New Dealing Archbishop

The most socially conscious New Dealer in the Roman Catholic hierarchy was raised to archiepiscopal dignity last week in the person of sandy-haired, twinkling-eyed Most Rev. Robert Emmet Lucey. With all the pomp and circumstance of his church's ritual, he was enthroned as Archbishop of San Antonio. The Most Rev. Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, Pope Pius XII's Apostolic Delegate to the U. S., himself installed him. For the dozens of bishops and archbishops, the scores of red-robed monsignori, the hundreds of priests and nuns, the thousands of lay folk who jammed San Fernando Cathedral and the Military Plaza outside, it was a significant as well as a colorful occasion. For it gave the U. S. its first out-&-out New Dealing archbishop since the death of Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago in 1939.

New Dealer Maury Maverick, San Antonio's Episcopalian mayor, hailed the event as "the greatest single fortunate occurrence for San Antonio in a very, very long time." And a letter of good wishes came from another Episcopalian who is also a personal friend--Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Emmet Lucey is no ordinary prelate. Most Catholic bishops have actively opposed the Child Labor Amendment* but he has publicly championed it. Catholics are seldom noted for interdenominational gestures--but at the farewell banquet of his California parish before his departure for the see of Amarillo in 1934, nine of the ten speakers were non-Catholics. Many Catholic conservatives, including some in his new archdiocese, have warred on C.I.O. --but he has backed it from its birth. Most Catholic prelates in the U. S. are isolationists--but Emmet Lucey says: "Isolation is a spiritual, cultural and industrial impossibility. To profess neutrality in the face of international crime is to deny the existence of a moral order. Unprovoked aggression in starting a war and barbaric savagery in conducting it constitute murder and injustice. These do not admit of neutrality." Young for an archbishop (he was 50 last fortnight), Emmet Lucey's appointment is another earnest of the present Pope's desire to give U. S. Catholicism vigorous leaders. Significantly, his seminary classmate in Rome and close friend is the U. S. prelate who seems destined to become the Cardinal Gibbons of this generation: Archbishop Francis Joseph Spellman of New York. The two future archbishops were ordained together on May 14, 1916 in Rome's Church of St. Apollinaris, are both likely to wield an increasing influence.

In San Antonio, Archbishop Lucey will have an ample field to exercise his liking for both social work and liberal thought. His chief problem: the spiritual and material welfare of the great mass of poverty-stricken Mexicans--100,000 of them--in his city's slummy West Side. To them, as to all the 653,000 Catholics in his province, he will present the Church as "the great bulwark of democracy" because it teaches tolerance, charity, the dignity of man and the supreme worth of the individual.

Key to Archbishop Lucey's political philosophy is his belief that the Government's excuse for existing is to protect personal rights. This he says can be achieved only through organization, and one of his great regrets is that "the world has little social organization, no international organization and not enough organization in economic life." Typical sayings of the new archbishop: "There are some who say that if everybody kept the Ten Commandments all would be well with society. Nothing could be further from the truth. Industrial and agricultural relations cannot control or manipulate themselves. . . . Only machinery intelligently constructed can make them work . . . and assure a regime of justice and charity.

"If we as a people continue to neglect God and religion our devotion to the democratic way of life will soon be dissipated. . . . We claim that all men are equal and all have inalienable rights, but the liberty of many millions of our working people has been the freedom to live and labor in servitude. In our own day millions of citizens have demanded that government shall function for the forgotten masses, not merely for the privileged few. They have demanded a new order in legislation and industrial relations. In a democracy these just demands must be satisfied."

* William Cardinal O'Connell, Archbishop of Boston and dean of the U. S. Catholic hierarchy, last fortnight again expressed his hearty opposition to the amendment.

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