St. Patrick's Successor

I can never forget what we in, Ireland owe to the Catholics of New York and other American cities.

So said doughty, blue-eyed Joseph Cardinal MacRory, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, when he visited the U.S. in 1935. Last week the 81-year-old Cardinal addressed Americans in a different fashion. He found it "exceedingly hard to be patient," he complained, when he thought of "my own corner of my country overrun by British and U.S. soldiers against the will of the nation." By "my own corner" the Cardinal meant 66% Protestant Ulster, where he was born, lives.

Like many another Irish leader, Cardinal MacRory has leaned so far backward in his effort to be neutral that his head sometimes seems to be in the Third Reich. In 1938 he ordered public prayer "for Christians in Germany who . . . are being subjected to a most dangerous persecution," but since the war's outbreak he has reserved his most vigorous denunciations for the Allies.

Cardinal MacRory is a graduate of Maynooth, famed Irish seminary which has sent priests all over the world. He taught there for 26 years before becoming a bishop in 1915. In 1928 he was appointed to St. Patrick's see, got his red hat in 1929. A sharp-tongued Irishman who never minces his words, the Cardinal has positive dislikes--among them, Protestantism ("the Protestant Church here and elsewhere is no part of the Church which Christ founded") and modern civilization (which "increases the opportunity for sin").

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