Transformation of the Cathedral: An Interview with Gregory Glenn

Transformation of the Cathedral: An interview with Gregory Glenn

BY GARY TOPPING

Since completion of the Cathedral of the Madeleine under Bishop Lawrence Scanlan in 1909, and especially after its colorful redecoration in 1917 under Bishop Joseph S. Glass, it has become one of Salt Lake City’s most celebrated architectural monuments. The cathedral underwent a further transformation during the 1980s from an almost exclusively Roman Catholic structure to an authentically public building—“A Cathedral for All People,” as the slogan had it during its extensive renovation from 1991 to 1993. Today there are few people with a cultural bent in Salt Lake City who have not attended at least some of its free public concerts, lectures, or dramatic performances.

Gregory Glenn with the Cathedral of the Madeleine Choir, 2011.

Courtesy Intermountain Catholic

That renovation was an immense project costing 10.4 million dollars. In addition to a seismic retrofitting of the structure itself, it included cleaning the murals and other interior painting that had become dulled by air pollution over the decades; removing, cleaning, and reassembling the stained glass windows; redesigning the sanctuary area; commissioning a new set of paintings for the Stations of the Cross; acoustical improvements; and construction and installation of a new organ, among other less dramatic improvements. 1 The transformation included more than just physical aspects, for such programs as the annual Madeleine Festival of Arts and Humanities and the annual Eccles Organ Concert series, among other events, made the cathedral a public cultural center as well as an architectural and artistic marvel.

That transformation was largely the work of three great leaders: Bishop William K. Weigand, who led the diocese from 1980 to 1995; Monsignor M. Francis Mannion, cathedral rector from 1986 to 2000; and Gregory Glenn, founder and director of the Madeleine Choir School, who arrived in Salt Lake City in 1988 and continues at this writing as head of the school. While I was preparing a new history of the cathedral as part of the celebration of its centennial in 2009, it was my privilege to conduct extensive interviews with all three. 2 What follows is a transcript of the interview with Glenn, which is the most concise of the three interviews. In some ways, it is the most interesting, because of the breadth of Glenn’s involvement, his role in creation of the Choir School (which is the only institution of its kind in the United States), and not least because of his eyebrow-raising account of the exhumation of the remains of Bishop Scanlan!

The interview took place on February 9, 2009, in the cathedral rectory. It is part of the Archives of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, under whose permission it is presented here.

Gary Topping: I wonder first of all, Greg, just to kind of establish a context for this, if you could tell us a little bit about your personal background—where you grew up, and your education, and stuff like that.

Gregory Glenn: Sure. I grew up in the state of Washington, in the Olympia area, and eventually moved to Seattle to do my undergraduate work, which was in music, specifically in organ performance. After a few years of pastoral work in a parish there in Seattle I went back to school at Catholic University in Washington D.C., and did my graduate degree in theology with an emphasis in liturgical studies, then also did work in choral conducting and Gregorian Chant studies. Then, completing my graduate work, I took the post here as the Diocesan Director of Liturgy in September 1988 and became the Director of Liturgy and Music for the cathedral in 1990, doing both jobs, and then in 1991 I came just to the cathedral, as we were getting busy for the restoration.

GT: Did you come from a musical family?

GG: I did. My grandfather was an organist, all of my uncles are musicians, and my father is.

GT: You came by it naturally, then.

GG: Yeah, it’s in the blood, I’m afraid. [Laughter]

GT: Now the first thing I need to ask is how in the world you found out about the Diocese of Salt Lake [City]. That’s the question that all of us Utah Catholics are liable for sooner or later: how in the world did you wind up here?

GG: [Laughter] I know, I know. While I was at Catholic University, my graduate program director, Father Gerard Austin, made me aware of the position opening here. Monsignor Mannion had studied at Catholic University, did his doctorate there, and had studied with Father Austin. 3 Father Austin became aware of this position through Monsignor Mannion. So I did apply because of that and was accepted in the post. I was expecting to be here three to five years, [laughter] and I’ve been here ever since. It’s been a great thing. I very much like Utah.

