The cardboard box holds yellowed documents, newspaper clippings, old letters … and a lesson. 

The box belonged to Mary Neal Bennett, who worked at Phoenix Memorial Hospital for 40 years before retiring in 1990, taking the box with her.

She died in April but entrusted the box to her colleague and friend Barbara Lambesis. 

The items in the box belonged to Emmett McLoughlin, who came to St. Mary’s Basilica as a young priest in 1934 and was assigned to work in south Phoenix.

Church officials chose the post to tame McLoughlin’s stubbornness.

What he found were people, mostly Black and Hispanic, who were hungry, often sick, living in shacks. The infant mortality rate was high. Women gave birth at home, attended by untrained midwives.

McLoughlin decided those needs were bigger than spiritual needs.

He won $600 in a contest, enough to renovate an abandoned grocery into a community center in 1936. He turned the building next door into a free maternity clinic, recruited volunteer doctors and nurses, and offered family planning.

In 1939, when McLoughlin was chaplain of the Arizona House of Representatives, he browbeat lawmakers into pursuing federal funding for the city’s first housing projects. When the bill passed, McLoughlin headed the project.

In 1944, McLoughlin raised money to open St. Monica’s Hospital, later renamed Phoenix Memorial Hospital, where anyone could get treatment regardless of ability to pay. It housed the only racially integrated nursing school west of the Mississippi.

He believed he was doing God’s work.

But his humanitarian efforts raised the ire of church officials. McLoughlin was threatened with a transfer to Ajo.

Forced to choose, McLoughlin left the priesthood in 1948, making headlines across the country. The next year, he married Mary Davis, a hospital worker, making headlines again.

In the community where McLoughlin continued to work, people called him “the people’s padre” and “el Santo del Southside.” He died in 1970.

In 1989, Bennett donated materials from Phoenix Memorial Hospital, including an iron lung used to treat polio patients, to the Arizona State University Library. On her behalf, Lambesis donated nursing school memorabilia to the Arizona Nurses Association in 2012.

That left the box.

In June, Lambesis sent an email to Arizona State University offering to donate the box to the university’s archives. The email found its way to Catherine O’Donnell, a history professor in ASU’s School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies.

She was in her car on her way to see it before she even had all the details.

For O’Donnell, the documents would provide a first-hand account of a time in Phoenix’s multicultural history that was not always harmonious, that showed how social values and religious beliefs had changed over the last half century and how one man made a difference.

O’Donnell went to Lambesis’ Phoenix home, where the box sat on a dining table. For more than an hour, she sorted through the contents.

The terse correspondence from church officials, who thought McLoughlin “too worldly,” donning suits and ties as a hospital superintendent and first head of the Phoenix Housing Authority, and too outspoken about segregation.

The carbon copies of the letters McLoughlin had sent in return, defending his works.

She read the handwritten letters from across the country, sent after McLoughlin left the priesthood. Most insisted he’d go to hell; others congratulated him, on his work and marriage.

It was a dizzying snapshot of thinking at the time. O’Donnell understood why McLoughlin kept them. “I think humility was part of it,” she said, but she also recognized he was  trying to understand their perspective.

His handwritten annotations in the margins of the original manuscript of his autobiography, “The People’s Padre,” showed how he struggled with his vow of obedience and how he rejected the church but not God.

As she read the documents for the first time, O’Donnell felt like she was there, in those moments. 

Lambesis hopes someone will use what’s in the box to tell McLoughlin’s story.

There’s a lesson in that box, Lambesis said, about our beliefs and the choices we make. 

“There’s some noble work yet to be done,” Lambesis said, “if you are willing to go out and do it.”

Reach Karina Bland at [email protected]. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter @KarinaBland.

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