Spotlight Archive
On August 15, 1909, the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City was consecrated. The occasion marked the culmination of a pioneer period and the beginning of a new stage in the Catholic Church’s presence in the state of Utah.
Better known in religious history as the home of Mormonism, Utah possesses a proud Catholic heritage as well. Like much of the American West, the thirty-second state was first Spanish and then Mexican territory, and saw missionary activity by Franciscan friars. Padres Silvestre Velez Escalante and Atanazio Dominguez, from their base at Santa Fe, explored and evangelized in what is now Utah during the year 1776. The journey's historian summarized their effort as "one of the great exploring expeditions of North American history, made without noise of arms and without giving offense to the natives through whose country they had traveled."
While still Mexican territory, in 1847, the Salt Lake area became home to thousands of Mormons fleeing persecution in the east, establishing the state’s dominant religious group. After its incorporation into the United States following the conclusion of the Mexican-American War, Brigham Young was appointed governor of the U.S. Territory of Utah. It became a state in 1896.
After the missinonary journey of Escalante and Dominguez, the historical record is silent on Catholic activity in Utah until the career of Jesuit Pierre de Smet. De Smet passed through the Salt Lake region on his way to Wyoming in 1846. The following year he met Brigham Young and his followers near Council Bluffs, Iowa, and described to them the Utah territory in which they would soon settle.
Franciscan Bonaventure Keller said Mass in 1859 at Camp Floyd near present-day Lehi. Father John Baptist Ravary visited Salt Lake City in 1863, but found no Catholics beyond those among the federal troops stationed there. Miners seeking riches in the territory's metal deposits began arriving that year, and three years later Fr. Edward Kelly offered the first Mass in the city, June 29, 1866. Catholic railroad workers worshiped in Utah in the same decade, helping to construct the means for tying the state more closely to the rest of the nation: the Transcontinental Railroad, ceremoniously completed at Promontory Point in 1869.
In 1868, Colorado and Utah were formed into a vicariate apostolic, Joseph Machebeuf becoming bishop of the new ecclesial territory. He appointed James Foley as Salt Lake’s first resident priest, serving the handful of Catholics who had settled in the area. In 1869, Foley built the first Catholic church in the state; it was destroyed and rebuilt in grander style by Foley’s successor, Patrick Walsh, who placed the parish under the patronage of St. Mary Magdalene. Meanwhile, jurisdiction for the church in Utah was shifted from Machebeuf in Denver to Archbishop Alemany in San Francisco.
Walsh’s successor, Fr. Lawrence Scanlan, inherited the largest parish in the United States—containing some 800 Catholics. He began the process of building up the church in Utah, which grew slowly as settlers were attracted from the east and west by the promise of the state’s mineral wealth. Scanlan was named the first bishop of Salt Lake City when that see was erected, January 27, 1891. Almost 160,000 square miles at the time, the diocese was shrunk to its present size when Nevada was detached as the Diocese of Las Vegas in 1931. Ten years after the founding of the Salt Lake diocese, parishioner Thomas Kearns was elected to the US Senate. His home later became the state governor's residence.
Bishop Scanlan invited the Sisters of the Holy Cross from Indiana, who brought women’s religious life to Utah. They established schools at Ogden, Park City, and Eureka. In 1885, Scanlan founded All Hallows College in Salt Lake City; the Marist brothers took charge of it in 1889. In 1910 the Sisters of Mercy moved into the state, staffing charitable institutions such as hospitals and orphanages.
Scanlan broke ground for the new cathedral in 1899, and Cardinal James Gibbons visited in 1909 to dedicate it. In 1898, the region’s Catholic periodical, the weekly Intermountain Catholic was founded.
Over the course of the twentieth century, the population of the state of Utah grew gradually—and with it the region’s Catholic church, counting 40,000 members by 1960. Benedictine sisters arrived in 1944, Trappist monks came to Huntsville in 1947, and discalced Carmelites settled in the state five years later. Prominent American Catholic poet and educator Sister M. Madeleva Wolff served stints as principal of the Holy Cross sisters’ Sacred Heart Academy in Ogden and St. Mary-of-the-Wasatch College in Salt Lake City. Sacred Heart alumna Phyllis McGinley won a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry in 1961.
The Cathedral of the Madeleine was renovated in the 1990s and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A total of nineteen religious congregations serve the diocese, and more than 100,000 Catholics now reside in Utah; among them a growing number of Hispanic Catholics. The laity, religious, and priests of the diocese of Salt Lake build on a unique history of Catholic encounter with the mountains, deserts, and peoples of the American West.
©2009 CatholicHistory.net. Posted August 4, 2009.
Photos, from top: St. Mary Magdalene Church, Salt Lake City, courtesy of Utah State Archives and Utah State Historical Society; Cathedral of the Madeleine, © 2005 CatholicHistory.net; Bishop Lawrence Scanlan; All Hallows College; Cardinal Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) visiting Salt Lake City, 1936; all courtesy of Utah State Archives and Utah State Historical Society.
Sources and Further Reading
Bernice M. Mooney, "Catholic Church in Utah,"
