Religion: California Cardinal?

The U. S. will soon get a fifth cardinal, according to last week’s Vatican City despatches, to rank with William Henry O’Connell (Boston), Denis Joseph Dougherty (Philadelphia), George William Mundelein (Chicago), Patrick Joseph Hayes (New York City). The candidate in Pope Pius XI’s mind is “from an archdiocese toward the West.” That points to Edward Joseph Hanna, 70, Archbishop of San Francisco.

Westward Trend. The decision to make a western U. S. archbishop a cardinal runs with the current trend of the Roman Catholic organization to strengthen the Church in that region. Thus four years ago the International Eucharistic Congress conducted ‘ its magnificent pageantry at Chicago (TIME, June 21, 1926). Last month the National Eucharistic Congress met grandly at Omaha. Last week the National Council of Catholic Women was at Denver. And Cardinal Hayes took train from Manhattan to California, to celebrate with Archbishop Hanna and 50,-ooo worshippers the 75th anniversary of San Francisco’s St. Ignatius College. From San Francisco he was to go to Los Angeles to help John Joseph Cantwell, Bishop of Los Angeles & San Diego, dedicate Los Angeles’ new cathedral.

A good reason for Catholicism’s westward campaign: except in California and New Mexico, the Catholic proportion of the population is far below the one sixth average for the entire U. S.

Archbishop Hanna. The present is the second time that Archbishop Hanna has overtly been mentioned for the cardinalate. The first time was 1923 (TIME, Dec. 10, 1923).

Apparent cause of Archbishop Hanna’s 1923 rejection was the persistent suspicion of his “modernism.” At the beginning of the century he was teaching theology in St. Bernard’s Seminary, Rochester, N. Y. (where he was born). He had studied at Rome, Cambridge and Munich and there had absorbed much of the modernized philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (Thornism), philosophy which Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) approved. But Thomism leads, if unrestrained, to dangerous questioning of Roman Catholic dogma, to what Leo’s successor Pius X (1903-14) called pernicious “modernism.”

Complaints of Professor Hanna’s modernism reached the Vatican. They reached there at a particularly bad time for his ecclesiastical advancement, for Pius X was then preparing his stern encyclical letter, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, against modernism. That letter was published in 1907, just as Professor Hanna was nominated for coadjutor archbishop of San Francisco. The papal thumb went harshly down on his promotion.

But Professor Hanna eventually dis proved those tenuous charges of modern ism. He obediently accepted the whole papal program. Pius X relented, made him auxiliary bishop of San Francisco and titular bishop of Titopolis (1912). A new Pope, Benedict XV, promoted the onetime suspect to the archiepiscopal throne.

All Californians respect Archbishop Hanna for an able, unbigoted, civic-minded citizen. In 1913, when the Japanese question became a national wrangle, he was the state’s choice for the important post of immigration commissioner.

California Catholics revere him for maintaining the firm status of their church during a period when Protestant fundamentalists have poured into the state from the midwest prairies, and the irreligious from the Atlantic seaboard.