Utah Catholicism’s Greatest Mystery

By Gary Topping–

Seen any stray stained-glass windows lately?  If you have, let me know immediately, because you may have solved the greatest mystery in Utah Catholic history: what happened to the five windows depicting the Sorrowful Mysteries of the rosary that were originally installed in the apse of the Cathedral of the Madeleine.

Bishop Joseph S. Glass (1915-26), who took over the Diocese of Salt Lake City after the death of our pioneer bishop, Lawrence Scanlan, was as different from Scanlan as two men could possibly be.  Scanlan was a tough-as-nails, stoical Irish frontiersman who had created parishes in two rough western mining towns—Pioche, Nevada and Silver Reef, Utah—as well pastoring the rapidly growing Catholic populations in Salt Lake City, Ogden and Park City.  Glass, by contrast, was an urbane Los Angeleno who disdained living in Scanlan’s cathedral rectory without indoor plumbing and built, instead, a palatial home in the Federal Heights district.  He also thought of himself, however accurately, as a patron of the arts and set out to redecorate Scanlan’s Cathedral which, when he began the project in 1917, was less than a decade old.

Scanlan’s Cathedral had been decorated simply in the Irish colors of green and white which served effectively to set off the lavish colors of the fifteen stained-glass windows created in the Bavarian shop of F. X. Zettler and depicting the mysteries of the rosary: the Joyful Mysteries on the west, the Sorrowful mysteries in the apse, and the Glorious Mysteries on the east.  The windows were, and still are to the extent that they exist today, among the great glories of the Cathedral.  Glass disagreed and considered that Bavarian style of glass work to be outmoded.  A major part of his redecoration consisted of removing the windows in the apse and replacing them with brick and plaster upon which he hired Felix Lieftuchter to paint the huge mural depicting the Crucifixion which we see today.  From the outside of the Cathedral on the north one can still see the outlines of the apertures where the windows once existed.

We do not even know what most of the windows looked like.  There are a number of photographs that include them, but as the purpose of all the photos was to depict the interior features of the Cathedral, not the windows themselves, the camera aperture had to be opened so wide that the sunlight streaming through the windows washes out most of the visible detail.

In a remarkable stroke of good fortune, some years ago Msgr. Joseph M. Mayo, who was at the time the Cathedral rector, traveled to Germany to attend the famous Passion Play at Oberammergau.  While there, he went to Munich to visit the immense stained-glass factory of Gustav Mayer, the firm that had absorbed the Zettler firm that had made our windows.  When he returned, he put me in touch with the president of the company, an enormously generous and helpful person who took time to answer my question if there were any photographs of the windows.  The factory had been seriously damaged by the ravages of World War II, he sadly reported, but—incredibly—black and white photos of two of the windows had survived!  I have included them with this blog posting.

Most of Glass’s redecoration efforts—Lieftuchter’s murals, the wood carvings of Johannes Kirchmayer, and the sale of Scanlan’s original altars to the Diocese of Lake Charles, Louisiana—are adequately documented in the historical record.  But on the ultimate disposition of the windows, the record is not only silent, but in fact misleading.  Discovering their whereabouts, if in fact they still exist, has been an ongoing preoccupation of those of us who have studied the Cathedral’s history over the last half-century, and the answer still eludes us.

At one point during his service as rector of the Cathedral, Msgr. William H. McDougall, Jr. thought he had found the answer.  On a return visit to his native Salt Lake City, Archbishop Robert J. Dwyer of Portland, Oregon told McDougall that the windows had been sold to the Diocese of Boise, Idaho whose Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist was under construction at that time.  McDougall recorded Dwyer’s report in a sort of diary of events at the Cathedral that he had been keeping.  When I chanced across that diary during my service as diocesan archivist, I was immediately on the phone to the Boise cathedral, where I had the good fortune actually to speak to the son of the cathedral architect.  He was able to assure me authoritatively that there were no such windows there.  (My friend Marty Seiner, an equally fanatical student of Cathedral history, actually got into her car and drove to Boise to verify that fact!)

So. . . what happened to the windows, then?  Could they be just stacked up in somebody’s garage?  It’s possible, but it seems unlikely to me that someone would devote all that space to storing five huge windows that he never has a chance to display.  Could they have been sold, if not to the Boise cathedral, to another church that happened to be under construction at that time?  I mustered the energy to research the history of cathedral construction in the western states and found none that began at that time or for a reasonable period afterwards.  But considering the fact that Glass had sold the altars to a diocese as far away as Louisiana means that one would need to research the construction of cathedrals or other large churches throughout the entire country, and no one as yet has tackled such an enterprise.  And if Glass had sold them at all, he surely would have kept receipts as he did for the altars.  Could someone have installed them in a private residence?  Well, surely not all five of them!  And given the fact that they depict the events of Jesus’ Passion like the scourging at the pillar and the crowning with thorns, it seems inconceivable that anyone would want to put such things on daily display.

One encouraging possibility that occurred to several of us is that perhaps the windows were never removed at all, and were simply entombed in a prison of brick and plaster where they were originally installed.  Well, that hope is also dashed.  There is a notebook in Bishop Glass’s papers that contains his hand-drawn map of the apse with the notation “Out” for each of the windows.  Further, the two outer windows were replaced with the windows of abstract design that are presently in the apse.  Finally, during the renovation of the Cathedral in the early 1990s, the bricked-over apertures where the other windows existed were drilled into to see if there were anything inside.  Nothing.

We seem to be left, then, with the depressing possibility that the windows were simply destroyed.  That would be an act of inconceivable artistic nihilism, given the stunning beauty of the ones that remain.  But life on this earth does not always lead to happy endings.

*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.