By Gary Topping–
Like Mike O’Brien (oops, I should be calling him “Michael”), I have fond memories of Monsignors Mannion and Mayo. (See Alpha days and Omega times–a Tale of Two Priests.) My long tenure as a member of the Cathedral of the Madeleine parish began before the rectorship of Msgr. Mannion and lasted well beyond the reassignment of Msgr. Mayo. They were, then, each in his own time, my pastors, and I am certain that if I could dredge my memory deep enough I could fill the pages of The Boy Monk for several weeks with my recollections.
Msgr. Mayo became rector only slightly before I went to work at the Pastoral Center as diocesan archivist, and I actually knew him better as a co-worker than as a parishioner. But we became fast friends. In my mind I can still hear his booming voice in the hall outside my office before he bounded through the door and sat down to “talk history” for a while. And he really knew his history. In addition to growing up in the diocese and attending the Cathedral School in the very building that became the Pastoral Center, he was an avid reader of Utah Catholic history, often bringing one of Bernice Mooney’s books into the confessional to read between penitents on a Saturday afternoon. I hope those frequent visits provided for him a respite from the pressures of running a large parish and even keeping that ancient building from falling down. They were certainly an education for me.
My most vivid memory of Msgr. Mannion concerns the Good Samaritan program. Begun by a previous Cathedral rector, Msgr. William H. McDougall, Jr., the program provided free sack lunches at most hours of the day to anyone who knocked on the rectory door, no questions asked. When Mannion took over, he expanded the program immensely, turning it into a mini-social services agency of its own, though which people could get not only lunches but also clothing, toiletries, vouchers for prescription drugs, gasoline, lodging and virtually anything that people down on their luck might need.
In the course of that expansion, he incurred the wrath of Salt Lake City Mayor DeeDee Corradini, who objected to the sometimes unsavory elements the program was bringing into the Avenues residential district. After I went to work at the Pastoral Center, I learned that Corradini had a point: very often the bulletin board had a photograph of some dangerous character whom we were admonished not to engage and to call the police, and eventually the Vicar General decided to put the whole building under lockdown except for the C Street door to keep those people from pestering or threatening the staff.
But Mannion was resolute, maintaining with the authority of the Letter of St. James among others, that caring for peoples’ bodily and material needs was an authentic obligation of Christianity. Corradini did not necessarily disagree, but pointed out that there is a place for everything and that the Avenues district was not zoned for social welfare services. Mannion’s response was devastating, that the Avenues was zoned for churches and therefore was zoned for social services.
Few of us Cathedral parishioners were aware that this battle was taking place, so Mannion took the occasion one Sunday, during the announcements at the end of Mass, to detail the entire conflict for us and to alert us to the fact that this vital social program was being threatened. He did it in his characteristically quiet way, but I remember being so inspired and fired up by his presentation that I wanted to stand up and shout.
Being the devoted Catholic that I am, though, I restrained myself until I got home that afternoon. Before my passion subsided, I sat down and wrote a letter to Mayor Corradini, chastising her for her evident lack of compassion for the poor and observing that she certainly had not learned that at the knee of her father, the Rev. Horace McMullin, a prominent and highly respected Protestant clergyman. I made a copy for Msgr. Mannion and enclosed a check for the Good Samaritan program. When he opened his mail later in the week, Mannion reached for the telephone and called me, thanking me for the check and for my support. At the time, I was even more of a nobody in the Cathedral and the diocese than I am today, and getting a call from the Cathedral rector was heavy stuff.
There is a crazy coda to this story. Unthinking as to the consequences, I included in the letter my return address, which at that time was in Emigration Canyon. Corradini evidently took one look at that and tossed the letter into the garbage: Emigration Canyon is in Salt Lake County, not in Salt Lake City; thus, I was not a constituent of hers and she had no obligation to pay any attention to anything I said. I never heard a word from her,
But the Good Samaritan program continued to exist.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
