By Gary Topping–
During my long career as a historian, I’ve done a number of what we call “oral history” interviews, where I sat down with a participant in some historical event and recorded his or her answers to questions that didn’t get into the documentary record. Oral history has its risks because people’s memories can be badly unreliable, but it’s a lot of fun and kind of a heady experience because you actually get to create a historical source.
More than once, unfortunately, after I’ve grilled a subject for an hour or more and asked every question I could think of, and after the recorder is switched off and we’re putting on our coats and heading for the door, the subject out of the blue comes up with something more important than anything I got on the tape! I’ve been known to unpack the recorder and resume the interview just to get that tidbit on tape, but other times I’ve just had to let it go. Here’s a story of one of those unexpected bombshells that did NOT get away, though it nearly did.
In 2009, as part of our celebration of the Cathedral centennial, I wrote a new history of the Cathedral and as part of my research I did oral history interviews with Bishop Weigand, Msgr. M. Francis Mannion, and Gregory Glenn. My story concerns the interview with Greg. I had asked him everything I could think of about the renovation of the Cathedral, the new organ, the creation of the Madeleine Choir School and every other issue I could dredge up. I was running out of questions, but I concluded with one I thought I already knew the answer to. To my absolute astonishment, here is the dialogue that ensued:
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 [Utah’s first] Bishop [Lawrence] Scanlan used to be buried downstairs had to be destroyed because some kind of reinforcing beam or pillar had to be installed. 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.
GT: So that was the reason for moving Bishop Scanlan’s crypt upstairs.
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 crozier and his mitre, the old pontifical sunburst gloves, his hands were folded. He was a very tall man, very tall. That was a very striking moment.
There is a ring that he was given when he became the Bishop of Salt Lake City by the Archbishop of Cashel, the Archbishop of Thurles, 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.”
A few months later, after I had regained some of my composure, I ran into Greg in the parking lot and asked him a question I might have thought to ask him during the interview: did anyone photograph the bishop’s remains? As I had anticipated, his answer was no (I expect the Church has some kind of theology of exhumation, since we have a theology of everything else, and photographing remains might be considered disrespectful). He did speculate, though, that if the exhumation were to take place these days when everyone carries a cell phone camera, there would be many photographs of the deceased bishop.
