"It Is the End"

Cardinal Villeneuve, Archbishop of Quebec and top-ranking member of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Canada, had suffered two heart attacks in six months. A fortnight ago he left Manhattan's Misericordia Hospital for California, hoping to convalesce in a convent at Alhambra. There, around 7 o'clock one morning last week, Msgr. Paul Nicole, the Cardinal's secretary, entered the prelate's room vested for Mass. The Cardinal was sitting before a small altar. The secretary finished the Introit (preliminary to Mass). Then the Cardinal interrupted.

"Do not start your Mass now," he said quietly. "I feel myself dying. You will administer unto me the last sacraments and give me the apostolic blessing. It is the end."

The Cardinal was moved to his bed. The rites were administered. The Cardinal spoke his last words, a humble prayer. At 7:50 Cardinal Villeneuve, 63, died.*

Thus passed the spiritual leader of some 5,000,000 Roman Catholics in Canada and the most influential man in Quebec. A short (5 ft. 6 in.) man with a round body and face, keen dark eyes and spectacles that perched halfway down his nose, the Cardinal was also a power in Canada. Of recent years, his influence has been exerted notably to guide Quebec away from her isolationism and toward greater unity with the rest of the Dominion.

The Making of a Man. Jean Marie Rodrigue Villeneuve was one of a shoemaker's family of six. Born in Montreal, he was ordained a priest at 23. For the next 23 years he taught philosophy, morals, liturgy and canon law at the University of Ottawa. Then in 1930 he was named Bishop of Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan. A year and a half later he was made Archbishop of Quebec; hardly more than a year after that, a Cardinal. Never in Canadian ecclesiastical history had anyone risen from priest to Cardinal so fast.

The Making of a Prelate. Cardinal Villeneuve was outspoken in his beliefs, and at many of them men reared in the Anglo-Saxon tradition looked askance. He did not feel that freedom of thought and of religion are "rights which Nature has given to man." He was opposed strongly to "absolute freedom of the press" because it provided "revolutionaries with a means to sing the benefits of revolution." He opposed the passage, in 1940, of Quebec's law giving women suffrage in provincial elections. His reason: it would tend to destroy family unity and paternal authority.

At first, like many French Canadians, Rodrigue Villeneuve was a nationalist and isolationist. Yet when war came, Cardinal Villeneuve shed his isolationism, urged French Canadians, foes of conscription and overseas service, to register for the draft and to enlist. He said in 1941 : "We are legally at war and we are bound to fight. . . . You cannot fight this war by condensing the horizon to this continent."

As a plane brought the Cardinal's body home, flags were at half-staff. In Quebec, Rodrigue Villeneuve, shoemaker's son, this week lay in state. In its own good time, Rome would select his successor. Canada's top Catholic prelate was now James Cardinal McGuigan, Archbishop of Toronto.

*His death created the seventh vacancy in the 70-man College of Cardinals.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.