Who Was James Francis Cardinal McIntyre?

To the Editor:

My Irish is up! Kevin Starr’s glowing review (Book Review, June 22) of Msgr. Francis J. Weber’s biography of the “New York Irishman,” Cardinal McIntyre, causes this New York Irish person to marvel at the ignorance concerning the history of the civil rights struggle in Los Angeles and the role of Catholics.

Like the cardinal, I came to California in the 1950s and received a Catholic education during his reign. When I graduated in 1960 from Immaculate Heart College, I assumed my first position as a teacher at Markham Junior High School in Watts, prepared to act upon the social teachings of my church.

I became deeply involved in the community of Watts, worked with the Student Committee for the Improvement of Watts, participated in the development of an arts center at the Watts Towers with Noah Purifoy and Judson Powell and, following the Watts uprising in 1965, I directed the first teen post at the Watts Towers focused on visual and performing arts.

When civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo was murdered in the South, no priest in Los Angeles was permitted to give the eulogy at a memorial service sponsored by CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), so I was asked to serve in that role to honor a Catholic woman, activist and parent struck down in the fight for racial justice. Father William DuBay, who served an African American parish in Compton and spoke from the pulpit against racial injustice and discrimination, called for the removal of the cardinal for malfeasance in office. He and other archdiocesan priests were harassed, muted, transferred or in some cases driven from their vocation. A Catholic Interracial Council, founded in 1948, was banned and, for many years, Catholics in Los Angeles profoundly committed to human relations and interracial justice were forced to go underground to discuss their concerns.

But young Catholic graduates in the 1960s, like myself, Irish Americans as well as African Americans, believed the time was right to confront the cardinal, not on issues of nuns’ habits but on the habit of racism in our own city and church: excluding minorities from diocesan contracts; discrimination in housing; taking the Mexican American Catholic population for granted; muzzling priests and laity who wanted to open up a dialogue on race among white Catholics. We recognized the powerful position of Cardinal McIntyre to exercise moral and spiritual leadership in concert with the social teachings of our faith on matters of race. We secretly formed our own effort called Catholics United for Racial Equality (CURE) and in August of 1963, we conducted a quiet sit-in at the chancery offices on 9th Street seeking a conference with Cardinal McIntyre to present our proposals. We sat-in praying for his leadership, but the cardinal refused to see us, sending various emissaries, among them the director of cemeteries, into the waiting room with innocuous statements. Finally, on the last day of our sit-in, the cardinal in black appeared before us behind the counter. We could see his cohort Msgr. Benjamin G. Hawkes’ keen profile peering suspiciously through a small peephole in the door.

His Eminence announced our names. We brightened and, putting our rosaries aside, stood up and approached the cardinal. He extended his hand, and we respectfully kissed his ring and stood humbled before him, breathless to hear the good news. Instead, he rambled on incoherently and concluded with “wherever local custom and practice permits, the church always encourages integration and racial harmony.”

My Irish was up again. Where were the references to the social encyclicals we studied and discussed so earnestly in our theology classes in college? Where was the spirit of Pope John XXIII? As quickly as he had appeared, the cardinal retreated before we could engage him. Calling upon the strategies of our contemporaries in the South, I promptly telephoned my friend Paul Udell at Channel 2, and he sent John Hart to interview me in front of the chancery office the following day. And the word went forth across the diocese. (Starr and Weber can check the archives and the newspapers to see that coverage.)

All five of us, four men and myself aided by prayers of social justice from Father DuBay, had sat peacefully in the chancery offices for five days, but on Sunday we were roundly condemned from diocesan pulpits as communists and outsiders who didn’t know what we were talking about. At the time, apparently, the cardinal’s men didn’t realize we were all graduates of Catholic colleges. Many Catholics shunned us and considered our act scandalous and outrageous. But CURE soon found allies in the African American Catholic community.

