Background
Scanlan was born on September 29, 1843 in County Tipperary, Ireland, the son of Patrick and Catherine (Ryan) Scanlan.
Scanlan was born on September 29, 1843 in County Tipperary, Ireland, the son of Patrick and Catherine (Ryan) Scanlan.
Lawrence was educated at St. Patrick's College in Thurles and at the missionary seminary of All Hallows, Dublin.
After studies Scanlan was ordained a priest on June 24, 1868, and adopted by Archbishop Joseph Alemany of San Francisco, who had a rapidly increasing Irish flock. For five years he served as a curate of St. Patrick's Church and at St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco, as pastor in a wild mining-camp at Pioche, Nevada, four hundred miles from a railroad, and at Petaluma, California.
In 1873 he was sent as missionary to Utah with headquarters at Salt Lake City, whose frame chapel had been temporarily served since 1866 by such frontier priests as Edward Kelly, J. P. Foley, and Patrick Walsh.
People at Pioche aided him in building a church, a lean-to shanty, and a hospital. His fame preceding him, he was welcomed by about ninety Catholics in Ogden and Salt Lake City and several hundred who were scattered over his parish of 85, 000 square miles. At first single-handed and then assisted by a small corps of self-sacrificing priests, of whom Denis Kiely became his vicar-general, he labored with astounding activity as vicar-forane, as vicar-apostolic of Utah and a large part of Nevada - consecrated titular bishop of Laranda on June 29, 1887, by Archbishop Patrick W. Riordan - and finally as bishop of the newly created see of Salt Lake City, January 30, 1891.
He established All Hallows College, soon assigned to the Marist Fathers, in Salt Lake City in 1855; founded academies with the assistance of the Holy Cross Sisters at Salt Lake City, Ogden, Park City, and Silver Reef and erected the elaborate St. Mary Magdalene's Cathedral which was dedicated by Cardinal James Gibbons in 1909. He also took an active interest in state and civic affairs and in western immigration.
When the end came through rheumatism and neuritis, he left a well-ordered diocese and secure foundations for the future church.
A true pioneer and builder of the church and Utah state, Lawrence Scanlan laid the foundations of practically every parish in the diocese; he erected over thirty Roman Catholic churches. He built St. John's Hospital at Silver Reef, the large Holy Cross Hospital in Salt Lake City, St. Ann's Orphanage, and the Mary Judge Memorial Home for aged and injured miners. Besides, he established All Hallows College.
Lawrence favored sermons on death, hell, and judgment and strived to make moral reform.
A stalwart, militant man of over six feet in height and two hundred pounds, Scanlan was especially well suited for arduous visitations on horseback through wild mountainous country, for the privations and coarse food of camps and diggings, and for a free, informal association with the hard but generous miners, railroad laborers, and stockmen to whom he became a hero.
People loved him for his integrity, courage, and zeal for the poor and broken-down.
There is no information about his marital status.
