Quiet American

Cardinal Baum goes to Rome

The top American in the Vatican is a shy, Missouri-bred Cardinal with a Jewish name, who has risen fast in the church partly because he is an expert on Protestantism. Four years ago, William Wakefield Baum, now 53, became the second youngest Cardinal in U.S. history. When he took over his new job as Prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education last month, he became the third American ever to join the exclusive group of men who head major Vatican agencies. He also found himself in the middle of Pope John Paul II's controversial campaign to restore priestly discipline.

The education congregation (a Vatican department, not a gathering of worshipers) controls all parochial schools and some 200 seminaries and religion faculties around the world. Baum's congregation is empowered to decide on the orthodoxy of any tenured teachers appointed to those faculties. In addition, if the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith decides a professor is not orthodox, Baum will handle official discipline. He concurred in the recent decision to investigate Belgian Theologian Edward Schillebeeckx and to banish West Germany's Hans Kueng from a Roman Catholic faculty. The church, Baum insisted to TIME'S Wilton Wynn, has a "just claim" on its theologians: "Our task is to present the message of Christ as transmitted by the Roman Catholic Church. The public has the right to know clearly what this message is, and what it is not."

Baum is softspoken, polite, bookish, a man who tries to avoid open confrontation. He has a fondness for fine food, art and opera. His taste: Mozart always, Verdi and Wagner occasionally. "There are days when you just can't listen to Wagner," he says. As Archbishop of Washington, B.C., for nearly seven years, he succeeded cut-and-slash Conservative Patrick Cardinal O'Boyle. Baum calmed tempers and tried to strike a balance between outraged church loyalists and Catholic University of America professors who regularly question papal pronouncements.

He comes by his interest in other religions naturally. After his Presbyterian father died, Baum's Catholic mother married a Jewish businessman in Kansas City, Mo., whose surname the prelate took. He is close to many Protestant and Jewish relatives. During 15 years as a Missouri pastor, theology professor and administrator, the Cardinal-to-be left nothing but friends behind. Monsignor Thomas O'Brien, a fellow executive in the Kansas City diocese, speaks for many: "He always has a calming influence. He never gets angry or upset."

He returned to Rome in 1962 as an adviser to the Second Vatican Council, especially on relations with non-Catholic Christians and Jews. The U.S. bishops were the first national hierarchy to launch a successful ecumenical commission, with Baum as executive director. He became bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau, Mo., in 1970, and Archbishop of Washington three years later. Baum got off on the wrong foot when he bought a $525,000 suburban mansion to live in. After protests, he acquired more modest quarters. Though he issued a fervent pastoral letter denouncing racism as heresy and was praised for his evangelism and support of the arts, the Cardinal seemed ill at ease as an administrator and public figure in a sophisticated and complex diocese like Washington.

At the Vatican, the cultured and ecumenical Cardinal may prove just what the Pope wants in Catholic education, since he will treat non-Catholics as friends rather than enemies and will clarify differences. Baum believes that today ecumenism must be an "intrinsic part" of any modern priest's training. "I consider unity to be the will of the Lord, as expressed in his prayer at the Last Supper, 'that they may all be one, even as Thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee.' "

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