GT: I do, too. It kind of grows on you, doesn’t it?

GG: Yes, it does.

GT: So you had not met Monsignor Mannion before you applied for the job?

GG: No, he left the university before I began. He completed his doctoral work before I arrived there. It was only through Father Austin.

GT: So let’s start talking about the cathedral renovation. What exact role did you have in that?

GG: I came into the process somewhat halfway. A lot of the groundwork had been laid. For example, the organ had been chosen. The builder had been chosen and the design of the organ had been chosen. That’s one thing I would have wanted to have some influence on, but could not. Much of the basic work for the restoration and design work had been done. They were entering the phase of design development and the final choices about things, so I did not get a chance to be involved in all of that. Also, with the actual construction, I do remember Ash Wednesday of 1991 (I believe that’s the right date) when the building was going to close the next day, on Ash Wednesday they had already come in and started to do some of the work. I recall the next morning going into the cathedral and seeing them literally ripping things out, and I thought to myself and actually commented to Monsignor Mannion, “I think this may be a huge mistake.” [Laughter] It looked so devastating to see them destroying things. But it turned out fine.

GT: It may be some consolation to you to know that he felt the same way. He told me he used to walk through there and it was just completely torn up and would wonder if you were ever going to be able to get it back together again

GG: Yeah, that was a common anxiety.

GT: I did not know that you had not been involved in the choice of the organ. Could you tell me a little bit about the organ? One question I had was . . . I had read somewhere, it may have been in that little brochure that Monsignor Mannion wrote about the renovation, that the previous organ was really not suited for liturgical or classical performance, that it was more of a theater organ or something like that. Do you know anything about that? What would that mean?

GG: I played the organ that was here before. It was a fine instrument. It was something of a hodge podge of a number of different instruments put together. It was in very, very bad working condition. One couldn’t say that it was a horrible organ, but what one would say is that, number one, it wasn’t suited to liturgical use because it wasn’t able to really lead the congregation in singing nor to accommodate some of the other things that had come about because of the Second Vatican Council restorations.

GT: Can you explain that a little bit?

GG: Yeah. For example, we now have the use of many antiphons in the liturgy, and the old organ struggled to provide leadership for those antiphons, whereby a single melody line would be spelled out in clarity for the congregation. So that was one thing. A number of other things are in terms of a performance basis, to invite a recitalist in to perform, the old organ would not have been the kind of organ one could do a concert on. It just didn’t have all of the basics that a good quality organ has. So we wouldn’t ever have been able to have the organ recital series. A third thing that is also true is there is a great tradition of pipe organ literature, music, for use at the Mass. It’s a very solidly Catholic entity, and there was a lot of the literature that could not be played, and so that was a part of the motivation for the new instrument. But the most basic one was that the old instrument was in a state of severe decay. It was going to take a massive amount of restoration. Parts of the old organ have been incorporated into the new one. That’s kind of a continuity with the past.

GT: Just the pipes, right?

GG: The pipes. There are a couple of the wind chests in the pedal division that were from the old organ that were restored and returned to the organ.

GT: What would you say that the great virtues of this new organ would be? I assume you really love playing it.

GG: Yeah. It’s an instrument now that can accommodate almost any of the organ literature. So myself and the cathedral organist, Douglas O’Neill, were able to play any of the tradition of Catholic Church music because of that. We’re also able to attract and invite performers to come and to offer the instrument as a concert instrument for the general public. This has always been something that cathedrals have done throughout Europe and something that we’re now able to do here in Salt Lake City.

It’s also an instrument that is what’s called mechanical action, which means it returns to a pre-Industrial Revolution style of building organs whereby the actual connection between the keys and the pipes is all mechanical, with the exception of one valve that releases air. So when the player plays, he actually has a mechanical control of the speech of the pipes. This is not something that’s common, especially in this area. There are very few mechanical action instruments.

