Ambria Hammel/CATHOLIC SUN

St. Joseph and the Christ Child greet visitors to St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix. In 1895, the Sisters of Mercy founded what would go on to become one of the country’s leading medical centers.

Valley’s first Catholic hospital boasts pioneering past, innovative future

There’s a hallway in St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center lined with meticulously ordered displays. They’re the kind you might find in a museum, filled with artifacts from the past and little explanatory plaques.

One might show a blown-up photo of nuns covered from head to toe in their heavy habits, posing by their patients lying in hospital beds. Another features a series of photos from the early 1950s documenting the building of the new hospital taking shape on Thomas Road.

Download: Historic Milestones | 115th Anniversary Trivia

The families of St. Joseph’s patients appreciate these displays. Anyone who has accompanied a loved one to the hospital knows how the waiting rooms and hallways can be filled with a particular mixture of boredom and dread.

The displays give them something to look at, something to distract themselves. They also serve as a kind of metaphor for St. Joe’s.

Lining the halls of one of the most sophisticated and advanced medical centers in the country, the displays bridge the present to the hospital’s past, connecting the health care brought to this city by a group of nuns more than 100 years ago to the state-of-the-art Barrow Neurological Institute.

This connection to its past — all while keeping its eyes on the future — is especially felt at St. Joe’s this year. On March 19, the feast of St. Joseph, the hospital celebrates its 115th anniversary.

In the beginning

“Oh, my gosh, St. Joseph really has protected us to go from a six-room cottage to a 700-bed hospital,” Sister of Mercy Madonna Marie Bolton said. “In the early days there was difficulty. We were living in an anti-Catholic world. The sisters just ignored it and the people started to get to know them.”

Sr. Madonna serves St. Joe’s as its archivist now, but she was originally a nurse when she came to the hospital in the early ’70s. Her knowledge of the hospital and its history is impressive and comes from a true love of the place.

She was right to point out the difficulties that met the Sisters of Mercy when they founded St. Joseph’s Sanitarium in 1895 on Polk and Fourth Streets in downtown Phoenix.

The Sisters of Mercy — an order originating in Ireland — weren’t even originally known for their medical skills. They were teachers and had been invited to open a school in the small town of Phoenix in 1892.

Back then, the town boasted only a couple thousand inhabitants and was known mainly for making and providing hay for the horses stabled at Fort McDowell. The town was also a safe haven for the ill. Men and women came from across the country to benefit from the dry air and mild winters.

It was in encountering the many sufferers of tuberculosis that the sisters felt moved to do more than just visit with them. They needed real care and attention, so like so many of those pioneering orders, the nuns went about raising money for a hospital.

Sr. Madonna said they would go into town in a horse and buggy collecting 25 and 50 cents. Eventually, the support from the community became so great, that they survived when disaster struck in 1917.

“We had a fire,” Sr. Madonna said. “While they were putting out the flames, people were already donating $500. They rebuilt the hospital in 90 days.”

The hospital expanded throughout the decades until the late ’40s, when it became clear that construction of a new hospital was necessary to accommodate the rapidly growing city.

The sisters began raising money for a new building in 1947. Within seven years, the new St. Joseph’s Hospital was completed on Thomas Road. More than 57,000 citizens streamed through the doors during its opening ceremony.

Changing times

One of the remarkable things about St. Joe’s is how long it was run nearly entirely by the Sisters of Mercy. When Sr. Madonna arrived at the hospital in 1971, the religious group was just starting to incorporate the laity into hospital management.

“In those days the sisters were very much a part of the hospital. In almost every department there was a sister,” Sr. Madonna said. “We lived in a convent connected to the hospital chapel.”

In 1970, the sisters welcomed the first lay administrator. In 1972, they convened the first board of directors that included laymen. Now, there are only a couple of sisters left working at St. Joe’s.

Throughout these changing decades, however, the Sisters of Mercy made sure that their charism and values remained a paramount aspect of health care.

“In many ways it was difficult,” Sr. Madonna said. “It was our hospital. But hiring the right people made a big difference. With the new board members we really got top-class people.”

Sister of Mercy Margaret McBride, vice president of Mission Integration, said part of her job description is being “a resource to the employees about the mission and values” of St. Joe’s.

With more than 5,000 employees and about 600 volunteers, it’s a large task.

“For the new employees, I hope that they get instilled with the passion of people who work here,” Sr. Margaret said. “We talk about mind, body and spirit. We try to take care of the whole person.”

One way St. Joe’s tries to do this is through its community outreach programs. It’s just a matter of fact that a hospital isn’t often the best resource for continuing care. There are many patients that the doctors and nurses at St. Joe’s would like to check up on, but it remains unfeasible.

That’s why the hospital partners with other not-for-profit organizations that share in the same values. The hospital tithes a portion of its proceeds each year, which it then distributes throughout these programs to help better the health of the community at large.

Each program chosen by the hospital receives a $25,000 grant for the year to work on a project. One example of this type of partnership is the relationship St. Joe’s has had with Florence Crittenton for many decades.

Florence Crittenton is an organization that aims to help young women in need. One of the projects they’ve been able to undertake — thanks to the St. Joe’s community grants program — focuses on the health of women coming out of incarceration. They are able to provide these women with health care that they might otherwise seek in the already overburdened emergency room.

Another community grant was recently awarded to Catholic Charities’ DIGNITY program, which helps women leave a life of prostitution. DIGNITY has used the grant money to teach these women how to self-manage many of their health issues.

The grants program also points to a larger ethos of the hospital: the call to help the poor and underserved.

“It’s a really important part of our mission statement to care for the poor and vulnerable,” Sr. Margaret said. “It’s really a calling for us. At the same time, we have to balance it with financial realities.”

Partnership programs help bridge that financial gap, helping the poor and also positioning the hospital for long-term stability.

“I think Catholic health care is more important than it’s ever been, just looking at the ethical and end-of-life issues,” Sr. Margaret said. “I think it will become even more important — the whole sense of dignity and respect.”

Visionary community

There have been many firsts at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in its 115-year history. It boasted the first pediatric department in Phoenix in 1928, opened the Southwest’s first cardiac care unit in 1964, helped found the Make-A-Wish Foundation in 1980 and hosted Pope John Paul II’s only visit to an American hospital during his 1987 tour of the country.

The pope memorably broke protocol when he saw a welcome sign outside of the hospital written in his native Polish. He strode over to the screaming crowd, blessing and touching them. It’s something Sr. Madonna will never forget.

“I held his hand,” she said. “It was incredible.”

And since the hospital boasts world-renowned doctors and care, Sr. Madonna believes that St. Joe’s legacy will last a great deal longer.

“We’ve always been a visionary community,” she said. “It’s mostly our faith. Everything is based on our faith in God. We’ve had some difficult times, but He’s always gotten us through.”

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Photos courtesy St. Joseph Hospital and Medical Center

1. The community was behind St. Joseph’s fundraising efforts in 1951. This banner stretched across Central Avenue.

2. In 1954, St. Joseph’s established the Mercy Clinic to help care for the under served. Patients paid 25 cents a visit and sometimes that fee was donated by an employee.

3. Barrow Neurological Institute’s revolutionary Med-Presence system, a $1.1-million real-time video-conferencing system established in 2006, provides an unsurpassed view of Barrow operating rooms from the comfort a conference room.