The Marist Fathers of All Hallows College

Friday, Oct. 03, 2014

(Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of articles featuring the contributions of the men and women of religious orders in the Diocese of Salt Lake City. The series will continue through the Year of Consecrated Life, declared by Pope Francis to run through November 2015.) 

Whatever faults The Right Rev. Lawrence Scanlan, the first Bishop of Salt Lake, might have had, a lack of vision was certainly not among them. His achievements in the late 1800s and early 1900s, especially considering the handful of Utah Catholics he had to work with, are truly remarkable: construction of the Cathedral of the Madeleine and its rectory; Holy Cross Hospital; St. Mary Academy; St. Ann Orphanage; creating and staffing a parish, school and hospital in Silver Reef some 300 miles from Salt Lake City, and the list goes on.  But when, in the 1880s he created All Hallows College for men, he found his ambition had met its match.

When the college opened in 1886, staffed by local priests including Bishop Scanlan himself, it was a runaway success. Bishop Scanlan quickly realized that its burgeoning student body and extensive curriculum were much more than he and his handful of local clergy could handle. He began looking for a religious order that would be willing to take it over, and the search led him to the Society of Mary.

A French order founded in 1816, the Marists had come to the United States in 1863. Devoted to parish work as well as high school and seminary teaching, the Marists seemed an ideal fit for All Hallows College, and negotiations with Bishop Scanlan proceeded apace. Unfortunately, things began to go awry at the very beginning.

Although the Marists purchased the college (at $20,000 less than a third of Bishop Scanlan’s estimate of its value) and provided its faculty, All Hallows, like every Catholic activity in the diocese, was subject to the authority of the bishop. And Bishop Scanlan could not keep his hands off the place. Named for the Irish seminary where he himself had been trained, All Hallows College was Bishop Scanlan’s baby, and the Marists, try as they might, could never quite reach his impeccable standards.

Anyone but Bishop Scanlan would have been delighted by the college’s success: As well as a prep school, it offered a full collegiate curriculum in both academic and commercial courses. In addition to a band and an orchestra, the college fielded no fewer than three football teams and two baseball teams. There was a military emphasis: Students wore uniforms, were called “cadets,” and practiced drill. Partly reflecting the paucity of Catholic colleges and universities in the West, All Hallows drew students from as far away as Nebraska and Montana, its student body grew to as many as 200. Altogether 53 Marist priests taught at the college from 1889-1918.

Much of the poisonous relationship between the bishop and the priests grew from the fact that they never drew up a contract that specified their mutual obligations, relying instead on vaguely worded correspondence during their initial negotiations. Both sides obviously wanted the deal to succeed so badly that they failed to realize that they were talking past each other on some essential points, and that misunderstanding and conflict were inevitable.

One of those points was access to Mass at the college chapel. There are apparently no extant photographs of the chapel, which was reputedly very beautiful. It was within easy walking distance of the Cathedral of the Madeleine, and Bishop Scanlan repeatedly accused the Marists of luring away Cathedral parishioners (and the attendant income, which he badly needed). Bishop Scanlan exploded in 1903 when the Marists took out a mortgage to fund construction of that chapel and a new dormitory, alleging that that mortgage could threaten the very existence of the college they had sworn to maintain.

Other complaints betray a puritanical streak in the bishop. He accused the Fathers of attending an opera in the LDS Tabernacle on Holy Saturday. (They hadn’t).  He refused to allow the athletic teams to participate in intercollegiate competitions, fearing that non-Catholic athletes would corrupt the AHC boys, and, for similar moral reasons, he objected violently to a dance (“Cadet Hop”) held at the college.

All Hallows College failed, ultimately, for fiscal reasons. As more Catholic colleges began to appear in the West, life in the Mormon capital seemed less appealing to potential students than it once had. Also, Bishop Scanlan had made the Marists agree to educate local Catholic day students free of charge (despite the Marists’ objection that many local parents were well able to pay). With the flow of out-of-state students drying up, some three-quarters of AHC students were non-paying Utahns, and the college became fiscally untenable. 

The Marists offered the college back to the diocese after Bishop Scanlan’s death in 1915, but Bishop Joseph S. Glass had inherited Bishop Scanlan’s distaste for them and refused. In 1918 they left Utah and leased the grounds to the Utah National Guard for a drill field. In 1924 they sold it to the State of Utah to be used as an armory, and in 1941 it was demolished.