Leon Aubry of the Jefferson Council saw the interview and contacted us, and CURE, which initially was composed of a small handful of activists, had headquarters in Aubry’s Tonsorial Parlor on Jefferson Boulevard. Aubry introduced us to an entire community who shared our concerns and willingness to act for social justice. While our pastoral leader floundered and remained silent, CURE under Aubry’s charismatic and dedicated stewardship continued the struggle to end discrimination within the Catholic Church and to encourage our church to be a light to the world on issues of race. Aubry organized several more marches and candlelight vigils (one at the cardinal’s residence in Fremont Place off Wilshire Boulevard), which attracted increasing support. One of the positive results of CURE’s militancy was to force the cardinal to deal with more moderate Catholics and to reinstate the interracial council as a Catholic Human Relations group.

This history is not written in some ecclesiastical library but in the minds, hearts and experiences of many Catholics who participated. Weber and Starr must go beyond the confines of diocesan resources to find these stories. I urge Msgr. Weber and Kevin Starr to study more earnestly our L.A. Catholic activist history as it pertains to racial justice; to tell the whole truth; to learn more about faithful Catholics, like Leon Aubry; and to wonder: What if the cardinal had come into town, and while building edifices, had also built upon the strength of Catholics already engaged in interracial justice instead of intimidating them into silence? What if, gentlemen, one of the most powerful prelates in the United States at that time had encouraged his priests to lead and educate their flocks out of racism?

But, no, our experience of this history is that Cardinal McIntyre blocked, blunted and demeaned all those Catholics who were addressing the single most important issue of this American century: racism. It is well and good to laud the cardinal for his construction wizardry, but at what cost? Weber’s book, we’re told, has been simmering for 30 years, and so, too, our city and nation have been simmering with growing racial and ethnic conflict. Today, our president seeks a national dialogue on race. CURE asked Cardinal McIntyre for leadership in the summer of 1963. His Eminence eminently failed to respond. He delayed the progress of justice in Los Angeles, and that reality plagues us to this day.

Let the men of history and Catholic churchmen cease glossing over the real-life experiences of the faithful and go deeper into our Los Angeles Catholic history. Maybe then they’ll realize why many of us do not “love this magisterial biography,” as Starr describes it, but know a different history.

Sue A. Welsh

Los Angeles

To the Editor:

Kevin Starr’s pious review of Cardinal McIntyre’s biography prefers the image of the prelate as a simple parish priest dedicated to the care of souls rather than as a prince of the church and one of the most powerful men in California, who failed to give leadership on racism, the most urgent moral issue of the day.

On the same day I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, D.C., Archbishop Egidio Vagnozzi, the apostolic delegate to the United States, in private conversation with me, insisted that Cardinal McIntyre “had been the source of great scandal and embarrassment to Rome and to Catholics worldwide.” Not only Rome, but other bishops and leaders of other religions had vigorously intervened with Cardinal McIntyre as they watched Los Angeles rush headlong toward civil disaster.

Later, in 1965, the Los Angeles riots stunned the world. As we surveyed the smoldering ruins, the words of the prophet came to mind, “With desolation the land is made desolate, because there is no vision.”

William H. DuBay

Costa Mesa

To the Editor:

As a 1966 graduate of Immaculate Heart College and faculty member of Immaculate Heart High School during what Starr trivializes as a “contretemps” between reactionary McIntyre and the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I witnessed the aggressive response of Cardinal McIntyre to the most intelligent, dedicated and strong women he had ever faced in his life. As Starr notes and Weber chronicles, the cardinal could build a master plan admirably. He had difficulty, as Woody Allen notes about a character in one of his films, with “real live people.”

The people in this case were the Immaculate Heart Sisters, who have never been in what Starr interprets as “a condition of communal meltdown.” Always prescient women ahead of their times politically, theologically and socially, the sisters asked each community member, including me, a layperson, to participate in group encounters to find out in the purest sense what each of our lives was about. The sisterhood is never a place of escape; with those sisters one engaged the world, the City of Angels and the plethora of problems endemic to daily human life. No sheltered convent walls, those.

