>>>This is a book I want to read! An honor as a new Deacon to have assisted him at Mass many times in Abita Springs, LA at St. Jane de Chantal Church and overwhelmed at his attendance at my, and my classmates, ordination!
Book Review: Archbishop Philip Hannan gets his career down on paper
Published: Sunday, June 20, 2010, 12:00 PM
Bruce Nolan, The Times-Picayune
Among Catholic bishops and archbishops around the country, Philip Hannan stands as something of -- well, perhaps legend is too strong. But a distinctive figure, certainly -- at 97, a remarkable and sharply defined personality jutting out from the institutionalized profile of modern American Catholic bishops.
Among them, he is revered for many things: his ability (many wish they had it) to engage in blunt talk without blowing himself up, his quick analytic gifts nicely married to total immunity from either internal doubt or external criticism, and the sheer breadth of his 71-year career from parish assistant to archbishop -- especially his service as a combat paratroop chaplain at the Battle of the Bulge.
Now Hannan has got that career down on paper: He recalls his years as a young seminarian in pre-war Rome watching Hitler and Mussolini dominate Europe; his weeks with the frozen GIs of the 82nd Airborne repelling Hitler's last offensive through the Ardennes; his 1950s back-channel relationship with Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy, who chose Hannan, by then the auxiliary bishop of Washington, D.C. as a private sounding board to determine the Catholic church's expected response on various issues; his participation in the church-shaking Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, and his supervision of the Archdiocese of New Orleans from the aftermath of Hurricane Betsy, through years of suburban growth, occasional racial tension, the absorption of thousands of Catholic South Vietnamese refugees, and finally, near the end of is 24-year tenure, its hosting of Pope John Paul II on a three-day visit in 1987.
Part of the book has already made news. He discloses a private note to him from 34-year-old Jacqueline Kennedy struggling with both faith and grief less than a month after her husband's assassination. She is not sure she believes in heaven, she confides in anguish, unsure she will ever see her husband again.
And in the landscape of a seven-decade career the Hannan memoir yields other items:
His belief that Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy's assassin, did not act alone;
His disclosure that the president was booked to attend daughter Caroline's catechism class on the day that turned out to be the president's funeral;
That John Paul arrived in New Orleans in 1987 completely exhausted, was awakened on his plane on arrival and slept through the limousine ride from the airport to Hannan's residence at Notre Dame Seminary. (The pope thereupon rallied and worked a killing schedule.)
That, at 92, Hannan rode out Hurricane Katrina by himself, sleeping alone on the floor of his Metairie office for four days before departing to wave himself through roadblocks to the North Shore, and
His assertion that Catholic politicians who support abortion rights are already excommunicated -- done, no bishop's decree necessary -- a canonical interpretation which, let it be said, is not widely held among his colleagues.
All his life Hannan was famous among his brother bishops as an international hawk who seemed to read the Gospel and its demands for peace differently than they.
Hannan had helped liberate two Nazi concentration camps as a chaplain. He had no tolerance for what he thought to be weakness in the face of armed evil. And for years it seemed that his refusal to join his brother Catholic bishops in denouncing the American nuclear arsenal, and his lonely support for the 1991 invasion of Iraq, were founded on his World War II experiences.
Turns out, it was deeper than that.
Phil Hannan was the son of an impoverished Irish immigrant who not only survived, but prospered in America. At the Hannan dinner table sat seasoned believers who felt "that when it came to seizing opportunities afforded by this wonderful country, you did whatever it took -- and took whatever resulted -- without complaining. It was action that mattered."
With respect to bullies for instance, the Brothers of Mary at Hannan's elementary school taught a code of charity-with-knuckles: "Defend the little guy and beat the devil out of the big."
Here too, are on display the roots of Hannan's famous, headlong, damn-the-torpedoes executive style. In his youth, a high school teacher tries to temper Hannan, urging him, "Hannan, forget every third idea."
The Hannan memoir presents itself as a memory tour de force. From the war years, for instance, he proffers his room number in chaplain's school, the name of a price-gouging drug store in Miami Beach, the name of every commanding officer and jeep driver he encountered, and one particular GI who applied to him for permission to marry: Szuszczewicz.
This is ummistakably Hannan's take on events and the people he worked with. New Orleanians may be interested in his assessment of local people he worked with for a quarter of a century, (although they will have to find the references without benefit of an index.) He calls 'em as he sees him.
He is generous with familiar New Orleans figures like Superdome founder Dave Dixon and Xavier University President Norman Francis. He credits former Moon Landrieu's civil rights record, but is still miffed that Landrieu did not take his advice and call in Hannan's old outfit, the 82nd Airborne, to engage Mark Essex, the infamous Howard Johnson sniper, in 1972.
His three living successors get little sustained attention (although there are pictures) and his treatment of former Mayor Dutch Morial (and their "roller coaster" relationship) is brief and rather uncomplimentary. Morial's wife, Sybil, fares better.
Peter Finney Jr., who with co-author Nancy Collins, a Hannan cousin and New York-based free-lancer, helped reshape Hannan's manuscript, says Hannan aided himself with contemporaneous notes, saved correspondence and other resources. Yet it also heavily dependent on memory. And Finney says nearly every fact he was able to check turned out to be as Hannan remembered -- although sharp-eyed readers will find a few small errors.
Hannan once said in an interview that he never felt more a priest than when he was anointing wounded and dying GIs in the snows of Belgium, and never more a bishop than when, 43 years later, he stood with John Paul on the elevated outdoor altar looking out at a crowd of more than 100,000 assembled for Mass at the New Orleans Lakefront.
Both are in this memoir, with still more from a career we likely will not see again.
No comments:
Post a Comment