GT: What does that mean? What’s the advantage of that?

GG: The advantage is that you have more control of how the organ speaks, by your playing. With other instruments, such as the large instrument found on Temple Square, they are electronically controlled, so you don’t have the nuance that you would have with mechanical action. This is now in fact the largest mechanical action organ in the city. So we’re very fortunate to have it.

GT: So by that you mean you can depress the key part way and let just a little bit of air into the pipe:

GG: Yeah, there’s a small area where you can make it sound—and the children enjoy this—it almost can sound like a train whistle! [Laughter]

GT: And the actual action of the keys, would it require a good deal more finger strength to play that?

GG: A little bit, yeah. We find some American players who balk at playing the instrument because it seems too heavy, but all the European artists that we’ve had here have all said that it’s kind of a standard weight in terms of playing the manuals.

GT: So they would have mostly mechanical action organs in Europe?

GG: Yes. A large percentage of them are mechanical action.

GT: The Eccles Series [of organ concerts] is funded on a year to year basis by the Eccles family, is that correct?

GG: It is. It also receives funding from the Utah Arts Council, and the Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts and Parks fund. Doug O’Neill, our organist, works on that every year. The Eccles Foundation gift is the primary amount, and then we have a Friends of the Eccles Festival, and many of the people who attend provide regular financial support. So it’s become more of a community-based project.

GT: Which is what the Eccles family wanted, I think. I believe that was the stipulation in order to get the donation, that there had to be a series of public recitals?

GG: Absolutely, yeah. And we always intended that. Cathedrals have always been places for the arts, to nurture the arts, even outside of the liturgy. So while the literature that is played is in conformity with the sensitivities of the building, it’s very much a public event. People are very welcome.

GT: Now you mentioned that Doug O’Neill works on that. Who chooses the artists who perform? Is there a committee or something?

GG: There is a committee. There’s a committee made up that represents various constituencies here in the city. We chair that committee because as the cathedral we’re responsible for it. We’re also responsible to the Eccles Foundation. We do have a committee with representatives of very different groups in the city.

GT: Could you give me some examples?

GG: One example is Rick Elliott, who is the chief organist at the tabernacle. He’s on the committee. There are professors of organ at BYU, the instructor of organ up at the University of Utah, and some members of what is called the American Guild of Organists. They are also part of that committee.

GT: The committee would be how large?

GG: Only six to seven. Committees can take on a large . . .

GT: It’s easier to make a decision if you have fewer members, right? [Laughter]

GG: Exactly!

GT: Okay, how about the Choir School? 4 Can you explain the inception of that, and whose idea that was and how that got started? I know it started out pretty modestly.

GG: Yeah. Well, it was my idea. It had a great deal of support from Monsignor Mannion. We began in 1990 by just simply recruiting children from around the diocese for an after school program. We had our first meeting of the students on the nineteenth of March in 1990. That is now the Founder’s Day for the Choir School.

What we did was we auditioned children from all of the Catholic schools, and the schools were very accommodating. We sent letters to children who seemed to have a particular ability in this area and invited them to take part. We were very surprised by the interest, the very overwhelming interest early on. We launched right in, began the Boy Choir and then the Girl Choir.

GT: How many kids were involved there in the beginning?

GG: Early on, seventy. Thirty-five in each group. It was a big group. It’s kind of funny because that’s been some time now, and I’m still in contact with many of my former choristers from those very first days. One is a professor of music at a junior college in Kentucky. Another now teaches at the Choir School, as a seventh grade math and science teacher. So it’s been kind of funny to see all those people move along.

GT: And how did the kids get here? Their parents brought them?

GG: The parents brought them. As you know, it started while the cathedral was closed, so we began in the basement of St. Ann School and eventually we moved the rehearsals back to the cathedral, for the opening of the cathedral, September 31 of 1992.

