James Francis Cardinal McIntyre — Sanity through Madness

The death of Pope Francis and subsequent election of Leo XIV by the College of Cardinals has refocused the world’s attention on that select band of men charged with the selection of new Popes. But they have a personal importance for me, since one of them played an important role in helping me maintain my faith the post-Vatican II era of madness. His name was James Francis Cardinal McIntyre, former Archbishop of Los Angeles.

I began High School in the autumn of 1974 at Daniel Murphy High, a Dominican school in Los Angeles. In those dark days for the Church, there were no Tridentine Masses to speak of in the Los Angeles area, and the catechetical quality of Catholic schools in the archdiocese was generally very poor. My brother and I were very fortunate to have parents who knew their Faith, took it seriously, and were not afraid to stand up for it. But while they were good at passing their religion on to us, it was not reflected in either Catholic school or parish.

Walking home one day from in my first month at Murphy, I passed by the hideous St. Basil’s church on Wilshire Boulevard, whose cyclopean shapes my father always said reminded him of “an outpost of Lost Lemuria” — the mythical sunken Pacific Ocean answer to Atlantis. Entering its stark and towering structure, I saw two things immediately — a discrete sign stating “In Residence, James Fracis Cardinal McIntyre,” and a bit further on, a little Mexican child who had fallen on her rear, and was being assisted to her feet by an elderly priest. Walking up to him, I asked, “Excuse me, Father, but does Cardinal McIntyre really live here?” “I hope so,” was the reply. “I’m Cardinal McIntyre.” Thus began a four-year adventure.

After enquiring where I was going to school, the retired Archbishop of Los Angeles asked me a number of questions. The historical ones, such as — “How many elephants did Hannibal take over the Alps?” and “What year did the Roman Empire fall?” I answered to his satisfaction. His mathematical questions were all beyond me. He said, “well, you have a mind! Come see me Saturday at 1PM.” From then until he went into the hospital after a stroke, just before I went to college, I saw him once a week; His Eminence of Los Angeles had a very large influence over me, then and now.

Just who was this man? Born to an Irish Catholic family in New York in 1886, he had been raised in a German neighbourhood — Harlem. He remembered sheep grazing in Central Park; when he was 12 years old, the Spanish-American War broke. Young James McIntyre was confused by the Irish parish priest’s sermon concerning that conflict — “He preached it as a holy crusade. But how could it be that when we’d be fighting fellow Catholics for Protestants?” His Eminence told me that he wished that that pastor had been alive when Franco gave him the Order of Isabella the Catholic: “I’d have invited him to the ceremony!”

Not long after that, his mother died, and his father, a New York City policeman, was wounded in the line of duty. Young James had to go to work to support them both. He found employment as a runner on Wall Street, and put himself through night school at Columbia University and City College. At the time his father died, when the future prelate was 29, he was offered a partnership in the firm for which he worked. Instead, he quit to pursue the priesthood. Ordained in 1921, in 1940 he was appointed auxiliary Bishop in New York. On July 28, 1945, he decided to take a walk through Manhattan — and absent-mindedly grabbed his sick kit. To his horror, the Empire State building was hit by a bomber as he was passing by, and he was surrounded immediately by the dead and dying; Bishop McIntyre was the first priest on the scene as a result. He immediately began administering Extreme Unction to the victims — and never again left his home without his sick kit.

Appointed Archbishop of Los Angeles in 1948, he came to a city that in the grips of a population and construction explosion; the new Archbishop found himself quickly creating new parishes, schools, and other Catholic institutions. In 1953, he was made a Cardinal. He had a great vision for Los Angeles, as THE Catholic city of the 20^th century. To that end, he encouraged every conceivable kind of apostolate to every conceivable state in life. He encouraged Catholic lawyer Joseph Scott in his successful efforts to break legal segregation in the city, at the same time that he backed evangelistic programmes toward the film industry. McIntyre welcomed refuges from the Communist Captive nations, while safeguarding as he could the remains of Los Angeles’ Catholic Spanish heritage. He encouraged the Catholic Labour Institute, and had the Salesians start a high school to train Catholic industrial leaders. When Countess Doheny decided to leave a fortune in Catholic art to the Archdiocese, the Cardinal saw in this the nucleus of a future museum of Catholic culture. But already he had fears for the future, so he convinced the Countess to put a 25 year hold on the actual release of the items after her death — unfortunately, his calculations were incorrect, and when the time ended, his later successor, Cardinal Mahony (of sex abuse coverup fame) sold a 25 million dollar collection for 3 million. In all of this zeal for building and institutional growth, however, he never lost sight of the salvation of souls; having a listed number, he was often called out in the middle of the night to attend random dead or dying — and would then pass their names on to the local pastor to follow up.

But as the 1960s progressed, the Cardinal became increasingly worried by developments. In 1962 he rejected the admonition from Rome to “de-canonise” St. Philomena, declaring that he trusted the opinion of the Cure d’Ars in the matter more than that of Vatican Bureaucrats. At Vatican II (which he attended in hopes of getting the Church’s teaching on Limbo defined and Communism condemned), he argued against changes in the Liturgy and in the Church’s traditional teaching on Church and State and other religions. As the liturgical changes came in, he freely gave indults to individual priests asking to continue with the traditional rites: among the best known of these were Glendora’s Fr. William Trower and San Juan Capistrano’s Msgr. Vincent Lloyd Russell. In 1968, he suffered through the rebellion of the IHM Sisters, of whom this writer and his brother were victims. Finally, in 1970, he retired.

At. St Basil’s, the Cardinal lived the life of a parish priest — although he said the Tridentine Mass on a side altar every day, rather than the New Mass. When I met him, he was fully engaged in the life of the parish — but he undertook the role of my confessor quite naturally. I can never repay the spiritual gifts he gave me; he introduced me to Dom Marmion and gave me my first copy of Christ in His Mysteries and St. Louis Marie de Montfort’s The Secret of the Rosary. He also gifted me with a complete set of the Confraternity of the Precious Blood Booklets. These three presents alone had a great effect on me.

But there was more. His love of the Tridentine Mass was palpable. Fearful that my faith was slipping away from me because of a lack of exposure to decent liturgy, he recommended that I go to Mass on Saturday night and fulfill my Sunday obligation. The next morning I should visit the then Episcopalian but extremely High Church — to the point of Papalist — congregation of St. Mary of the Angels in Hollywood. While the Cardinal rightly knew that I would never leave the Church, this encounter with Anglo-Catholicism had a huge influence on my life, culminating in my entrance, although a Cradle Catholic, into the Ordinariate — of which St. Mary’s ultimately was a pioneer, but tragically did not join (though your prayers for that end are solicited). From that also came my encounter with Fr. Feodor Wilcock, S.J., of St. Andrew’s Russian Catholic Church in El Segundo — and my lifelong fascination with the Eastern Rites.

But beyond that, the Cardinal was a type of man I have always admired — utterly realistic, tough as nails, yet a believer to the core. My father was that way, and it is what I have always aspired to. The Cardinal’s reminiscences of people, places, and things gone by were educational, and gave an insight into the past of New York, Los Angeles, and Rome that I could not get from books. His loyalty to the Faith, despite what he knew of the dark side of its leadership, inspires me to this day. I think it is fair to say that if my work has done anyone any good, His Eminence of Los Angeles deserves a good deal of gratitude for it. To learn more, I heartily recommend Msgr. Fracis J. Weber’s two volume biography of that name. Notable about this well written tome is that the late Kevin Starr’s favourable review of it sparked a controversy that is worth reading itself, for the light Starr sheds on the Cardinal’s character.