By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Some people who live in Utah, but do not belong to the predominant Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, feel ostracized. I’ve been lucky to have the opposite experience.
Despite being part of a very small group here—Irish Catholics—I’ve known nothing but friendship from my Latter-day Saint neighbors. Perhaps that’s due to good karma flowing from a wonderful but little known interfaith act of kindness done 145 years ago this month.
Three remarkable but very different men—Erastus Snow, John Macfarlane, and Lawrence Scanlan—are responsible.
In the late 1800s, Erastus Snow—originally from Vermont and one of the first two Latter-day Saint pioneers to enter the Salt Lake Valley—was an apostle of his church. He also was in charge of its growth and operations in Southern Utah and the Four Corners area.
A fiery and eloquent speaker and defender of the faith, Snow spearheaded several Church missions all over the world. He also oversaw construction of the historic and beautiful St. George Tabernacle and Temple, which opened in 1876 and 1877.
At Snow’s request, John Macfarlane, a Scottish immigrant and skilled choirmaster, brought beautiful music to those two Latter-day Saint houses of worship. He also wrote what likely is the best known Latter-day Saint Christmas hymn, “Far, Far Away, on Judea’s Plains”.
As a musician, no doubt Macfarlane understood the phrase “starving artist” all too well, and so to pay the bills and keep a roof over his family’s head, he also worked as a surveyor. In 1879, that surveying job brought Macfarlane to Silver Reef, a booming mine town 20 miles northeast of St. George.
While there, Macfarlane met a fellow immigrant and churchman, an Irish-born Catholic priest named Lawrence Scanlan. Scanlan had been ministering to his flock in Utah for six years.
The priest was responsible for a small but far-flung group of Catholics in the Utah Territory, which included Nevada. Eventually, Scanlan would serve as first bishop of the Diocese of Salt Lake City.
In 1879, however, Scanlan was trying to build a church, a school, and a hospital for miners in Silver Reef, almost 300 miles away from his home base up north. Although a devout Catholic, Scanlan was comfortable living and working among the Latter-day Saints.
In a 2013 Utah Historical Quarterly article about early Catholic-Mormon relations, my friend Utah historian Gary Topping recounted one Scanlan report about his unique ministry:
“We sometimes visit exclusively Mormon towns, and they receive us kindly and hospitably, offering us the use of a hall and even of their own churches, wherein to say Mass and hold other services. I visited some of those places lately, and preached night and morning to large and attentive audiences. After the services, many came to me and expressed themselves well pleased with our doctrines, asked me several questions and invited me to come again.”
Perhaps due to their common North Atlantic heritage, or maybe because of their mutual interest in ecclesiastical matters, Scanlan and Macfarlane became regular dinner companions when they both were in Silver Reef. A friendship formed.
One evening, Scanlan bemoaned how he had no church choir in Silver Reef and barely even a church. (St. John’s Catholic Church did not open there until later in 1879.) Macfarlane made a mental note.
While back in St. George, Macfarlane told Snow about Scanlan’s plight and suggested they offer the Tabernacle as a venue for Mass with musical support from Macfarlane’s Mormon choir. Snow agreed, and then so did Scanlan.
The unusual Mass was scheduled for May 25, 1879. The Intermountain Catholic has reported the Mormon choir was to sing the “Mass in D” by composer William Cumming Peters, copies of which they ordered specifically for the event.
Macfarlane’s group practiced regularly, and even learned some Latin so they could sing with greater precision and accuracy. According to Topping, “Scanlan reportedly traveled repeatedly to St. George to train the choir in proper pronunciation of the Latin text.”
When the big day arrived, hundreds of Catholics and Latter-days Saints packed the Tabernacle for the service. Either Snow or Macfarlane invited Scanlan to speak to the assembly during or just after the Mass. Topping called it “a remarkable ecumenical gesture.”
A correspondent named “Amram” described the event in a letter published in The Deseret News on June 2, 1897. The letter praised Scanlan as “a man of considerable information” and someone who “considering his faith, appears to be liberal in his views.”
Some 140 years later, in May 2019, Catholics and Latter-day Saints gathered again in the St. George Tabernacle to remember and celebrate the event. Scanlan’s episcopal heir, Bishop Oscar Solis, attended as did Stephen Snow, then the Latter-day Saint Church Historian as well as the great great great grandson of Erastus Snow.
Snow told the story of Alfredo Filippella, a Catholic organist in Italy, who’d heard about the 1879 St. George Tabernacle Mass and wanted to repay the favor. In 2013, Filippella reconfigured his Catholic Sunday church duties so he also could play piano for a nearby small Latter-day Saint congregation which did not have a musician.
“I love how acts of kindness can come back, even 140 years later,” said Elder Snow. So do I. In fact, I’ve seen it firsthand.
My friends, the Trappist monks from the old Huntsville monastery, developed deep bonds with their Latter-day Saint neighbors. My 2021 memoir about growing up at the abbey—Monastery Mornings—tried to explain the palpable sadness in the Ogden Valley when the monks moved away:
“Each year with the thaw of deep winter at the monastery came the warmth of an approaching Easter. The hibernating pasturelands and farms of Huntsville awoke and filled the three forks of the Ogden River with the icy cold runoff of the melting snowpack. More than forty years after my first Easter at the monastery, the usually much-anticipated ritual of seasonal transformation and renewal felt differently. It was 2017, and the last time the monks and the saints would together welcome spring to the mountain valley they had shared for as long as anyone could remember.”
I am working on another book about this unique interfaith friendship. Among other stories, it tells how people raised as Latter-day Saints are preserving the old monastery property and its agricultural legacy.
Dave Noyce and Peggy Fletcher Stack of the Salt Lake Tribune’s Mormon Landpodcast were the first journalists to interview me about Monastery Mornings. Since then, I’ve spoken to almost as many Latter-day Saint book clubs as Catholic gatherings about my book and the monks.
Several of my closest colleagues at my old law firm, Jones Waldo Holbrook & McDonough, were devout Latter-day Saints. One of them named Lee Curtis—who like Stephen Snow went on to serve as Church Historian—was the first to comfort me when a beloved fellow partner died and has been a good friend ever since.
Later, I watched at the Catholic church funeral for a founder of that same law firm—Don Holbrook—as his old friend Thomas Monson, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, tearfully blessed Don’s body before its final journey.
Vickie Smoot, my legal assistant and friend for almost four decades, came to my Catholic wedding. A few years later, I joyfully attended a send-off before one of her children went on an Latter-day Saint mission.
I took a client (George Myers, another Latter-day Saint) to the Notre Dame/BYU football game in Provo several years ago. We sat in the ND section, and despite proudly wearing his BYU jersey, George made friends with all the Irish fans surrounding him.
Finally, I travelled to the East Coast with yet another Latter-day Saint client, Kent Streuling, to attend a conference together. We flew on separate routes.
My flight was delayed and changed and did not arrive until about 2:00 a.m. We had no cell phones back then to communicate or coordinate, but Kent was at the airport to pick me up anyway, with a big smile on his face.
Most of these wonderful saints probably did not know, at least until now, about the story of the 1879 St. George Tabernacle Mass. Yet, they instinctively channeled its essential meaning—love your neighbor as yourself.
Their spiritual ancestors Erastus Snow and John Macfarlane would be proud. And so would Lawrence Scanlan.
The Utah Irish Catholic priest concluded his St. George remarks 145 years ago with these words: “I think you are wrong and you think I am wrong, but this should not prevent us from treating each other with due consideration and respect.”
I wish we’d hear that message a lot more often today.
(The Salt Lake Tribune also published a version of this article on May 11, 2024.)
*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.
