Cardinal Manning Dies; Led Archdiocese 15 Years

Cardinal Timothy Manning, a mild-mannered Roman Catholic prelate who led the Los Angeles archdiocese through a 15-year period that saw it grow into the nation’s most populous and ethnically diverse, died Friday afternoon.

He was 79 and died at the Kenneth Norris Jr. Cancer Center at the University of Southern California, where he had been admitted June 7.

Bill Rivera, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said he died at 2:25 p.m. and that his successor, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony, was at his bedside.

Manning began to undergo radiation therapy early in 1989 upon learning that he had lung cancer, which had spread to his spine. Shortly after his condition was made known in May, a Mary’s Hour crowd of 9,000 at the Hollywood Bowl gave him a prolonged standing ovation after Manning led Catholics in the rosary and gave the homily.

Although he retired in mid-1985 with the naming of Mahony as his successor, Manning had kept active in the church, conducting retreats for fellow bishops and preaching at devotional events.

He had been living at Holy Family Parish in South Pasadena.

Friday evening Mahony said Manning will be remembered for “the depth of his personal spirituality, the generosity of his love and charity and the simplicity of his humble soul (which) were graces which flowed out upon the Archdiocese of Los Angeles for some 55 years.”

“Only God himself can calculate the immense spiritual mission which his life and ministry accomplished among us here in Southern California.”

Manning’s direction of the Los Angeles archdiocese from 1970 to 1985 amounted to a low-key hiatus between the archconservative reign of Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, who clashed in the 1960s with reform-minded Catholics, and the energetic management of Mahony, who has been visibly involved in regional social problems and in pronouncements of the U.S. Catholic hierarchy.

Elevated in 1973

Manning was named a cardinal in 1973, but the soft-spoken archbishop of Los Angeles rarely attempted to parlay that status for influence in public affairs or national religious issues--not even when by 1983 the archdiocese overtook Chicago as the diocese with the most Catholics. (Los Angeles stood then at 2.3 million and now exceeds 3 million.)

For the Irish-born Manning, the three-county Los Angeles archdiocese, which includes Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, was “the rim of the Western World.” It was a place to view through missionary eyes, much as the Franciscans did a couple centuries earlier in establishing a string of missions. Thus, much of his attention was focused on the church’s response to the continuing influx of Latino Catholics and other ethnic populations.

Although his passport and church records stated that Timothy Manning was born Nov. 15, 1909, in Ballingeary, County Cork, Ireland, he said his actual birth date was Oct. 15 that year, as noted on his baptismal certificate.

One of four children of a blacksmith, Manning said he wanted to become a priest as long as he could remember, even though no priests were in his family. The first priest he ever knew, Manning told one interviewer, was shot to death “for happening to be staying in a house of a wanted man” during the fight for Irish independence from England.

It was a reminder, he said later, that while the church could rise above political issues and preach the values of Christ, it could not afford to lose sight of individuals affected by such conflicts.

He began studying for the priesthood in Ireland in 1923, but he was attracted to California in 1928 in answer to an appeal for priests by the Diocese of Los Angeles-San Diego. In 1934, he finished his training at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, Calif., and was ordained on June 16, 1934, at St. Vibiana’s Cathedral in Los Angeles by Archbishop John J. Cantwell.

After a few months as an assistant pastor, Manning was sent to Rome for graduate studies in canon law at the Pontifical Gregorian University from which he was graduated in 1938. Upon his return, he was appointed secretary to Cantwell, a post he kept for eight years. He became a U.S. citizen Jan. 14, 1944.

In 1946, Manning was named an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles. When McIntyre was named the Los Angeles archbishop in 1948, and launched a well-financed parish and school building program to match the suburban growth of Los Angeles, Manning played administrative roles as chancellor and vicar general.

Bishop at Fresno

The Vatican created the Fresno diocese out of the Monterey diocese in 1967, and Manning was made its first bishop. In 18 months at Fresno, Manning created a diocesan housing commission, authorized a task force to seek funds for inner-city minority groups and authorized formation of a priests’ senate, an advisory board fast becoming the norm in U.S. dioceses.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles archdiocese was beset with both the Catholic ferment following the innovative Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and the ramifications of civil rights movements. McIntyre, a staunch conservative in religion and politics, was in his 80s. That was before the Vatican’s mandatory retirement age of 75 was instituted. The cardinal won his battle to squelch modernization steps by the Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters, but McIntyre was openly charged by liberal Catholics with intransigence on church reforms and minority rights.

