Builder's Death

In the Villa, a house at the $13,000,000 Seminary of St. Mary's of the Lake in Mundelein, Ill., late last Sunday afternoon, two cassocked churchmen worked over the draft of a speech. One was Most Rev. Bernard James Sheil, Auxiliary bishop of Chicago, good friend of labor, good friend of youth, founder of the Catholic Youth Organization. The other was the godfather of the town, His Eminence George William Cardinal Mundelein, Archbishop of Chicago, great liberal of the Church, great builder and money-raiser for the sprawling archdiocese he had headed for nearly a quarter of a century. The speech over which they worked was to be delivered next evening at a C. Y. O. convention in Cincinnati. Bishop Sheil was to speak it, but it represented the thoughts of Cardinal Mundelein. His thoughts were of war & peace.

With alarm the Cardinal perceived that great masses of citizens both Catholic and Protestant were being stirred on the neutrality issue by the persuasive baritone of Royal Oak, Mich.--Rev. Charles Edward Coughlin, with whom Cardinal Mundelein had crossed swords publicly in the past. The Cardinal knew that the Vatican, neutral in the War, was concerned about U. S. neutrality. Bishop Sheil had just returned from a visit to Rome, had hotfooted to Washington for a two-hour lunch in the White House. It then became known that his C. Y. 0. speech would be broadcast and that it would uphold the Administration, denounce Father Coughlin.

The draft of the speech approved, Cardinal Mundelein dined, meditated, went to bed. Next morning, a secretary entered the Cardinal's bedchamber to awaken him for his devotions. But in his sleep, heart disease had brought death, as to all men, to George William Mundelein, 67.

Chicago had loved Cardinal Mundelein ever since it gasped, one morning in 1916, to learn that, at the first public dinner given for him, an anarchist cook had poisoned the soup, laid most of the 300 guests low--but not the new Archbishop.

When he returned from Rome in 1924 with a red hat, 50,000 Catholics paraded to welcome' him. And on each of two later occasions--an international Eucharistic Congress in 1926, a celebration in 1034 of his 25th anniversary as bishop--1,000,000 people joined him in public acts of devotion.

In the sorrow and confusion after the death of the West's first Prince of the Church, Bishop Sheil had a quick decision to make--whether or not to cancel his speech. In a stroke of astute churchmanship, he resolved to deliver it as Cardinal Mundelein's political and ecclesiastical testament, a summing up of the liberal views which had made the Cardinal a personal friend of President Roosevelt and a public friend of the New Deal.

To the C. Y. 0. and the U. S., Bishop Sheil said: "What he [Cardinal Mundelein] authorized me to say was controversial--something he would not have wanted to have said for him--except that he felt that others had created a situation which might be mistaken to compromise the position of the Catholic clergy toward the Congress of the United States, and toward his great friend and admiration, the President. ... It constitutes disrespect for wisdom and experience, and is a positive impediment to our democratic process, deliberately to bludgeon Senators and Congressmen with letters and telegrams which can only be counted and not read. . . .

"The devising of a course of action in such circumstances is the gift of a statesman . . . and not something to be divined by emotional charlatans who have become statesmen overnight. . . . No man can be both honest and intelligent if he professes to want to safeguard peace in America at the same time he preaches the kind of racial hatred which has destroyed peace everywhere else in the world. . . ."

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