The Archbishop Wore Combat Boots. Nancy A. Collins
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bad diagnosis. Anyway, be grateful to God for the cure.” I agreed.
In the hectic first year after the conquest of Poland, Myron C. Taylor, President Roosevelt’s personal representative to the Vatican, hosted a special banquet at the North American College at which there were several special guests, including United States Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles and a representative of the Holy Father. There were various rumors about the nature of the event, and later it was learned that it was a last-ditch effort by the Pope to end the war.
It was obvious from the very animated conversation among the special guests, who disregarded their food, that some unusual proposal was being discussed. No explanation was ever offered about the nature of the banquet meeting, but eventually it became known that the papal entreaties were in vain. The reason given for the unusual site of the meeting was that the College was neutral territory, neither Italian nor Vatican.
I stayed in Rome until May 1940. The last few weeks of class were very hectic. Rumors circulated of a new campaign by the Nazi forces to increase the military tension, and I studied mightily to pass my forthcoming exams for my licentiate in theology. The Nazis finally opened their Blitzkrieg against Belgium and France, to the dismay and shock of the rest of Europe.
At that point, Secretary of State Cordell Hull had notified everyone that the United States could no longer guarantee the safety of its citizens in Italy after June 1940, and he gave a final, stern warning to leave the country. Exams were hurriedly prepared. Bishop Hayes, the rector, had anticipated this emergency and had been gathering cash to help any seminarians who didn’t have the money on hand to secure boat passage back to America on the S.S. Manhattan. Italy was desperate for American currency, and even those seminarians who had bought their tickets with Italian lira were told they had to buy new tickets with American dollars. This gave me a problem. I had received a $50 gold piece at the time of my ordination from a member of our family. Now I had to dispose of it, and so I went to the bank, presented it to the teller, who immediately bounced out of his chair and took it to the manager’s office. The manager came out and locked the door of the bank. It was illegal in Italy to hoard gold coins. Nevertheless, the manager was delighted to arrange an exchange and did so. I received for the gold piece $500 in Italian currency.
I believe the vice rector may have stayed behind temporarily at the College to keep an eye on the building. But after war broke out officially, the Italians converted the seminary into an orphanage, which I was finally able to visit toward the end of the war in 1944.
The only difficulty in the College’s evacuation plans involved an Italian-American seminarian born of Italian parents in Italy. The Italian authorities had sent him a notice that he should report for military service, which, of course, he had no intention of doing. The only alternative was to sneak him onto our boat in Genoa, the S.S. Manhattan. Practically the whole college got on that boat. We stayed in a tightly packed group and gave our tickets to the boarding agent, and he did not hold us up to find out where the tickets had come from. The students, priests, and seminarians all slept in the main ballroom, which was converted into a dormitory. The boat was filled with passengers. The transatlantic voyage was uneventful except for the lurking presence of a German submarine that tailed the Manhattan the entire way, leaving us only when we entered the coastal waters of the United States. If the United States had declared war on Germany, the German submarine, under the laws of naval warfare, could have seized our ship. An American woman passenger expressed the sentiments of many on board the Manhattan: “It’s a bit uncomfortable to have so many seminarians aboard, but maybe their prayers will guard us.”
As the Manhattan passed the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor, all the refugees knelt on the deck in prayer to thank God for the safe passage. My parents had been extremely concerned about my safety. No matter how much I had reassured them I was okay, they were getting a different story in the local newspapers, so, of course, they were beside themselves. But my arrival set their minds at ease. My parents and my brother Tom met me at the dock in New York, and we had a tearful reunion. When I later met my youngest brother, Jerry, at Union Station in Washington, D.C., I didn’t recognize him. When I left, he was four or five inches shorter than I; now he was several inches taller!
In New York I prayed with the passengers for the many blessings that God had showered me with over the previous four years — the blessing of my studies in Rome, a growing realization of the freedom and opportunities I had been given to serve God, and the inestimable gift of the priesthood of Jesus Christ.
My life was a gift! My four years in Rome constituted a four-year retreat in preparation for the priesthood, and now I was being called to begin that ministry for God’s people in my home country. Father Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, a nineteenth century French Dominican, summed up my feelings as I embarked on my priesthood in America:
To live in the midst of the world without wishing its pleasures; to be a member of each family, yet belonging to none; to share all sufferings; to penetrate all secrets; to heal all wounds; to go from men to God and offer Him their prayers; to return from God to men to bring pardon and hope; to have a heart of fire for charity and a heart of bronze for chastity; to teach and to pardon; console and bless always. My God, what a life! And it is yours, O Priest of Jesus Christ!
What a supreme gift!
I was also convinced America would be drawn into international conflict. I hoped that I, who had seen some of the terrible sources of the war, would someday be able to serve as a chaplain for our troops, preferably in combat, where chaplains are needed the most.
CHAPTER 5
My First Parish Assignment
As much as I longed to see combat, I first needed to get my clerical feet wet back home. Just before I returned to the United States, Baltimore Archbishop Michael Curley came to Rome to meet with his priests and seminarians studying at the North American College.
“Just because I know your father, don’t expect any favors,” the Archbishop warned me. His bluntness dashed any hopes of requesting an assignment to a predominantly African-American parish, a desire born out of my father’s struggle for equal rights which had instilled in me a love for African-American Catholics. Growing up in Washington, D.C., I knew, firsthand, the terrible history of the Catholic Church as it related to slavery. In southern Maryland, during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, the Jesuits owned thousands of acres and hundreds of slaves, with those who ran the parishes selling slaves and breaking up families, a historical stain on the Church that I can never forget. (This is one of the reasons, in fact, that I have been particularly sensitive to the needs of African-American Catholics throughout my entire priesthood — a wrong, I am happy to say, with God’s grace, that I was able to address in a small way as Archbishop of New Orleans.)
Determined to do my best wherever I landed, I was very pleased when I found out that I had been appointed an assistant to the pastor of St. Thomas Aquinas Parish in the Hampden area of Baltimore, effective ten days after returning to the United States. Knowing nothing about Baltimore, much less St. Thomas Aquinas Parish, I, nevertheless, trusted that God was sending me exactly where I needed to be. As indeed He did.
My ten-day vacation allowed me to celebrate my first Mass in my own parish of St. Matthew’s in Washington, D.C. My family and fellow parishioners, forgetting that I had been doing this since my ordination six months prior, were awed that the “new priest” was so relaxed and calm. What those present that day did not see were my intensely profound, if hidden, feelings — that I, a former altar boy, was now being served at the altar by two of my brothers in the presence of the whole family, a truly overwhelming experience. Afterward, at a cheerful family reunion and party at Norbeck farm, my future pastor in Baltimore, Father Francis D. McGraw, surprised me by showing up.
Rev. Philip M. Hannan blessing a seminarian after his ordination to the priesthood
St. Thomas Aquinas Parish
After a hurried round of visits to relatives where I was inevitably asked my opinion of the war, I reported to Baltimore and the rectory of St. Thomas Aquinas, located