New York contains more Irish Catholics than any other city in the world. Its five archbishops have been named Hughes, McCloskey, Corrigan, Farley, Hayes. Its handsome Gothic Cathedral on Fifth Avenue is dedicated to St. Patrick. Of the city’s priests, policemen, bartenders, politicians, firemen, judges and streetcar conductors, a goodly number are named for the Scottish-born saint who brought Christianity to Ireland. Thus there was plenty of cause for pious feeling last week when the authentic spiritual successor of St. Patrick—Joseph Cardinal MacRory, Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland—visited New York.
Armagh, where St. Patrick founded a church, monastery and school about 445 A. D., is a small city not in Catholic Irish Free State but in predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland. The Cathedral on the hilly site of St. Patrick’s buildings is no longer Catholic. Because it was long ago appropriated by Protestants, the Catholics had to build their own, which was not opened for worship until 1873, not consecrated until 1904. Even in 1915, when Joseph MacRory became Bishop of Down and Connor, there still were what quiet-loving Irishmen called “The Troubles”—stirred up by the Black and Tans.
Bishop MacRory visited the U. S. in 1926, member of the retinue of Armagh’s Archbishop O’Donnell at the Chicago Eucharistic Congress. In 1928 he ascended the throne which Archbishop O’Donnell’s death left vacant. In 1929 he got his red hat. Last week Cardinal MacRory arrived in Manhattan on the S. S. Pennsylvania* after traveling half way around the world from Australia, where he represented the Pope at a Eucharistic Congress.
Monsignor Michael J. Lavelle welcomed Cardinal MacRory on behalf of Cardinal Hayes who was vacationing in Nassau. Piercingly blue-eyed and looking not unlike his New York colleague, the 73-year-old Irish Cardinal was whisked uptown to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where the bells tolled and 1,000 schoolgirls waved U. S. and Papal flags. Stepping out upon a green velvet carpet, Cardinal MacRory took from Monsignor Lavelle a crucifix, which he kissed, and a holy water hyssop, with which he sprinkled the congregation as he walked up the aisle. Wearing a scarlet ferraiuolo, the Cardinal prostrated himself in prayer at a priedieu. Then he briefly thanked the people for the “welcome you have given me, the unworthy successor of St. Patrick.”
After a second brief service at the Cathedral and a reception by New York’s Catholic Club, Cardinal MacRory embarked once more, waving a scarlet handkerchief from the deck of the Saturnia, which flew the yellow-&-white Papal flag in his honor. To the Holy Father in Rome, said he, “I will give . . . a report that will gladden his heart.”
* During its trip to San Francisco and back the Panama-Pacific Liner Pennsylvania logged the following incidents: Her surgeon died of a stroke. The engine-room storekeeper died of pneumonia. Both were buried at sea. Brooding because the boatswain had taken his bedroom slippers, the ship’s lookout fell 40 ft. from the crow’s nest, arose unharmed. A 40-ft. whale became so firmly impaled on the Pennsylvania’s bow that the captain had to put his ship astern to dislodge it. The liner also rushed to the aid of a freighter, took off a wiper who had a chicken’s wishbone lodged in his throat.
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