After this program continued to kind of flourish for a while, many of the parents determined that something along the lines of the European choir schools was something that might be of interest to them. This was always in the back of my mind. In fact it was something we sort of subtly talked about with the architects who were designing the lower floor of the cathedral. Not very seriously, but just as a possibility. We launched into a feasibility study in 1995, and we were kind of overwhelmed, first by the response of the parents. We were a little stunned by the negativity of some members of the Catholic community about starting another school, and mostly the very strong negativity from the other Catholic schools. There was a lot of negative feeling about the school. But we steered through that and announced the opening; Bishop Niederauer approved the opening of the school on the 25th of May in 1996. 5 We announced the opening and the school was full the next day. So it was a pretty amazing thing. I have to credit those parents because they were taking an enormous risk. When they signed up their child, they had to withdraw their registration from the other Catholic schools of the diocese. We had no teachers, no principal, no desks, no books—nothing. They were committing themselves to starting this school. My hat is off to them. They were tremendous pioneers in getting this off the ground, and I still am very grateful to them. Also to Elizabeth [Betsy] Hunt, who is now the principal of Cosgriff School, as the founding principal. 6 She did a marvelous, marvelous job of getting this thing off the ground.

GT: Catholic school students get a subsidy from their parish. Was that part of where the animosity was toward the cathedral school? They were going to be coming here instead of to that parish [school]?

GG: To some degree, although that wasn’t the primary concern. Most of the parishes already pay subsidies to other schools, because students in their parishes go to other schools. The largest motivation for the negativity was it was such an unusual thing. Anything with the arts has trappings of elitism, which is a very unfortunate thing, because we are hardly elitist. That was something, to be honest, of a cheap shot taken at the arts. It’s a very common criticism.

That was part of it, also just whether we needed another Catholic school here in the diocese. What we tried to say was we probably don’t need another Catholic school in the diocese, but what we do need is a choir school, because a choir school provides a particular formation for young men and women who have this God-given ability to be of service to the Church. Making a musician does not happen in four years of undergraduate education. It happens over the course of a very long period of time. We’ve seen this truth kind of borne out. For example, one of our young women just graduated with her master’s degree in organ performance and choral conducting from Yale. Two are at Dartmouth right now. A young man from the Choir School is serving in one of our large parishes here, also in Ohio and in Kentucky. We have a number of young men and women who are involved in music ministry as well elsewhere. One of our young graduates just applied, is a final candidate, for the Director of Music job in the Cathedral of Fort Worth. So it is working. Yeah, we didn’t need another school, but we did need a choir school to provide the music for our services and also to provide this formation.

GT: And did you point out also that other parishes could benefit from this? These kids aren’t just going to be serving the cathedral.

GG: That’s right. That’s right. And they have been. There are several music directors here who are our graduates. I think we’ll see more of that.

GT: So how did you fare in the basement, in Scanlan Hall? That must have been pretty cramped. That was the point at which that was kind of subdivided into classrooms, right? That was part of the renovation.

GG: It was cramped. That’s right. It was meant to be kind of joint use of Religious Education and other programs and potentially the Choir School. The Choir School did well down there, even without the playground. We had fourth through eighth grade, but we were bursting at the seams. We were crawling all over each other. Many of the early parents kind of looked on it very romantically. They see those as being the very best days of the school. There was no playground, however, and the children were underground a large percentage of the day, and that obviously wasn't the best advantage.

So early on we began looking for potential property and for other solutions to the situation. We had a design to completely redo the red house and create that as a school. 7 It was a very ingenious design, actually, but it didn’t solve our playground issues. We looked at a spot in the open field behind the Sacred Heart Center, and we looked at property all around this neighborhood. 8 Nothing really kind of showed itself.

