By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I’m working on my plan to stroll through the restored Salt Lake Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when it opens for tours about this time next year. I probably won’t be the first of my faith to get inside those historic hallowed halls.
In fact, we Catholics have had several memorable encounters with temples and their environs.
In December 1870, a French missionary named Father Toussaint Mesplie celebrated a Mass in the Old Salt Lake Tabernacle. The adobe building sat on Temple Square where the Assembly Hall now stands.
The Salt Lake Weekly Tribune reported on the unusual event right after it happened. Utah Catholics fondly recalled it in 1926, as part of a commemorative book celebrating our first 150 years in the Beehive State.
Mesplie may have started something because in May 1879, Utah Irish Catholic priest (and later bishop) Lawrence Scanlan celebrated a Mass at the St. George Tabernacle. A Latter-day Saint official had invited Scanlan to use the space after they met in nearby Silver Reef.
Scanlan — known for his cordial relations with his Latter-day Saint neighbors — spoke at the unveiling of Brigham Young’s statue in downtown Salt Lake City on the 50th anniversary of Young’s July 24, 1847, arrival. A half-century later, Catholic Bishop Duane G. Hunt helped dedicate the Young monument at This Is the Place Heritage Park in Salt Lake City’s eastern foothills.
In 2014, just before Latter-day Saint President Thomas S. Monson rededicated the overhauled Ogden Temple in my hometown, general authority Seventy Marlin K. Jensen led several Utah Trappist monks from the old Huntsville monastery through the new house of worship. Jensen, the emeritus church historian, grew up in the Ogden Valley and knew the monks well.
In March 2019, just before the dedication of the first Latter-day Saint temple in Rome, church President Russell M. Nelson met with Pope Francis. The Vatican helped build the temple, in a way, by not opposing it and encouraging Italian construction experts to offer their services.
A prominent Catholic — Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran — told Latter-day Saint apostle Gérald Caussé to call him if there were any troubles getting the Rome Temple built. Tauran — an advocate of interfaith cooperation — even organized meetings between high-ranking Vatican and Latter-day Saint officials about the project.
One of the most interesting Catholic temple encounters, however, dates back to the historic Salt Lake City building that will reopen in 2027. Brigham Young’s brother-in-law — architect Truman Angell — designed it after touring the great Catholic cathedrals of Europe.
Angell (who had a Catholic niece who became a Holy Cross Sister) started the construction in 1853. Like Young (who had a Catholic daughter), Angell died before it was finished.
Before the temple’s formal dedication by President Wilford Woodruff in April 1893, the church invited prominent area gentiles to tour it.
“We had been led in response to numerous applications received from gentiles to decide yesterday that invitations should be sent to a number of gentiles, some of whom had been our bitterest opponents,” apostle George Q. Cannon explained. “Accordingly, at five o’clock last evening, quite a number of prominent outsiders went through the temple, and they were filled with admiration at its beauty and so expressed themselves….We felt that permitting these people to go through would have a good effect upon their minds, as the invitation was so unexpected.”
I have not yet found a guest/invitation list for the April 1893 gentile tours, but I suspect Utah Catholic Bishop Lawrence Scanlan was on it. He may have been the first Catholic to step inside a Latter-day Saint temple.
If he did go, I hope it was as pleasant as my first and only temple visit.
Three decades ago, my friends Gerald and Marlene Biesinger — both devout Latter-day Saints — asked me to take them and their young sons through Salt Lake City’s just-renovated Cathedral of the Madeleine. The century-old cathedral, where I got married, is a Utah landmark, too.
Workers finished it in 1909, with preservation efforts ongoing ever since. Although I’m no expert on the building, I did study theology at the University of Notre Dame and my old friend Father Francis Mannion spearheaded the restoration effort.
I agreed to lead my friends on a tour of the cathedral and hoped I knew enough not to sound too stupid. Thankfully, the Biesingers and their sons were respectful tourists.
The boys were fascinated with the large wooden confessional booths. They also wanted to know all about the little wafers they had seen distributed at Mass.
I skipped the theology talk about transubstantiation. Instead, we had a nice chat about God being part of all our daily lives, as reflected in Catholic Communion and Latter-day Saint sacrament meetings.
A few years later, the Biesingers invited us to join them at the open house for the Mount Timpanogos Temple in American Fork. Church President Gordon B. Hinckley dedicated it in 1996.
During our tour, Gerald playfully threatened to toss me into the baptismal font, a large basin supported by huge stone oxen. I told him to go ahead, because my lawyer soul needed all the cleansing it could get.
Outside afterward, some zealous missionaries correctly sensed we were nonmembers. They surrounded us and enthusiastically asked if we wanted to know more about their church.
I told them I was from Salt Lake City and that Gerald — from American Fork — was my bishop. While they puzzled over the massive boundaries of the unusual ward I had just described, Gerald spirited me away with a smile.
Krister Stendahl, a Swedish theologian and the former dean of the Harvard Divinity School, has articulated three rules for effective interfaith dialogue:
• Let the other define himself/herself.
• Compare equal to equal, not one’s positive qualities to the negative qualities of the other.
• Find beauty in the other so as to develop what he called “holy envy.”
So many of us fail to respect, appreciate or even experience the beauty of religious diversity, of the many paths people walk in search of God and the meaning of life. I am grateful that, with just a couple of lovely tours, the Biesingers showed me exactly what Stendahl meant.
I hope to feel that holy envy again about this time next year after I secure and use yet another temple tour ticket.
After all, ‘tis a fine Irish Catholic tradition to visit and pay respects at the Salt Lake Temple at least once every 134 years.
(The Salt Lake Tribune published a version of this story on May 2, 2026.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for Christmas 2026.
