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Show UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY Tabernacle choir, whose day job as deputy U.S. mineral surveyor required travel among the mining centers of the region. Learning of their mutual love of choral music, the two struck up a friendship. As that friendship developed, Macfarlane boldly offered the use of the St. George Tabernacle and his choir if Scanlan would bring the Silver Reef Catholics to St. George and present Mass there. The president of Macfarlane’s Mormon stake turned out not to be as ecumenically minded as the choir director, but the higher-ranking Erastus Snow, an LDS apostle, intervened and ordered the service to be held.28 The date of May 25, 1879, was selected. What did Scanlan, Macfarlane, and their two churches hope to gain through such remarkable collaboration? Only tentative answers are possible, and even then only by reading between the lines of the sources. Although Scanlan reportedly told Macfarlane he had “neither a church nor a choir” in Silver Reef, he exaggerated at least in part, for the church had been completed in time for Easter Mass on April 13.29 And surely Scanlan could have cobbled together at least some sort of choir out of the substantial Catholic population. More likely, he recognized that the tabernacle was a much finer structure than his little clapboard church, and that its choir, in the tradition of Mormon choral music, would far outdo anything he might assemble. Further, Scanlan did not abandon the quixotic quest for converts among the Mormons until the following decade, and he apparently regarded the St. George performance as an opportunity to disseminate sound doctrine. On the Mormon side, Snow and Macfarlane might have seen it as an opportunity to show off the new tabernacle, which the LDS church had dedicated three years earlier in 1876, and its well-trained choir. On a darker note, the historian Juanita Brooks speculates that the Washington County Mormons might have been looking for some goodwill in their attempts to live down the grisly Mountain Meadows Massacre, which occurred only a few miles away—especially since the 1877 execution there of John D. Lee would have revived memories of that ghastly episode.30 In any case, the service did take place. Scanlan previously claimed to have celebrated Mass in Mormon churches, but this is the only documented case of such an event. The liturgy was a Mass in D by a composer named Peters. Legend has it that Scanlan made repeated trips to St. George to help rehearse the choir in the meaning and proper pronunciation of the Latin. Although the St. George Mormons would have far outnumbered the contingent of Silver Reef Catholics, Scanlan carefully bridged understanding between the two groups by taking a few moments to explain the vestments he would wear, as well as including, perhaps in a homily or in a lecture 28 L. W. Macfarlane, Yours Sincerely, John M. Macfarlane (Salt Lake City: The Author, 1980), 153–59 Ibid., 155. 30 Jerome Stoffel to [Paul S.] Kuzy, December 30, 1987, Diocesan Archives. See also, Michael N. Landon, “‘A Shrine to the Whole Church’: The History of the St. George Tabernacle,” Mormon Historical Studies 12 (Spring 2011): 125–48. 29 242 |