Suddenly, Rowland Hall-St. Mark’s announced that their property was going to become available because they were moving to a new campus. 9 That couldn’t have been more ideal. However, it was rather daunting to raise 1.4 million, which was their asking price for that property. So under Betsy Hunt’s leadership, largely, we set about the task of raising that money. Two million dollars came from the McCarthey family under the leadership of Jane McCarthey, who was thrilled to be finally giving money to something other than sports. 10 [Laughter] She was quite excited that she was going to be able to do this. It was the last project she did before her death. We were very, very glad to name the main classroom building the Jane McCarthey Building. So we were really thrilled about that. The first million dollar gift actually came from Bob Steiner. His wife, Jacqueline Erbin, had passed away in childbirth. She was very devoted to young children, and so the other main building is named Jacqueline Erbin Hall. And then another million dollars came through the work of Bishop Niederauer with the Daniel Murphy Foundation. The Daniel Murphy Foundation provided the other million. So altogether four million was raised. We were able to purchase and now we own the land free. It’s a fantastic two-acre campus with five buildings. While those buildings are decaying a bit and we have a lot of work to do, we’re in a great place. Close to the cathedral, and with a nice playground.

Gregory Glenn at a “hard hat party” during the cathedral’s renovation, 1991.

Courtesy Archives, Roman Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City

GT: Let’s see, I thought I would ask you about the interim period when we were at what we fondly called “St. Lowell.” 11 What was that like? I can remember the choir singing and you were playing away on this battered old upright piano. [Laughter]

GG: [Laughter] It was pretty horrible. It was a real test. Something to Monsignor Mannion’s credit was his ability to kind of keep the community together during that period of time. It has happened in many places that when this kind of thing happens people go to other churches. They scatter. He started a program [laughter], remember, I think we were all wearing buttons for a few weeks that said something about our commitment, “I’m Committed to Staying.” I know it involved a button. It was a down-to-earth campaign.

That was also difficult for the choir. It was easy to attract members to sing in a neo-Gothic building, but it was not so easy to attract them to sing in a basketball gymnasium. But my hat’s off to those wonderful founding members of the cathedral choir, keeping things together through those years. It was an opportunity for us to reflect on things and do some planning for moving back into the cathedral. So it was a good time of intensive work, preparation, building up repertoire, figuring out a pattern for how things were going to develop. We used that to our best advantage.

During that time I was able to go, with Monsignor Mannion’s assistance, to London and spend several months there studying the choir school and the choir at Westminster Cathedral, which became then the pattern for how we established the Choir School here in Salt Lake City. That time for me was invaluable. In fact, I’m always amused: I think I learned more in that two months about some aspects of church music than I did in many of my courses in my undergraduate and graduate work. That was a very valuable time. I was able to bring all that back to the founding of the Choir School, and also to the pattern of our liturgical music.

GT: Where did you rehearse? Did you rehearse at Lowell also?

GG: No, we rehearsed in the basement of this building [the cathedral rectory], in the basement of the rectory, because we only had access to the Lowell school on the weekends. We had a small, very cramped room down in this very basement. It’s now the music library, in the basement of this building. [Laughter]

GT: I thought that was kind of fun, myself. I thought it was like camping out. I wasn’t about to go anywhere.

GG: There were many of us that felt that way. No, that was great. Those were great days.

GT: Now what else have you been involved in? You’ve been involved in the Madeleine Festival [of Arts and Humanities], I suppose? 12

GG: Yeah, I haven’t been involved so much in the leadership of that as I have just in providing arts events over the years. The Madeleine Festival was launched in 1987, the year before I came. And it was still in somewhat of a very primitive stage at that point. Then in 1988 to 1989, Marrie Hart took over the leadership of the festival and really developed it to the standard that it currently is. So I did work with her in shaping artistic events and providing ideas and things of this kind. Leadership has passed on now to Anne Collopy and Drew Browning. So things are going well.

GT: How is that funded?

