Deacon Owen Cummings to speak at Bishop's Dinner

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SALT LAKE CITY — The Cathedral of the Madeleine is more than just a magnificent edifice gracing the Salt Lake City skyline; it is the heart of a vibrant faith community and a cultural arts icon. Loved by many, its preservation is important to the community as a whole.

To ensure adequate funding for that preservation, after an extensive renovation in the early 1990s, in 2004 the diocese instituted the annual Bishops Dinner: A Benefit for the Cathedral of the Madeline. The benefit raises funds to maintain the cathedral’s beauty  for generations to come and to support its programs.

The cathedral’s beauty can be a surprise to first-time visitors.

“One of our favorite things is when someone who hasn’t been in the cathedral before comes in and is struck with its beauty and its amazing Old World feeling of a Catholic cathedral in the middle of Salt Lake City, Utah,” said Patricia Wesson, the cathedral’s director of development.

The Bishop’s Dinner is the cathedral’s primary fundraiser.

“This dinner keeps the cathedral open,” Fr. Martin Diaz, the cathedral rector, said. “The parish budget goes so far; the Bishop’s Dinner allows us to do those things that a parish church would not do and enables us to do what a cathedral does. We could not be more grateful for the support from the community and the diocese.”

Along with upkeep of the cathedral, the funds that are raised at the Bishop’s Dinner help provide needed improvements. This past year, with funds generated at the Bishop’s Dinner and a grant from the David Kelby Johnson Memorial Foundation, the cathedral was able to install a video streaming and security camera system.

The cathedral is not only the mother church of the diocese; it is an important cultural offering in the city, Wesson said. Along with religious services, the cathedral offers professional arts programming through the Eccles Organ Festival and Madeleine Festival of the Arts & Humanities concert series that are free and open to the public.

“The cathedral is not about a building, it’s about people,” Fr. Diaz said. “Here at the cathedral, which is a gathering place for our diocese to meet, we are also focused on services we are able to do with people: support of the arts, the organ and Madeleine festivals and choir and Madeleine Choir School performances.”

The theme for the 2019 Bishop’s Dinner is “From Stone & Mortar to Heart & Soul.”

“Within this building people put their hearts and souls into it and get back a lot of heart and soul from it,” Wesson said, explaining the theme.  

Deacon Owen Cummings, academic dean at Mount Angel Seminary, will be the guest speaker. Deacon Cummings spent several years in Utah in the 1990s and early 2000s. He was incardinated into the Diocese of Salt Lake City and served as director of education and formation at the cathedral and later as director of the diocesan Office of Diaconate Formation. The author of numerous books about the Church, he is a native of Scotland. He studied theology in Dublin, Ireland, and holds a doctor of divinity degree. In his speech, he will reflect on the meaning of the cathedral, the centrality of the Eucharist and the message that regular worship at the cathedral sends “not only to the Catholics in Utah, but to everybody in Utah who has an awareness of the cathedral,” Deacon Cummings said.

The video that will be shown at the dinner this year will pay tribute to the legacy created by two stalwarts of the Utah Church, brother and sister Alan Lipman and Nancy Giles, who passed away this year. It will also honor the upcoming generation with a profile of the Kevin and Elizabeth Beuhler family.