The Broader Family

1844–2026

Holy Cross College, the brothers' college. The brothers of Holy Cross opened their own college on the Notre Dame ground in 1966 — a two-year college founded for the order's own members, grown since into a four-year liberal arts college open to lay men and women. Its founding fact stands here because the family frame requires it; its whole telling belongs to the connected-schools pass that follows this one, and is not anticipated here.

The works the motherhouse sent out. From the bluff the congregation's work ran outward for a century and a half. The archives' timeline counts the school expansion of 1844–84 across the map — Indiana thirteen cities, Illinois five, Ohio seven, Michigan two, and schools besides in Iowa, Kentucky, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Texas, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Maryland, and California. The sisters went to Bengal in 1852 and withdrew after twenty-four years; the return of 1927 was permanent, and Holy Cross College at Dhaka (1950) and Holy Cross Girls High School (1951) stand from it. Two more colleges of the sisters have closed and are named here at their size: the College of St. Mary-of-the-Wasatch at Salt Lake City, opened September 1926 — Sister Madeleva's presidency before Saint Mary's — and closed in 1959, and Dunbarton College of the Holy Cross in Washington, D.C., opened in 1935 and closed in 1972. The hospital line that began at Cairo in 1867 gathered into the Holy Cross Health System in 1978. The missions continued: Brazil in 1947, Uganda in 1967, Peru in 1982, Ghana in 1983, Mexico in 1987, and Holy Cross Ministries in Utah in 1994. The motherhouse on the bluff remained what it had been since 1855 — the seat of the congregation, the place its sisters come home to, and the ground its college stands on.

Sources

1. Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend, diocesan history — Holy Cross College opened by the Brothers of Holy Cross in 1966, at the strength this history already carries.
2. HARC, Archival Reference Guide — the timeline and projects record: the 1844–84 school expansion by state, Bengal 1852 and 1927, Dhaka 1950–51, the Wasatch college (1926–1959), Dunbarton College (1935–1972), the Holy Cross Health System (1978), and the mission dates.
3. Sisters of the Holy Cross, "History" (cscsisters.org) — the congregation's course in summary.