GG: It’s funded by the Friends of the Madeleine Festival, again, a larger community of people who contribute annually to the support of the festival, by the Salt Lake Arts Council, Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts and Parks, and by the Utah Arts Council. Its funding comes completely from outside sources; in other words, not a dime of cathedral parish money is spent on the festival. It’s really kind of a remarkable grass-roots effort. It’s been recognized around the community. It’s pretty amazing for what it accomplishes, given its small budget.

GT: I forgot, one more thing I wanted to ask you about the Choir School, I believe it has expanded since it started in the number of grade levels. Could you talk about that a little bit?

GG: Right. We started with grades four through seven. We had a hundred children enrolled in that four through seven. We were severely petitioned to open an eighth grade in that first year, which we originally were not going to do. We didn’t think children would want to come out of their school for one year. 13 We had thirteen children basically on their knees [laughter], asking us to open the eighth grade, so we did have the eighth grade. We ended up with 110 that first year.

The school gradually added, in 2002 we added the second and third grade. For the first several months they were in the house on the corner, in the dining room and the living room. 14 That was very difficult. That was the fall of 2002. Then we moved to the new campus in December of 2002. The following fall we began the first grade and kindergarten. Then two years ago we also began the prekindergarten program. Now we have prekindergarten through eighth grade, with about 240 students.

GT: What other stories do you recall about the restoration of the cathedral?

GG: Monsignor told you about all the trials and tribulations of the restoration. I have to say that it was a very exciting time. It was an amazing time. I look back on it and wonder how we did it. There were twelve hour days almost every day, in between managing all the work that was going on. One of my fondest memories—I don’t think Monsignor told you about this—was his famous memorandum trying to negotiate between the architects and the organ builder, who were both very difficult to get to sit down at a table and negotiate. There was a long correspondence, a very difficult communication, and it was coming right down to the wire. The design for the gallery had to be finished. So there’s a famous memo which I still have. It was sent to the organ builder and to the architect, basically laying down the gauntlet, saying if you don’t converse by such-and-such a date, I believe Monsignor threatened to paint the organ case baby blue [laughter], and something about a horse head with the architects [?]. It was a call to action [laughter] that I won’t ever forget.

GT: How did you find Bishop Weigand to work with?

GG: I only knew Bishop Weigand in his last five years, five or six years here. When I came to Salt Lake City, I came originally to work for him, in the diocesan liturgy office. He was a bit more experienced as a bishop by the time I arrived, and so I found him very, very good to work with. He was a very fine Christian man. My fondest memories of him are just the surety of his faith. He was tough and he was demanding, but at the same time he was fair and he listened to you. He believed in the best things of liturgy and the best things of music, and he supported those things.

I had a wonderful conversation with him on the day of Bishop Federal’s funeral. 15 He had come back for that funeral Mass. The children performed for the funeral Mass, and we had done a setting of Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem, which is a very stunning piece of music. To the credit of the children, they learned it in five days. Bishop Weigand was carrying on about how wonderful they were. He said to me, “You know, Greg, if you had come to me and asked me for approval of the Choir School, I would have said no.” And he said, “And it would have been a terrible mistake.” So he was a very gracious man, who knew his faults, but I very much enjoyed working for him.

GT: Monsignor Mannion told me that Bishop Weigand never overrode any of the decisions of any of the committees that were involved in the renovation.

GG: No, he respected the advice of experts. That left the cathedral not with those, for lack of a better term, kind of architectural tumors that can sometimes happen because someone intervenes in the last stage of something.

GT: One of the things that I found Monsignor Mannion most proud of is the sort of seamless way that the renovations kind of fit in with the stuff that was left alone. It’s an integral structure.

GG: That’s been one of the comments from many people who have visited it. They wouldn’t really know that it had been restored. It has the look that it’s been like that. We were concerned that the new marble . . . in many cathedrals that I can think of—for example, Detroit, where an older building had new renovations installed, there’s this kind of giant modern lip installed, and we were terrified that that would be what the new altar and the chancel would look like. 16

We worked very hard to make sure that everything was integrated. It turned out that it would.