The unexamined life is not only not worth living, it’s a lie. The sisters, in their deep commitment to Los Angeles, wished to wear the clothes of the people they served, work the long hours of the city and pray when the work was done. Cardinal McIntyre removed them from his schools, saying and writing to the community that without their habits, they were not “real religious” and as such could wear street clothing if they liked. But in his schools, they had to wear their habits. He also believed that they should be in the convent, in habits, praying when bells rang. Hardly a man “aloof from the debate.”

Religious women all over the world embraced the world in a fuller sense in the ‘60s and acknowledged themselves as women of that world. The strictures of traditional religious life met a general and slow demise during that era. Had Cardinal McIntyre opened his mind and heart, the city would not have lost such a precious resource. However, it is interesting that as soon as the sisters were removed from all archdiocesan schools, many were hired by a public school system grateful for their expertise. They continue researching, teaching, nursing and taking on the life of Los Angeles to this day.

I worked with them one summer when they started their work on Blythe Street, the toughest street in the Valley, and we had gang members, children resisting gangs and teens recently released from prison all reading, writing, responding to Picasso and more. The Blythe Street Project continues to grow and needs our support. One should also note that the archdiocese never “lost Immaculate Heart College” because it did not own it. It was an independent college which, thank God, worked beyond the powers of the archdiocese. Ironically, it was at that college that many priests of the archdiocese received their degrees at half the normal cost.

When I participated as a delegate to the Fourth World Conference of Women in Beijing in 1995, as I began my work researching Chinese education, I blessed every magnificent Immaculate Heart sister who had shaped me into the woman I am: one who sees the needs of humankind, works the long hours of the world and prays when the work is done.

Nan Cano

English department, Agoura High School

Westlake Village

To the Editor:

The recent book review by Kevin Starr contains errors that bear correcting. The article implies that the Immaculate Heart Community has gone out of existence. Au contraire!

Born out of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart’s reading of and response to the signs of the times as directed by the Second Vatican Council, the Immaculate Heart Community continues its commitment to the mission of “building bridges in society that foster access of all persons to truth, dignity and full human development” with sister institutions like Alverno High School, Citrus Valley Health Partners, Immaculate Heart High School, Immaculate Heart College Center and La Casa de Maria Retreat Center, as well as through the diverse ministries of individual members and communal efforts such as the Blythe Street Project in Panorama City.

As a member of some 31 years, I can attest that the conflict between the then-Sisters of the Immaculate Heart and Cardinal McIntyre has been misrepresented by the author and the reviewer much in the same way tabloids depict stories of celebrities. While Starr correctly points out that this conflict exemplifies the debate regarding the role of women in the church, the importance of recognizing the inaccuracies, as with everything historical, is necessary for a clear understanding of how we became who we are, and who we are becoming.

In 1995, the regional Leadership Conference of Women Religious, in a ceremony of reconciliation, expressed regret for their congregations’ failure to stand more forcefully with us a quarter of a century earlier and to congratulate us for continuing to serve the church and world with energy and without rancor.

Mary Kirchen

Member, Leadership Team

of Immaculate Heart Community

Los Angeles

To the Editor:

As a former faculty member of the art department at Immaculate Heart College, I’d like to correct Kevin Starr’s statement that the college closed as a consequence of the conflict between Cardinal McIntyre and the Immaculate Heart Sisters, who created Immaculate Heart Community in 1970.

For 10 years, Immaculate Heart College continued as administrators and faculty--until the college closed in 1980. That ended 64 years of excellence in education for men and women, religious and lay--hundreds of whom went on to serve church and society, many as teachers in the L.A. archdiocese, Sister Karen Bacadero for one.

When the college closed, Immaculate Heart College went on to teach at public and private colleges and universities, where they are today--still members of Immaculate Heart Community, which is alive and well, thank you.

Dr. Lenore Navarro Dowling

Los Angeles