May 1995 Blazer

Sister Madeleva, Poet and Educator established St. mary of the Wasatch

Utah State Historical Societ!~ 300 Rio Grande Salt Lake City. tTT 84101 ( 801) 533- 3500 FAX ( 801) 533- 3503 Sister Madeleva, Poet and Educator, Established St. Mary of the Wasatch Sister Mary Madeleva Wolff was sent to - Ogden,. Utah, in - 1919 to take charge of Sacred Heart Academy in the dual role of principal and teacher. She had just completed her M. A. degree in English at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, one of only four sisters selected to pursue graduate work there. S. ince attaining her bachelor's degree at St. Mary's, a women's college also located in Notre Dame, Indiana, she had taught college- level courses. Moreover, she had won recognition for her poetry and according to one biographer was the " community poet laureate," producing poems upon request for special church occasions. She enjoyed her association with Notre Dame intellectuals, including Father Cornelius Haggerty, professor of philosophy, and Father Charles O'Donnell, a rising Catholic poet. Her assignment to a small western town puzzled and for a time disoriented Madeleva, but she answered the call without question. She would spend the next fourteen years in the West, establishing a women's college and publishing the books of poetry that would bring her national and even international acclaim. Madeleva was born in a rural Wisconsin lumber town on May 24, 1887, to Lucy Arntz and August Wolff who named their only daughter Mary Evaline. Her German immigrant father was Lutheran and her mother Catholic. August Wolff, who had only a third- grade education, loved to read, especially poetry, with his daughter. She was an apt and dedicated student who learned to read Cicero and Virgil in Latin and translated Goethe as a high school senior. She spent her freshman year at the University of Wisconsin, but as she matured she found herself increasingly attracted to the religious life. She transferred to St. Mary's College and changed her major from mathematics to English. The strict rules at St. Mary's proved hard for a girl who had enjoyed so much freedom during her country childhood. She hosted forbidden parties in her room and broke other rules that kept her from being listed on the honor roll. Still, she embraced the idea of becoming a nun of the Holy Cross order after completing her junior year. During Madeleva's tenure at Sacred Heart in Ogden, Bishop Joseph S. Glass conceived the idea of establishing a college for Catholic women in the Intermountain West. In 1921 the Holy Cross sisters bought 400 mountainside acres from the Salt Lake Country Club in the area bordered by 1300 South and 3000 East. In September 1926 Madeleva was sent to Salt Lake City to direct the opening of the new liberal arts college- St. Mary of the Wasatch. She was fully qualified to for the task, having completed a Ph. D. in English at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1925 and having both classroom and administrative experience. Times were difficult, though. The college had a large debt to retire, and Madeleva's unusual talents and creative personality sometimes strained relations with her superiors. Nevertheless, the school and the poet thrived. ( more) Madeleva loved the mountains and later recalled hearing coyotes howl outside the college at night, being snowed in at least once each winter, and facing water shortages during the long hot summers. stud& and teachers enjoyed group hikes on the mountain followed by hot chocolate when they returned in the evening. She was pleased with the quality of the students and remarked that out of a group of fifty, seven read Beowulfwith her in the original Old English and delighted in the experience. St. Mary of the Wasatch developed a warm relationship with the University of Utah over the years. The U provided some teachers, and the two schools shared visiting guest artists and invited students and faculty to participate in their programs. Bishop Glass had assem-bled a collection of outstanding European art which his successor, Bishop John J. Mitty , arranged to display at St. Mary, making it in effect a small museum. By 1933 St. Mary was ranked nationally on the " A" list of four- year colleges qualified to grant degrees in science, arts, and letters. Having achieved much in a short time, Sister Madeleva opted to begin a sabbatical year in 1933 at Oxford University in England. She studied medieval literature with the brilliant young scholar C. S. Lewis and later was inducted into the Medieval Academy of Arts and Letters, joining the likes of Andre Maurois, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and H. G. Wells. Despite her success as a scholar and poet, her religious life was her primary commitment. Her poetry reflects an intense devotion to God that expresses her inner fire. Following her sabbatical, from 1934 to 1961, Sister Madeleva served as president of her alma mater in Indiana, St. Mary's College. During her long career she wrote some dozen books of poetry and critical prose and an autobiography, My First Seventy Years ( 1959). Among other awards, she won the gold medal of the National Poetry Center of the New York World's Fair in 1939 and the Siena Medal in recognition as the Catholic woman who made a distinctive contribu-tion to Catholic life in the United States ( 1948). Madeleva died in 1964. By then the women's college she had established in Salt Lake City was serving as a girls' high school. In 1970 the school closed, and in 1972 the building was demolished, ending a unique story in Utah's educa-tional and literary annals. See Gail Porter Mandell, Madeleva: One Woman's Life ( New York: Paulist Press, 1994), and Bernice Maher Mooney, Salt of the Earth: Zhe History of the Catholic Church in Utah, 1 776- 1 987 ( Salt Lake City, 1987). THE HISTOBRLYA ZER is produced by the Utah State Historical Society and funded in part by a grant from the Utah Statehood Centennial Commission. For more information about the Historical Society telephone [phone] ( MBM)