When the altar was being installed, there is a time capsule located under the altar. I don’t expect it will ever be possible to retrieve it, because I think to get it you’d have to destroy the altar. It’s quite a ways down underneath. But it’s there. It contains a homily that Monsignor Mannion preached at the funeral Mass of a young man who died very tragically, a man by the name of John Wells. That funeral homily is found there. There’s a musical composition of mine that was dedicated to Adine Bradley, who was the organist here at the cathedral for something like sixty years. She was in the later years of life, so we had a concert given in her honor and this piece was composed for her. Julie Angelos, the old office manager, her mother’s rosary is placed there. I think that’s it. It’s in a small metal box.

GT: With all of that whole apparatus of the chancel and the altar and that, were there reinforcements that had to be installed below that, down to the foundation?

GG: Yeah. In fact, the old crypt where Bishop Scanlan used to be buried downstairs had to be destroyed because some kind of reinforcing beam or pillar had to be installed. 17 There are new pillars found in the social hall downstairs that are directly beneath the chancel area. They’re covered with plaster, so they look like they’ve always been there. Yeah, there was quite a bit of superstructure there, although the largest piece of superstructure is found beneath the organ, amazingly. And not for the organ. It was part of the earthquake plan that ties the two towers together. They have the structural field that goes all the way up the towers. Well, to tie that together they had to create this massive steel frame in the organ gallery. It’s probably one of the most reinforced organ galleries in the world! [Laughter] I can remember it going up and thinking, “My goodness, this is enormous!” But it’s because they had to tie the two towers together.

GT: So that was the reason for moving Bishop Scanlan’s crypt upstairs. 18

GG: It was, although I also have to say that it was not a very noble place to bury him. The doorway exists today; it was a safe, the kind of door you would have on a safe. The room itself was very awkward; one couldn’t go in there very easily.

He was exhumed. That was one of my strange jobs in the restoration process, to oversee his removal from the crypt. No one up here, in the rectory house, would do that. [Laughter] So I was given the job. When he was taken out of the marble sarcophagus, his casket had completely decayed. Not completely, but it has pretty much been destroyed. So his body was removed and placed on a noble stretcher, and I was instructed to go down and look at it. I remember he was inviolate. His body was all present. His skin was there. He looked very much like a dried flower, that kind of appearance. He was all intact. He had his crosier and his miter, the old pontifical sunburst gloves; his hands were folded. He was a very tall man, very tall. That was a very striking moment. 19

There is a ring that he was given when he became the Bishop of Salt Lake City by the Archbishop of Cashel, one of the older archdioceses in Ireland. This ring has a long history. I think it has medieval roots, if I remember correctly.

Bishop Federal, when I came back upstairs after doing this—and by the way, the funeral directors were all in space suits [laughter], and here I was, exposed to whatever . . . if I might contract some very strange disease in the future, you’ll know why [laughter]. But anyway, I came upstairs and Bishop Federal was at dinner. I was a bit shell-shocked by the whole thing, and the first thing he asked me was, “Did you get the ring?” I said to him, “Well, no, I didn’t get the ring.” I wasn’t about to take the ring, you know. [Laughter] It was one of those Young Frankenstein moments. But no, the ring is still there.

It’s only with subsequent reading of the early history of Utah that I even more and more recognize what an incredible man this was, what he accomplished in his years of work here in this diocese. So our great founder is now with us in the upper church, and that’s good.

— Gary Topping is archivist of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City — WEB SUPPLEMENT Visit history.utah.gov/uhqextras for recordings of the choir in 1960.

