the basic program of counseling and formal instruction.
The office of diocesan superintendent of schools has been operative in Utah since the time of the Reverend Joseph Sydney Keefe, who served in that capacity from 1923 until his retirement in 1937. For many years it was held in conjunction with the superintendency of the Judge Memorial School in Salt Lake City. A succession of qualified priests held the title, but it must be confessed (since the confessor is one of them) that it was more honorary than real. Inasmuch as the great majority of the teachers in the diocesan schools were Sisters of the Holy Cross, and their community was scrupulous in adhering to strict rules of training and accreditation, and inasmuch as curriculum adjustments were generally made in consultation with the school office of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, within which ecclesiastical province the Salt Lake Diocese is included, the problems that arose were minimal and quickly solved. Within the past decade, however, the advisability of a full-time superintendent of schools with charge over the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, the official catechetical program, has been recognized, and the Reverend Joseph Fitzgerald presently fills the office, assisted by an adequate staff.
A hundred years of educational effort on the part of a relatively small religious minority in Utah, if it does not exhibit uniform progress and unqualified success, but records disappointments and failures as well, stands nevertheless as a tribute to the faith of the Catholic people, their ready response to the urgings of their spiritual leaders, and the zeal and dedication of the educators, religious and lay alike. In 1875 the prospects, however dark, were nevertheless illumined by a surety of purpose and an unwavering determination to uphold the spiritual ideals which inspired the founders. In 1975, despite a dominating and devouring philosophy of secular humanism, it is heartening to record that much of that same idealism still lives.
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