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Monsignor Alfredo Giovannoni, who arrived in Carbon County in 1917 to minister to Catholics throughout eastern Utah, was known for his stylish dress.

By Gary Topping

Archivist, Diocese of Salt Lake City 

One characteristic of the Diocese of Salt Lake City is its vast size – all 84,916 square miles of the state of Utah – which makes ministering to those far-flung Catholics an arduous task. The bishop and rural priests are on the road for many days each year to nurture Catholicism in some very remote places. One of those places is southeastern Utah, where the diocese has maintained at least a sporadic ministry long before Saint Joseph Parish was created in Monticello in 1938.

One of the first priests to accept the challenge of ministering there was Monsignor Alfredo Giovannoni, whom Bishop Joseph S. Glass, the second Bishop of Salt Lake, sent to Carbon County in 1917. Although his primary pastoral responsibility was at first Helper, and later Price, his territory actually included all of eastern Utah from Vernal to the Arizona border. It was quite an order; in those days roads were just two wheel tracks through the sand, and primitive automobiles offered only dubious advantages over the more common horse and buggy.

Msgr. Giovannoni, a native of Lucca, Italy, had come to the United States as an escort for some young nieces who were rejoining their mother in Wisconsin. While there, Msgr. Giovannoni learned of the ethnically diverse mining communities in Utah and applied to Bishop Glass for permission to minister in them. Although he was as Italian as one could get, Msgr. Giovannoni was a "people person" with an effervescent personality that appealed to everyone, and he proved the perfect priest for those diverse and often fractious communities.

Msgr. Giovannoni’s introduction to southeastern Utah came in the form of a sick call from a dying Irish miner named Pat Meehan in an isolated cabin near LaSal (east of modern Highway 191 between Moab and Monticello). Setting out immediately at 10 a.m. in his fragile automobile, he was on the road the rest of the day. A faulty oil line forced him to abandon the car. Fortunately, in an ecumenical moment, he caught a ride with a Mormon bishop in a horse-drawn wagon while his car was towed to a garage in Moab.

The next day, he administered the sacraments to Meehan and set out for home. Somewhere between Green River and Sunnyside, a huge rainstorm washed out the road. He became stuck and had to spend the night in the car until someone happened by in the morning and towed him out.

Back home, he slept for the next 11 hours, dreaming "of the happiness that the sacraments of our holy religion had given to Pat Meehan of the sagebrush."

Having become aware of those desert Catholics, in 1921 Bishop Glass appointed Father Charles J. McCarthy to travel through the region to survey their numbers and locations and to appraise the problems of setting up a permanent ministry among them.

The report, much too lengthy even to summarize here, was an invaluable document that makes it easy to understand why permanent pastoral care proved to be a long time coming.

Fr. McCarthy’s journey throughout rural Utah was no less colorful than Msgr. Giovannoni’s. While waiting in Moab for his car, which had broken down, to be repaired, he purchased lunch at a mine mess hall from a Welshman named Parks – "a real old time prospector with a lurid faculty for blasphemy." Back on the road to Monticello in his open Buick, Fr. McCarthy encountered a desert thunderstorm that left him "pretty well spattered from head to foot, tired, and sun burnt."

In this manner, digging out of ruts, repairing washed-out road, and skidding almost completely around once, did Catholicism come to Monticello.

Fr. McCarthy’s report, though a promising start, was intimidating in its recital of the difficulties of ministering in that remote part of the diocese. Over almost two decades, Bishop Glass and his successors sought in vain to find diocesan priests or religious orders willing and able to undertake the task. Only in 1935 did the Catholic Extension Society provide funds for construction of a small church in Monticello, and in 1938 Father John Sanders became the first resident pastor. Catholicism had at last found a permanent home in southeastern Utah.