1 The Stations of the Cross are ordinarily paintings or sculptures arranged around the sides of a Catholic church and depicting various events during the passion of Christ. Their number has varied considerably over the centuries but eventually became standardized at fourteen. Bishop Lawrence Scanlan’s stations were bas-relief sculptures that were replaced during Bishop Joseph Glass’s redecoration with rather gloomy oil paintings. During the 1990s renovation, they were deemed unsalvageable and new paintings were commissioned and executed by University of Utah art professor Roger “Sam” Wilson.

2 Gary Topping, The Story of the Cathedral of the Madeleine (Salt Lake City: Sagebrush Press, 2009).

3 As noted above, Monsignor M. Francis Mannion was rector of the cathedral from 1986 to 2000. He is a widely recognized and published authority on liturgy and theology, most memorably Masterworks of God: Essays in Liturgical Theory and Practice (Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2004), which contains much of the theoretical underpinning for the cathedral renovation. At this writing, Mannion is pastor emeritus of St. Vincent de Paul parish in Murray and a weekly columnist for the Intermountain Catholic, the diocesan newspaper.

4 The nature of a choir school, which is never precisely defined in the interview, could be roughly described as a charter school affiliated with a cathedral with an emphasis on instruction and performance of liturgical music. The Madeleine Choir School website, http:// utmcs.org/, offers a much more accurate and elaborate description of the program.

5 Bishop George H. Niederauer succeeded Bishop William K. Weigand in 1995 and continued until 2006, when he was named Archbishop of San Francisco. At this writing he is retired from that position.

6 Cosgriff School is a Catholic elementary school affiliated with St. Ambrose parish.

7 The “red house” is the Bishop Hunt Center, east of the cathedral rectory.

8 The Sacred Heart Center is located on the northeast corner of the cathedral block, at 33 C Street.

9 The property referred to here is located at 205 East 1st Avenue.

10 The McCarthey family had previously funded the creation of the football stadium at Judge Memorial Catholic High School.

11 Lowell Elementary School at 134 N Street, where cathedral services were held during the closure.

12 The Madeleine Festival takes place annually during the Easter season. It consists of a wide variety of musical and dramatic performances and lectures.

13 There are only three high schools in the Diocese of Salt Lake City: St. Joseph in Ogden, Judge Memorial in Salt Lake City, and Juan Diego in Draper. The other schools terminate with the eighth grade.

14 Cobblecrest, on the southeast corner of the cathedral block.

15 Bishop Joseph Lennox Federal served from 1960 to 1980 and was Bishop Weigand’s immediate predecessor. He died in 2000.

16 A chancel is a platform raised a few steps above the main floor of a church, upon which the altar is placed. The most conspicuous change in the cathedral renovation was installation of a huge stone chancel that brings the altar out into the midst of the church, in conformity with the Vatican II mandate that Holy Communion be celebrated something like a family meal.

17 At the time of the dedication of the cathedral in 1909, James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, who had presided over the dedication, suggested to Bishop Scanlan that he might consider being entombed in his own cathedral. Scanlan obviously warmed to the idea, but the cathedral architect, Carl Neuhausen, had not been asked to provide a vault where such a burial could take place, and the bishop’s remains were placed into a very cramped space in the basement.

18 Scanlan’s remains today are in a crypt beneath the location of the original main altar on the main floor of the cathedral.

19 Monsignor Mannion had similar feelings. In a oneparagraph deposition in his papers in the Diocesan Archives recorded two days after the fact, he remembered seeing “the thin frail frame of an old man withered with age yet preserved like an old flower after many years. He was wearing faded purple vestments, a miter and a pectoral cross. He had a ring on his prayer enfolded hands. We were amazed at how tall he was. Contrary to my expectations, the experience was not at all jarring or disturbing, but was deeply moving and awe-inspiring. I thought how privileged I was. The O’Donnells [proprietors of one of the Catholic funeral homes in Salt Lake City] were quite overcome with the honor of it all and expressed a deep bond with their great-great grandfather who buried the bishop in 1915. All in all, an historic, thought-provoking and humbling experience.”