Manning was appointed coadjutor archbishop of Los Angeles in 1969 with the right of succession. He returned from Fresno that August.

Succeeds McIntyre

On Jan. 21, 1970, Manning succeeded McIntyre and immediately took up residence at St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, on the edge of downtown’s Skid Row--a move symbolic of Manning’s pastoral image as servant of the church.

Manning’s expressed willingness to listen to unhappy segments in the church and systematically visit the parishes had a calming effect and there was little open discord in years to come.

“The most pressing problem, the first responsibility I could see, was toward the priests of the diocese,” he said in an interview 18 months after he succeeded McIntyre. “The whole well-being of the community depends on the priests, on their unity and on their holiness. My first reaction was to make it known that I was here to listen.”

Manning permitted the formation of a priests’ senate and founded the Interparochial Council of East Los Angeles to give a forum for priests, nuns and lay people in Mexican-American parishes. He also authorized a new Immigration and Citizenship Department of the Catholic Welfare Bureau to help eligible aliens to obtain permanent resident status.

The Los Angeles archdiocese was able to “catch up” with the rest of U.S. Catholicism in several areas where McIntyre was resistant to change. For example, Manning authorized Saturday Masses, a convenient alternative to Sunday worship and one already enjoyed by other California Catholics.

In keeping with the ecumenical and interfaith cordiality inspired by Vatican II, Manning encouraged relations with other church bodies and made his first major address as archbishop at a synagogue--Wilshire Boulevard Temple. The interfaith dialogues and studies initiated under Manning became model programs for other American dioceses.

Although he was engaging as a public speaker, Manning avoided the limelight and rarely made public statements other than to criticize the lack of curbs on abortion, which he called murder, and pornography. He surprised some observers in the early 1980s, however, with statements that denounced the nuclear arms race as a “dance of death” threatening humanity and worsening the plight of the poor because of budget priorities for warheads.

Not a bold leader otherwise, Manning disappointed many Catholics by retaining the tough, much-feared administrator from the McIntyre era, Msgr. Benjamin Hawkes, as treasurer of the archdiocese.

Manning was among only a handful of U.S. cardinals for a dozen years, but he did not carry the kind of clout in American Catholic circles that colleagues in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington did.

Yet his enthusiasm for mission work did not go unnoticed at the Vatican. In 1978, he was a member of the Vatican-based Sacred Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.

Near the end of his tenure at the Los Angeles chancery, Manning was appointed by Pope John Paul II as one of three co-presidents of the 1983 World Synod of Bishops meeting in Rome. The following May, the Pope asked Manning to accompany him on the papal tour of South Korea, Papua New Guinea and other Far Eastern countries.

In a Migrants Day Mass at St. Vibiana’s in January, 1985, at which prayers were said in 20 different languages, Manning proudly referred to the immigrant flavor of many Los Angeles parishes and the Catholic Church’s defense of undocumented aliens.

Manning recounted a private conversation with the Pope that he had had a few months earlier in Vancouver, British Columbia. “I told him that we have 83 different languages spoken here and also that there are a large number of undocumented people here,” Manning said.

“In a beautiful gesture (the Pope) raised his finger and said, ‘Undocumented in the state, yes, but not in the Church,’ ” according to Manning.

Following church requirements, Manning submitted his resignation as the head of a diocese in 1984 before his 75th birthday. The Pope did not immediately name a successor, however, and Manning did not actually retire from the archbishop’s post until September, 1985.

Appearing to be in good health when he retired, the slightly built Manning was a light eater because he had three-fourths of his stomach removed when he was a young priest studying in Rome. “Ulcers,” he once explained in an interview.

At age 77, he surprised colleagues when he flew by fighter jet for a pastoral visit to the aircraft carrier Enterprise, on maneuvers 90 miles off San Diego. The next month, Manning accompanied Pope John Paul II during his 1987 visit to Los Angeles and San Francisco.

In mid-May this year, the Los Angeles archdiocese announced that Manning was under medical care for cancer. Expressing gratitude for the prayers of the Pope and Archbishop Mahony, Manning assured well-wishers that he would continue his ministry in retirement “according to my abilities.”

A Mass will be celebrated by Mahony at 11 a.m. Wednesday at St. Vibiana’s and a rosary will be recited at 7:30 that night.

More than 100 bishops nationwide and in Europe are expected to gather at 11 a.m. Thursday for a Mass of Christian Burial. Burial will follow at Calvary Cemetery in East Los Angeles.