Religion: The Bishop of Charity

From boyhood in his native Nashville, Tenn., Samuel Stritch led the way. He was only ten when he finished grammar school. At 16 he graduated with a B.A. from St. Gregory’s Seminary in Cincinnati, was ordained a Roman Catholic priest at 22. When he was 34 he became Bishop of Toledo, the youngest bishop in the U.S., and nine years later he was Archbishop of Milwaukee. A decade after that, in 1940, the Most Rev. Samuel Alphonsus Stritch became Archbishop of the largest Roman Catholic archdiocese in the U.S.—Chicago—and six years later he was elevated to cardinal. His rare combination of shrewd business sense and warm-hearted concern for the poor had earned him the nickname “Bishop of Charity.”

Last March, still leading the way, the soft-voiced, blue-eyed man became the first American cardinal ever appointed to the powerful Roman Curia. But when he arrived in April to take up his duties as Proprefect of the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, he was a stricken man. A blood clot forced the amputation of his right arm (TIME, May 5). On the mend, he was felled by a stroke, later complicated by heart disease. Last week at 70. and at the peak of a brilliant career, Samuel Cardinal Stritch died.

While his body lay in state at Rome’s North American College, prelates and priests, diplomats and laymen filed by his bier. Mourning alone in the Vatican was an old friend of his days as a young priest in Rome, Pope Pius XII—forbidden by papal protocol from visiting anyone, even in death.

Cardinal Stritch’s death underlines a situation that many in the Vatican view as critically serious: the understanding of the church’s administrative machinery caused by the Pope’s delay in calling a consistory to fill out the College of Cardinals, now down to 55 from its full complement of 70. Of the remaining 55, two have long been prevented by political conditions from fulfilling their functions (Cardinals Mindszenty and Stepinac, prisoners of Communism), one—Poland’s Cardinal Wyszynski—has been seriously hampered by difficult communications, and another —Peking’s Cardinal Tien—by ill health. And in all too many cases the crushing load of responsibility in Rome falls on such old men as 85-year-old Pietro Cardinal Fumasoni Biondi, whose responsibilities Cardinal Stritch was to have shared in running the church’s missionary effort throughout the world.

Back in Chicago this week in his familiar Cathedral of the Holy Name on North State Street, the body of the Bishop of Charity lay in state on a black-draped catafalque before the altar rail, while thousands upon thousands of the humble people who were Samuel Stritch’s special concern moved quietly past.